The Arrival of Colour: Responding to the Restored Jour de fete (original) (raw)

The Early Film Colorists Speak

Film History, 2016

This section reprints two rare early texts about the craft of film coloring, dating from 1898 and 1908, by Duncan Mitchell in Britain and Elizabeth Martine in the United States. Mitchell and Martine each describe the meticulous nature of their work as colorists and discuss specific techniques and aesthetic issues that they believe are important in the process of coloring films by hand. The accompanying overview article by Stephen Bottomore summarizes and analyzes the points made by this pair of colorists and compares their accounts with what existing sources tell us about early film coloring. Brief biographies of Mitchell and Martine are also included.

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.

Early Discourses on Colour and Cinema: Origins, Functions, Meanings

2006

"This dissertation is a historical and theoretical study of a number of discourses examining colour and cinema during the period 1909 to 1935 (trade press, film reviews, publications on film technology, manuals, catalogues and theoretical texts from the era). In this study, colour in cinema is considered as producing a number of aesthetic and representational questions which are contextualised historically; problems and qualities specifically associated with colour film are examined in terms of an interrelationship between historical, technical, industrial, and stylistic factors, as well as specific contemporary conceptions of cinema. The first chapter examines notions concerning the technical, material, as well as perceptual, origins of colour in cinema, and questions concerning indexicality, iconicity, and colour reproduction, through focusing on the relationship between the photographic colour process Kinemacolor, as well as other similar processes, and the established non-photographic colour methods during the early 1910s, with an in-depth analysis of the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, published in 1912. The second chapter examines notions concerning the stylistic, formal and narrative functions of colour in cinema, featuring a survey of the recurring comparisons between colour and sound, found in the writing of film history, in discourses concerning early Technicolor sound films, film technology, experimental films and experiments on synaesthesia during the 1920s, as well as Eisenstein’s notions of the functions of colour in sound film montage. The third chapter examines the question of colour and meaning in cinema through considering the relationship between colours and objects in colour film images (polychrome and monochrome, photographic and non-photographic) during the time frame of this study."

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 Stuff That Dreams Are Made of”—Restoring Cinema Colors: A Roadmap for Real Research

Heritage

Since 1895, through the analog and the digital eras, color is among the many narrative and aesthetic tools cinema language used in its creative process to shape a unique, multi-sensorial experience for its audience. Over these 120+ years, endless cinema color techniques, technologies, aesthetics, and ideologies came and went. One thing that stayed the same is that color in cinema, more than a technology, is a complex system made up by many components: filmmakers’ ideas and intent, negotiations with the audience, technologies (such as film stocks, chemicals, cameras, printers, developing machines, projectors), and laboratory processes and practices. Taken individually, none of these elements tells the whole story of color use and experience in cinematographic works. This complexity adds to the fact that much of film color technology history is not recorded in books, journals and patents and is often forgotten as so much of it relies on individuals’ practices and memories. Consequentl...

The limits of aesthetic experience: colors and narrative cinema

Revista Significação, 2019

Narratological studies of audiovisual works often focus their analysis on theoretical abstractions. Sometimes the search for hermeneutical explanation, as Hans Gumbrecht interjects, resembles a semantic exaggeration in which the material basis (images and sounds) is reduced to mere vectors of abstract knowledge, the story. Color appears among the neglected themes, an element customarily foreign to academic analysis. This article proposes that color is strategically allocated with the intention of fostering some degree of aesthetic experience on the spectators. The very presence of color for viewers, however, will be regulated by their degree of attention and knowledge.

4. ‘Taking the color out of color’: Two-Colour Technicolor, The Black Pirate, and Blackened Dyes

The Colour Fantastic

In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille complained that 'color movies diverted interest from narrative and action, offended the color sensitivities of many, and cost too much'. Douglas Fairbanks voiced a similar objection, arguing that color took 'the mind of the spectator away from the picture itself, making him conscious of the mechanics-the artificiality-of the whole thing, so that he no longer lived in the story with the characters'. This paper explores Fairbanks's efforts in The Black Pirate (1926) to control the colour, putting it to the service of the film's narrative and relying, in part, on 'blackened dyes' to desaturate the film's color.

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.