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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture: An Introduction
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Introduction
2019-03-01
2021-09-02
2019-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Joshua Yumibe
2019/03/01
Michigan State University
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Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture: An Introduction
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16196/14474
19
Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture: An Introduction
Elena Gipponi, Università IULM, Milano
Joshua Yumibe, Michigan State University
  Elena Gipponi, Joshua Yumibe




                       We have confused the factory-made color world around us in our
                       rooms and magazines no less than on our bodies with the colors
                       in nature, parallel to the way we have confused a photograph with
                       reality.
                                             (Michael Taussig, ‘What Color Is the Sacred?’)


   Some of the most popular, online clickbait articles are photographic galleries
that call attention to the chromatic quality of the historical images: for instance,
collections of archival colour photographs and footage from the mid-century —
often war scenes (‘WWII in Colour’), or ordinary snapshots (‘Everyday Life in
Germany after the War’) — are displayed in sensuous tones. What is appealing
about these various compilations is that they reveal in colour a past usually thought
and represented in the antique shades of black and white. In some cases, these are
dealing with original colour documents, rediscovered and valorised precisely by
virtue of the exceptional presence of such indexical hues resurfacing from the past.
In other cases, the attention-getting aspect is, conversely, the digital colourisation
of archival images originally achromatic, now retouched by amateur historians and
graphic designers through digital software as part of the ‘Colorized History’ fad.
Whether these colours are original or retouched, such examples bear witness to the
renewed interest in historical colour in contemporary visual culture, undoubtedly
prompted by the possibilities of manipulation and simulation offered by digital
technologies that allow one to reproduce with a high degree of verisimilitude all
the styles and chromatic regimes of the past. This special issue of Cinéma&Cie aims
to address colour at mid-century as an analogue quality of still and moving images
and, more broadly, of the intermedial cultures in which cinema was embedded. The
central decades of the last century are our focus, as this is when colour gradually
became the norm, and the films and media from the era, like these various clickbait
articles, track this transition, formally as well as culturally.
   Another aspect of our focus on mid-century colour history, as outlined across
the following articles, is to think through the usefulness of cultural and technical
watersheds for assessing film and media history. Just as popular fascination with
the analogue colours of the past has surged, so too has scholarly interest. Recent

                                                Cinéma & Cie, vol. XIX, no. 32, Spring 2019
                                 Elena Gipponi, Joshua Yumibe


attention to historical transformations in colour’s apparatus has been informed
by the pervasive changes wrought by digital technologies to our chromatic
palettes. But such renovations are not without precedent, as the history of colour
cinema demonstrates. Frequently in film history, technical changes have led to
shifts in colour style that are simultaneously cyclical and transformative. The
very emergence of cinematic technology in the late nineteenth century led to
a surge of colourful attractions in some of the earliest moving images, from
the applied-colour hues of Annabelle Whitford’s serpentine dance films to the
prismatic splendour of Georges Méliès and Segundo de Chomón’s magical trick
and fairy films. Yet, the brightly, saturated aniline dyes used in these films were
subsequently restrained and integrated into narrative and nonfiction filmmaking
at the end of the first decade of the 1900s, as new modes of unobtrusive style
developed, and bourgeois taste cultures grew prominent. Following the First
World War, changes in the international colourant industry as well as the increased
professionalization of laboratory research were crucial for the thriving chromatic
culture of the 1920s in film and related media. These developments drove a
colour revolution that enabled Technicolor’s international rise, in fits and starts,
to prominence. The three-strip innovations of the Technicolor Corporation in the
1930s led to an initial era of colourful experimentation and demonstrative design.
This was followed by the normalisation of colour style into the genre system of
classical cinema, relegating the technology as a significant but minor practice
(compared to black-and-white production) that was primarily used in musicals,
melodramas, and historical dramas. Such generic uses of colour held sway
until after World War II, when advances in technologies such as Eastmancolor
mainstreamed colour as the dominant mode of filmmaking in post-war cinemas
around the world. As Scott Higgins’s exemplary work on Technicolor in the
1930s has shown, technical watersheds thus often lead to an initial phase of vivid
experimentation that is followed by a process of normalisation into existing,
typically classical stylistic practices.1
   In terms of watersheds then, the mid-century is a period in colour cinema history
bookended by the stylistic normalisation of Technicolor into narrative cinema
and subsequently by the adoption and transformative uses of Eastmancolor in
post-war cinemas, with many other competing, international technical systems
overlapping along the way (e.g. Agfacolor, Ferraniacolor, Fujicolor, Orwocolor,
Sovcolor). Profoundly significant in this trajectory was the emergence of colour
television internationally in the post-war era, which followed a separate, though
intersecting, technical genealogy from film colour, as Susan Murray’s remarkable
Bright Signals: A History of Color Television delineates (reviewed in this issue
by Doron Galili).2 The ongoing development of these media helped define


1
  Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s (Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2007).
2
   Susan Murray, Bright Signals: A History of Color Television (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2018).

