According to Wassily Kandisky's Concerning the Spiritual Art, the aesthetic of Expressionist art rests on a belief that the differences and apparent contradictions of the various arts conceal a fundamental affinity between them, which stems from the common expression of a personally experienced emotion, or "truth". Consistent with this is his suggestion that some of the expressive power of art derives from a language of suggestion or metaphor, where each medium evokes properties of others inaccessible to itself (e.g. sound in painting) in an unconscious and instinctive synaesthesia. Colour plays a vital role as a direct access to emotion, as can be seen in Kandisky's own paintings, and also his prose-poetry. This paper examines the evocation of colour in two artistic media which are, in a literal sense, colourless — music and early film — which both made vital and distinctive contributions to the Expressionist movement ; it also explores their relationship to each other and to Kandisky's theories.

Thurlow Jeremy. Colour and Emotion in Expressionist Music and Film. In: Interfaces. Image-Texte-Langage 9, 1996. La Couleur parle (1) pp. 267-277.