[ecrea] CfE: "Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture" / Cinéma&Cie n. 32

Cinéma&Cie - International Film Studies Journal

CfE n. 32: "Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture"

http://www.cinemaetcie.net/cfe32/

Edited by Elena Gipponi and Joshua Yumibe

Deadline for abstract proposal: June 1, 2018

Recently there has been renewed scholarly interest in the technology of 
cinema, shaped in part by the ongoing digital transformations of the 
apparatus. Film theorists have long acknowledged a crucial role for 
technology in shaping new forms of experience, and conversely, recent 
examinations of the cinematic apparatus have also emphasised the ways in 
which a given technology itself is a form of mediation influenced by 
aesthetic choices, other intermedial forms of technology, and broader 
social and cultural processes. Informed by such insights, this issue of 
Cinéma&Cie will focus on the technology of cinematic colour, 
specifically its analogue changes at mid-century, ca. the mid-1930s to 
the mid-1960s, though studies are welcome that extend this timeframe, 
particularly for thinking through parallel developments in the Global 
South. This is the era in which photographic systems such as three-strip 
Technicolor, Kodachrome, Agfacolor, Eastmancolor, and Fujicolor 
dramatically transformed cinematic practice – from musicals and 
melodramas, to animation, experimental, and amateur cinemas – and led to 
the eventual normalisation of colour over black-and-white cinema around 
the world. Our emphasis is on how colour functions during the era as a 
transformative technological and cultural form inherent to image 
production and reception.

The focus for the issue builds upon and complements recent studies that 
consider how cinematic colour fits within broader modes of production 
and consumption, and we seek contributions that explore the ways in 
which the ‘colour culture’ of cinema is part of the intermedial 
environment at mid-century. This era is our frame not only because of 
its technical and cultural transformations, but also because the issue 
aims to expand the temporal as well as global reach of scholarship on 
colour cinema. Among the recent publications on colour, on the one hand, 
a great deal of research has been devoted to colour in the silent era – 
for example, the groundbreaking collection "‘Disorderly Order’: Colors 
in Silent Film" (1996), Joshua Yumibe’s "Moving Color" (2012), and the 
jointly authored "Fantasia of Colour in Early Cinema" (2015). Current 
publications on photochemical and dye-transfer colour, on the other 
hand, focus on precise technologies and filmstocks (e.g. Technicolor in 
Scott Higgins’ "Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow", 2007, and James 
Layton and David Pierce’s "The Dawn of Technicolor", 2015) or on 
individual national industries (e. g. Sarah Street’s "Colour Films in 
Britain", 2012). Finally there have been a number of wide-ranging 
historical and theoretical overviews of colour cinema, such as Richard 
Misek’s "Chromatic Cinema" (2010), Paul Coates’s "Colour and Cinema" 
(2010), Federico Pierotti’s "La seduzione dello spettro" (2012), and 
Edward Branigan’s "Tracking Color in Cinema and Art" (2017). Drawing 
from the various methodologies of these works, the issue approaches the 
aesthetic and cultural features of photochemical and dye-transfer colour 
beyond strictly technological restraints, in order to put into dialogue 
case studies from various mid-century technical, cultural, aesthetic, 
and national and transnational contexts.

A goal of the issue will be to identify and analyse case studies 
concerning the use of the new, analogue colour processes in both the 
filmic and intermedial contexts, thus connecting technological changes 
with broader social and cultural transformations. The mass transition to 
colour cinema is a complex and long-lasting process that spans 
mid-century filmic design and technical innovation. Since cinematic 
styles change slowly and visual regimes transform gradually, often 
without sudden breaks, this issue takes an expansive view of mid-century 
colour culture in order to account for the asymmetries of global 
modernity. During the era, in fact, colour style and cinematic reception 
interacted with numerous global structures of mid-century modernism and 
modernity across a wide range of media cultures, from Hollywood and 
experimental cinemas to various global new waves, for instance, from 
France to Japan to Senegal and India. Taking a comparative perspective, 
we aim to examine the transnational circulation of chromatic patterns 
and technologies while also locating national specificities informed by 
local taste cultures and economies.

The special issue invites essays that explore the following interrelated 
major areas:

Technologies: forms of adaptation to technical innovations of colour in 
cinema and other media; paths of diffusion of colour filmstocks and the 
technical and economic issues faced; the global circulation of colour 
technologies; the relationship between colour photography and colour 
cinematography; reassessments of the rise of post-war television and its 
impact on the transition to colour film; colour in relationship to other 
technical developments in film form, e.g. widescreen, 3D, stereophonic 
sound, and innovations in animation.

Aesthetics: theories of colour at mid-century; film style and colour, 
from classical adaptations to new wave excesses; avant-garde 
experiments; the relation of technical constraints to aesthetic choices; 
cultural meanings of colour, such as oscillations between chromophobia 
and chromophilia, orientalist and racial encodings, and gender 
stereotypes; colour and genre; emergent colour aesthetics in the Global 
South.

Practices: interactions between colour in mainstream media and the 
‘underground’, from experimental to amateur productions; the exchange 
and circulation of chromatic patterns across media; the relation of 
colour cinema to advertising, publishing and print industry, painting 
and design, and fashion.

Archives: preserving and restoring mid-century colour; rediscoveries and 
classics recovered; the uses of digital technologies for reassessing 
mid-century colour, both through restoration and digital humanities 
projects; assessing and accessing mid-century holdings in global archives.

Submission details:

Please send your abstract (300–500 words in English + bibliographical 
references) and a short biographical note to (submissions /at/ cinemaetcie.net) 
<mailto:(submissions /at/ cinemaetcie.net)> by June 1, 2018.

All notifications of acceptance will be emailed no later than June 15, 
2018. If accepted, 5,000/6,000-word essays will then be required for 
peer review by October 15, 2018.
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