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                  Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture: An Introduction


the chromatic landscape at mid-century, particularly during post-war boom of
consumption, youth cultures and international new wave movements.
   Change, however, is also gradual in ways not easily captured through a focus
on technical breakthroughs and firmly fixed historiographic eras. This is why we
take an expansive view of the mid-century, to account better for the cultural and
intermedial currents that shaped cinematic colour as well as the asymmetrical
flows of global media cultures. Beyond such technical and stylistic points of
navigation, what the articles collected here also delineate is the broad, contextual
developments that shaped cinema during the era. Watersheds do not occur in
a vacuum, and for historiography it is necessary to take into account the media
archaeological systems that enable technical and aesthetic change. For colour
at mid-century, these systems are numerous and require a multidisciplinary
approach. Indeed, colour has been examined in various disciplines, from physics
to chemistry, from biology to neurology, and of course in art history and aesthetic
theory.
   In particular, colour in audio-visual image studies most often draws on four
main interpretative points of focus: perception, technology, aesthetics and
culture. Proceeding backwards from the last dimension, colour is indeed a social
and cultural phenomenon, charged with linguistic-aesthetic values: for example,
its representational relation as it becomes normalised at mid-century to truth
and reality or, conversely, to fantasy and daydreams.3 Every chromatic language
and style, in turn, is inseparable from techniques and technologies (e.g. applied
colour produces a different effect if compared to photochemical processes such
as Eastmancolor). By virtue of technology, moreover, the spectators’ senses are
solicited, and their perception is affected by and contributes to colour culture on
a social level, in an inexhaustible circle of reciprocal mediations and influences.
As Edward Branigan maintains in his recent philosophical overview of colour
in cinema and art, ‘Color is relational. […] Color is not a purely objective
phenomenon determined by a light meter, but rather the result of many interacting
systems’.4 Such concern for the relational nature of colour is shared, in different
ways, by the majority of research on cinematic colour that has burgeoned since
the second half of the 2000s, particularly for those dealing with a contextual
perspective that is attentive to the relations of a given colour film (or corpus
of films) with its surrounding visual culture.5 Indeed, this is exactly what the
essays collected here do: while not renouncing close analysis and the decoding of
colour’s symbolic meanings in the examined works, each keep an open outlook


3
  On the history of the cultural and symbolic meanings of colours see in particular the work of
Michel Pastoureau, from Dictionnaire des couleurs de notre temps. Symbolique et société (Paris:
Bonneton, 1992) onwards.
4
  Edward Branigan, Tracking Color in Cinema and Art: Philosophy and Aesthetics (New York:
Routledge, 2017), pp. xxi-xxii.
5
  See at least Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color (Malden, MA: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2010) and Paul Coates, Cinema and Colour: The Saturated Image (London: BFI Palgrave,
2010).

