Rainbow Ravine: Color and Animated Advertising in Times Square, 1891-1945.” Joshua Yumibe, Sarah Street and Vicky Jackson, eds. The Color Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018: 161-178 (original) (raw)
Related papers
American Neon Signs: Illumination and Consumerism (Dissertation)
Neon signage heralded a revolution in American advertising that brought unparalleled scale, color, and boldness to product marketing beginning in the 1920s. This medium's appearance represented technological modernity by serving as a visual expression of mass electrification. Neon transformed nighttime cityscapes and roadsides from darkened environments into spaces that glowed with colored light. This dissertation examines the ways within which neon visually reinforced the presence of product advertising within the nightscape and consumer consciousness. It traces the cultural, technological, economic, and architectural forces that shaped neon's development between in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The deceptively mundane neon sign offers insight into how mass marketing impacted American culture. Neon served as an early form of electrical media. It used the ephemeral medium of light to communicate with the buying public. Its study enriches our understanding of technology's influence on consumerism and national advertising campaigns like those conducted by Budweiser or Ford. Neon remains an indelible feature of the American landscape. It has become synonymous with cultural icons such as Las Vegas and Times Square. Despite its visual prominence, its history has been under-examined. My dissertation differs from other works on the history of neon by emphasizing artifact driven analysis. This interdisciplinary dissertation draws upon art history, technological history, and mass communication in a manner far different from previous writings on electrical signage.
Chromatic Objects. Colour Advertising and French Avant-garde Films of the 1920s [2018]
2018
The article aims to illustrate the possible connections between the emerging science of advertising and a selection of French avant-garde films made during the 1920s. The connections between advertising and avant-garde films provide an opportunity to reflect on the function of colour and black and white in the visual culture of the 1920s. Indeed, advertising reinforces a subjective and non-indexical understanding of colour, establishing an alternative spectatorship model to the realistic ideology that was emerging during the same period. The article attempts to demonstrate that avant-garde films follow the same model of spectatorship, despite making only an occasional use of colour.
Phantom Colours – Colour, Fashion and Cinema in the 1920s
"This paper will consider the interrelationship of colour, fashion and Technicolor in the 1920s through an examination of the intermedial context of colour standardisation and categorisation. The 1920s was a period in which colour was highly 'in vogue'. In the art, advertising, architecture, design and cinema of the jazz age, cultural fascination with colour was lively. Colour was also a subject of intense international debates concerning its artistic, scientific, philosophical and educational significance. Moreover, with the development of new and more accessible dyes, colour was more freely available to be exploited and experimented with. As in the case of cinema where colour was used in a variety of ways. Stencil, tinting and toning, which had been developed for film colouring in the early 1900s, were still frequently used technologies, as were new systems such as Prizma, Technicolor and others. It was also a decade that saw increased activity around colour standardization and categorisation and moreover efforts to produce a universal colour nomenclature. Colour systems such as the Munsell system were promoted as meanings of measuring and standardising colour. In addition agencies such as America’s National Bureau of Standards were experimenting with the measurement of colour for a range of potential uses (Johnston, 2001). The language used to describe colour was also the focus of research by contemporaries culminating in 1930 in the publication of a Dictionary of Colour. Its purpose was to record all colour names in use up to that time and to provide ‘a record of color words and the particular sensations they identify’ (Maerz and Paul 1930). This desire to control the language of colour provides an interesting antithesis to the main function of colour in fashion. ‘Fashion thrives on novelty and change’ (Arnold, 2009) and colours are one means by which fashion can reinvent itself with each new season. This tension of colour in fashion is present in the world of textile and retail industry. For example, the Textile Color Card Association in America promoted the standardization of colours across the fashion industries as well as predicting and naming colours for the following season for the textile and retail industry (Blaszczyk, 2012). Thus proving there was a desire for both standardisation and variety in the growing consumer culture, resulting in colours becoming commodities. These intermedial conditions provide an important context to the development and use of colour in film during the decade and in particular the close interrelationship between colour, fashion and film. In order to explore these themes we will limit ourselves to two colours that were 'hot' in the spring of 1926 but were also linked to color films: Alice Blue from Irene (Green, 1926) and Phantom Red from Phantom of the Opera (1925). Both functioned within a remarkable intermedial network, not only were they famous for the use of a Technicolor II inserts but also for their connection to glamorous women. These stars functioned as examples for young girls that were searching for their identity in this ‘jazz age’ or 'années folles'. The paper will explore the history of both colours, their origins and changing meanings, through their interaction with the film they were featured in and the wider world of fashion and beyond. In this way, we hope to provide a better understanding of the meaning and function of colour in connection to cinema and fashion and of the friction between the wish to control and the need to vary in capitalistic consumer culture. "
Journal of Urban History, 2018
Discussions of urban representation have been hampered by a persistent contrast between the view from above and the view from street level, or between the urban planner's panoptic gaze and the flâneur's fleeting glance. This article challenges such contrasts by identifying a third way of representing a city, that of moving block-by-block along the length of its main thoroughfare. It traces the emergence of what it calls the "longitudinal view" back to antebellum New York, when tour guides and urban sketches promoted the "walk up Broadway" as a means to encompass the social and functional diversity of the expanding metropolis, and when visual genres such as the moving panorama and the pictorial directory offered a virtual simulation of that journey—one that echoed the perpendicular perspective of an omnibus passenger. It concludes by exploring the subsequent appropriation of the longitudinal view by artists, photographers, and filmmakers.
Cinéma&Cie 32_Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture
2019
Suspended between transparency and naturalness on the one hand, and opacity and artificiality on the other, colour is integral to the cinematic apparatus in an ideological as well as technological sense. This special issue of Cinéma&Cie aims to address colour in the middle decades of the twentieth century — from the 1930s to the 1960s — examining it as an analogue and material quality of still and moving images and, more broadly, of the intermedial cultures in which cinema was embedded. During the mid-century, colour gradually became the norm, and film and media from the era track this transition formally as well as culturally, showing a constant tension within colour between the display of its technical wizardry and its concealment, and between attempts to control it and its own autonomous resistance to regulation.
Elena Gipponi and Joshua Yumibe, Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture: An Introduction
"The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren" Cinéma&Cie International Film Studies Journal, ed Elena Gipponi and Joshua Yumibe, vol XIX, No. 32 (Spring 2019), 39-52. , 2019
Suspended between transparency and naturalness on the one hand, and opacity and artificiality on the other, colour is integral to the cinematic apparatus in an ideological as well as technological sense. This special issue of Cinéma&Cie aims to address colour in the middle decades of the twentieth century-from the 1930s to the 1960s-examining it as an analogue and material quality of still and moving images and, more broadly, of the intermedial cultures in which cinema was embedded. During the mid-century, colour gradually became the norm, and film and media from the era track this transition formally as well as culturally, showing a constant tension within colour between the display of its technical wizardry and its concealment, and between attempts to control it and its own autonomous resistance to regulation.
The Cavalcade of Color. Kodak and the 1939 World’s Fair
Etudes Photographiques, 2012
An earlier version of this article was presented at the one-day conference 'Le Spectacle de l'industrie / Exhibiting Industry,' organized by Claire-Lise Debluë and Anne-Katrin Weber at the Centre des sciences historiques de la culture at the University of Lausanne on June 1, 2012.