Charged with symbolic meaning and laden with cultural associations, colour is one of the emblematic devices of the epic film, conveying stylised messages of sexuality, race, and power in ways that sometimes overwrite the genre's ostensible themes. A key feature of the genre since the appearance of the tinted and stencilled Italian epics of the 1910s, colour technology and design constitute a direct line of formal innovation that extends from the earliest iterations of the genre to the exalted colour symphonies of the present. The significance of colour in the epic, however, has largely been ignored. Although chromatic design communicates emotion, cultural value and technological sophistication, it has to date been discussed in very limited ways – as if the aesthetic language of colour in epic film were superfluous or incidental, having little to do with the deeper meanings and pleasures of the form.

When we consider the unusual persistence and importance of colour throughout the history of the epic genre, the absence of critical discussion is even more noteworthy. Although the striking chromatic values of early film history – the majority of films were tinted, stencilled, or toned in multiple vivid hues – were actively suppressed from about 1908, colour remained an expressive and significant feature of epic form. Associated most immediately with prestige, exoticism and the projection of cultural and cinematic achievement, the chromatic features of the epic film also helped shape the large thematic questions of the genre – the conflicts between barbarism and civilisation, carnality and reason, masculine and feminine.