                                                                                             9
                               Elena Gipponi, Joshua Yumibe


on the socio-cultural and intermedial environment in which colour circulated at
mid-century, never forgetting the relationship between colour technologies and
the subjects who use them.
   Such renewed interest in technological devices and their impact on spectatorship
is grounded in the more general trend of the new film history inaugurated in the
late 1970s. This historiographic practice turned the focus from the ‘inventor-
as-hero’ narrative to the social uses of technologies, and from the single artist’s
personal expression to the minor and lowbrow, and often anonymous, cinematic
practices. While a great deal of research on cinematic colour has been devoted to
the silent era,6 this special issue aims to expand the time span of scholarship on
the history of colour cinema. As mentioned, the mid-century is an expansive era
lasting broadly from the late 1930s through the 1960s and beyond. Photographic
colour systems 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. In many ways, this transformation is difficult to observe, as colour
was increasingly common and ordinary, even banal and unobtrusive as a visual
quality that was experienced in mid-century media increasingly as natural.
   The dialectics between naturalness and artificiality and between transparency
and opacity have long been operating in colour studies, particularly in those
inquiries dealing with colour from an aesthetic standpoint. Research of this kind
often distinguishes two differing modes of colour appearance: on the one hand,
colour in a film can be used as a thing, in and of itself, a pictorial resource that
tends to abstract and detach itself from the diegetic objects and surfaces through
which it becomes visible. In this way, colour can be perceived as a quality of
its own, simply as colour. For instance, this is what happens often in the work
of Japanese director Suzuki Seijun, whose chromatic design — from vibrant
solid colours to sudden colour shifts — is analysed by William Carroll in the
first essay of this special issue, ‘The History of a Broken Blue Fusuma: Colour
in Suzuki Seijun’s Nikkatsu Films’. While delineating Suzuki’s remarkable and
idiosyncratic approach to colour in the 1960s, Carroll also carefully situates his
practice within the colour style of the Nikkatsu studio he was working in. On
the other hand, colour in films can operate in an opposite mode: as unobtrusive,
seemingly invisible, as in most cases, particularly as colour becomes the norm
at mid-century. Colour is everywhere, but, because of its pervasiveness, it
tends to go unperceived as an expected and insignificant property of visual
representation. The co-authored essay ‘From the Margins to the Mainstream?

6
  See the groundbreaking collection ‘Disorderly Order’: Colours in Silent Film — the 1995
Amsterdam Workshop, ed. by Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands
Film Museum, 1996); Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Giovanna Fossati and others, Fantasia of Color
in Early Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015); and the recent Sarah Street
and Joshua Yumibe, Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2019).

10
                 Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture: An Introduction


The Eastmancolor Revolution and Challenging the Realist Canon in British
Cinema’ by ‘The Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema’ research team —
Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith, Carolyn Rickards — aims precisely
to uncover the assumed invisibility of colour in British film history, particularly
when dealing with Eastmancolor filmstock as opposed to the more celebrated
Technicolor dye-transfer productions. Privileging lesser-known colour films
over now canonical masterpieces (e.g. the works of Powell and Pressburger),
the essay proves how the hitherto neglected and ‘transparent’ presence of colour
unexpectedly activated an inner remodelling within certain popular genres of
British film production, such as social realist documentary, horror, comedy and
the biopic.
   Beyond the historical and aesthetic perspective, the same dialectic between
opacity and transparency is at work if we consider colour as an integral part
of the cinematic apparatus. The methodological claims of apparatus theory,
which has been a renewed topic of interest in contemporary media studies, are
thus suitable also for our topic. Colour can be approached as a foundational
element of the cinematic apparatus at mid-century, particularly given its capacity
to negotiate between the binaries of transparency and opacity. The opposition
of these binaries engages the apparatus in an ideological sense: far from being
neutral, or natural, colour technology is inscribed with a range of social values
and cultural desires. For instance, ‘chromophobia’ — which considers bright
and saturated colours as the taste prerogatives of subaltern subjectivities (e.g.
women, children, gays and poor immigrants) — circulates discursively in much
of the reception of new colour technologies throughout the twentieth century.7
From a technological point of view, one of the main ideologies that colour
sustains is that of newness. At least until the 1960s, colour images were deemed
as state-of-the-art modes of display within modern visual culture, even if this
supposed newness was in some cases clichéd and commonplace — ‘tired’, as
Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka maintain: ‘the new is “dressed up” in formulas
that may be hundreds of years old, while the old may provide “molds” for cultural
innovations and reorientations’.8 This is one of the challenging assertions of the
methodology of media archaeology, and it is fruitful for the study of mid-century
colour. The newness of post-war colours can in fact be traced back before World
War II. As a matter of fact, many of the following essays locate in the 1930s
the groundwork of colour theories and practices that dominated the following
decades. Kirsten Thompson’s article, ‘The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont
and Faber Birren’, in particular, addresses the material relationship in the 1930s
between the DuPont chemical conglomerate and the Disney studio, which was
supplied by DuPont with key raw materials for its cel animation. By doing this,


7
 See the well-known study of David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000).
8
  Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, ‘Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology’, in
Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. by Huhtamo and Parikka
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 14.

