The Colour Fantastic
Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema
Published on 18. April 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
312 pages
978-94-6298-301-4 (ISBN)
Description
Sparked by a groundbreaking Amsterdam workshop titled Disorderly Order: Colours in Silent Film, scholarly and archival interest in colour as a crucial aspect of film form, technology and aesthetics has enjoyed a resurgence in the past twenty years. In the spirit of the workshop, this anthology brings together international experts to explore a diverse range of themes that they hope will inspire the next twenty years of research on colour in silent film. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book explores archival restoration, colour film technology, colour theory, and experimental film alongside beautifully saturated images of silent cinema.
Reviews / Votes
Longlisted for the 2019 Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award!Joint Review: "The Colour Fantastic and Chromatic Modernity are undoubtedly two significant contributions to their growing sub-field. ... They promote a fastidious treatment of relevant key contexts, from aesthetic discourses and polemics to technological and cultural innovations. And yet, equally, they prove that insisting upon the complexity of this history and eschewing simple linear explanations is not to make it inaccessible to non-colour specialists - such is the profound impression of originality and scholarly necessity created by their consistently sophisticated argumentation and deftly articulated interventions." - Patrick Adamson, Frames Cinema Journal, No 17 (2020)
"Reading this volume, I was taken with the passionate and relentless dedication to early film colour's study spearheaded by a group of diverse and committed researchers over a span of decades. Their efforts "personalize" research and point to the growing cohort of human agents who make the expanding and transformational discourses about colour legible. This volume is an elegantly curated and timely contribution to the continuing scholarship on early cinematic colour and its relationship to 21st century material, visual, and digital cultures." - Denise Mok, Film & History 49.2
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Amsterdam
Netherlands
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Academic
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
Illustrations: 34 black and white; 29 full color.
Dimensions
Height: 233 mm
Width: 156 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
684 gr
ISBN-13
978-94-6298-301-4 (9789462983014)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Giovanna Fossati | Victoria Jackson | Bregt Lameris
The Colour Fantastic
Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema
E-Book
10/2025
Routledge
€65.99
Available for download
Giovanna Fossati | Victoria Jackson | Bregt Lameris
The Colour Fantastic
Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema
E-Book
10/2025
Routledge
€65.99
Available for download
Giovanna Fossati | Victoria Jackson | Bregt Lameris
The Colour Fantastic
Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema
E-Book
04/2018
Amsterdam University Press
€101.00
Available for download
Persons
Giovanna Fossati is the chief curator of Eye Filmmuseum and professor of Film Heritage and Digital Film Culture at the University of Amsterdam.
Victoria Jackson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK.
Bregt Lameris is a post-doc at the University of Zuerich, Switzerland.|Elif Rongen-Kaynakci is the Silent Film Curator at the EYE Filmuseum, Amsterdam. Sarah Street is Professor of Film at the University of Bristol. She is the author of British Cinema in Documents (2000), Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (2002) and Black Narcissus (2004).
Joshua Yumibe holds a joint appointment as assistant professor and director of Film Studies at Michigan State University and as a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews.
Victoria Jackson is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Bristol, UK.
Bregt Lameris is a post-doc at the University of Zuerich, Switzerland.|Elif Rongen-Kaynakci is the Silent Film Curator at the EYE Filmuseum, Amsterdam. Sarah Street is Professor of Film at the University of Bristol. She is the author of British Cinema in Documents (2000), Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (2002) and Black Narcissus (2004).
Joshua Yumibe holds a joint appointment as assistant professor and director of Film Studies at Michigan State University and as a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of St Andrews.
Content
Introduction Giovanna Fossati, Victoria Jackson, Bregt Lameris, Elif Rongen-Kaynakci, Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, Prologue Questions of Colours: Taking Sides Peter Delpeut Non-Fiction and Amateur Cinema Fireworks and Carnivals: Natural Colour Processes in Italian Amateur Cinema Elena Gipponi Liminal Perceptions: Intermediality and the Exhibition of Non-fiction Film Liz Watkins Rough Seas and Waterfalls: Lyrical Colors in Silent-Era Nonfiction Film Jennifer Peterson Natural Colour Processes: Theory and Practice 'Taking the color out of color': Two-Colour Technicolor, The Black Pirate, and Blackened Dyes John Belton Why Additive? Problems of Colour and Epistemological Networks in Early (Film) Technology Benoit Turquety The Comedy of Colours: The slapstick potential of natural colour in Mack Sennett shorts Hilde D'haeyere Additive and Subtractive: Two Paths Towards Colour Frank Gray Intermediality and Advertising Rainbow Ravine: Color and Animated Advertising in Times Square, 1891- 1915 Kirsten Thompson Negotiating A World Of Color: Films Experiments And Intermedial Practices Natalie Snoyman Foregrounding objects: Advertising, moving images, and the role of colour in French 1920s visual culture Federico Pierotti Archiving and Restoration: Early Debates and Current Practices La Ligue du Noir et Blanc: French Debates on Natural Colour Film and Art Cinema 1926-1927 Bregt Lameris A Material-Based Approach to the Digitisation of Early Film Colours Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp and David Pfluger Archival Panels (edited transcripts) Preservation, Restoration, Presentation and Policy Sonia Genaitay (BFI), Ulrich Ruedel (BFI and HTW / University of Applied Sciences, Berlin), Bryony Dixon (BFI), Annike Kross (EYE), Tina Anckarman and Tone Foreland (National Library of Norway), Thierry Delannoy and Benjamin Alimi (Digimage-Classics), Fumiko Tsuneishi (Austrian Film Archive), moderated by Giovanna Fossati Digital Restoration' with Michelle Carlos (National Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart), Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp and David Pfluger (DIASTOR project, University of Zurich), moderated by Giovanna Fossati. Authors' Biographies, Bibliography,Acknowledgements