                                                                                       11
                                  Elena Gipponi, Joshua Yumibe


Thompson’s essay proves to be, among other things, a rich media-archaeological
exploration that digs into the very materiality of the cinematic apparatus: she
considers colour as a material substance and a technological device, as hardware
(l’appareil de base, according to Baudry).
   Thompson’s essay deals also with principles of colour aesthetic design, referring
to the theoretical and practical work of colour engineers and colour consultants
such as Howard Ketcham and Faber Birren, the latter being the champion of so-
called ‘functional colour’.9 Developed conceptually in the 1930s, functional colour
sought ways to best instrumentalise it through effective design and conventional
associations between hues and human actions and reactions, as in ‘red stands for
alert, green stands for rest’. By adhering to functional principles, colour in design
can achieve efficiently a wide range of objectives: increasing sales, reducing stress,
directing attention in factories. Functional colour is a pivotal reference in mid-
century colour practice, and it is a reference in several other articles collected here.
In Federico Pierotti’s ‘Biopolitics of Colour in Mid-Century Italian Visual Culture:
Red Desert and the “New Techniques of Life”’, functional colour is considered
as a biopolitical tool in a Foucauldian sense. In the context of Italian mid-century
visual culture, functional approaches to colour were developed through a series of
practices and discourses intended to regulate the biological aspects of human life,
shaping viewers’ perceptions and conditioning their moods, both at home and
at work. Pierotti, nevertheless, locates in Antonioni’s attention to colour in Red
Desert (1964) a critical resistance against the attempted biopolitical automation of
the Italian subject of the 1950s and the 1960s.
   Also taking up functional colour, Justus Nieland examines its relation to
the pedagogical and communicative work pursued in the Chicago School of
Design (initially founded as the New Bauhaus in 1937), in the essay ‘Colour
Communications: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the Humanities
Program of Design Workshops’. Nieland examines colour in relation to the
16mm Kodachrome films collected as Design Workshops (1940–1944), which
László Moholy-Nagy directed in collaboration with his students at the School.
As Nieland delineates, this collection of nontheatrical films fulfilled a number
of tasks for the School: documenting its experimental, multimedia pedagogy,
which dealt extensively with colour and new materials; training students in the
use of the colour filmstocks and cinematic techniques; and last but not least,
outwardly promoting the School’s activities — hinging in part on the allure of
colour film — to raise funds from corporate sponsors and philanthropic sources
such as Rockefeller Foundation. Across this work, Moholy-Nagy was invested in
the functional aspects of colour and design, yet he took these up at the School
as part of a broader, vanguard vision of an arts and humanities pedagogy that
sought to inculcate new forms of democratic and creative subjectivities for the
new post-war world.


9
    See Faber Birren, Functional Color (New York: The Crimson Press, 1937).

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                  Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture: An Introduction


   In wider terms, the struggle at the centre of functional colour — between
attempts to control colour and its own autonomous resistance to regulation —
has historically spanned colour theory. It reaches back, for instance, to Newton
and Goethe’s dispute about colour’s nature: can it be rationally studied and
controlled as an optical aspect of light, or is it best understood as a complex and
sprawling physiological phenomena? Focusing on mid-century colour, we can
ascribe to the latter — colour’s autonomy — the many examples of psychedelic
colours analysed by Bregt Lameris in ‘Hallucinating Colours: Psychedelic Film,
Technology, Aesthetics and Affect’. With particular emphasis on Roger Corman’s
The Trip (1967), Lameris discusses the variety of attempts to liberate colour and
celebrate its subversive and countercultural power during the psychedelic, LSD
heyday of the 1960s.
   Perhaps it should be no surprise that in the decade in which colour became
the cinematic norm on global screens, the wild countercultural experimentation
around colour expanded what normative colour might look like and how it
might function and be received. Even as the vibrant hues found at the close of
the mid-century marked a new watershed in colour practice, it is true also that
they returned to one of the founding associations of colour, that of the Greek
pharmakon, the pharmacy where both colours and drugs were synthesized.10 Even
as industrially-produced colour was naturalized at mid-century, it bore within
it the illusory and autonomous powers that have always defined our mediated
access to it. Thus, even ‘natural’ colours and dyes in cinema have always been in
a sense culturally conditioned, artificial, synthetic, in other words an apparatus.




10
  See Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Disseminations (London: Athlone Press, 1981), pp.
61–172.

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