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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J. 2012, pp. xvii + 192 / Federico Pierotti, La seduzione dello spettro. Storia e cultura del colore nel cinema, Le Mani, Genova 2012, pp. 296
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Reviews / Comptes rendus
2013-10-01
2023-10-09
2013-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Elena Gipponi
2013/10/01
Università IULM, Milano
2036-461X
21
en
Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J. 2012, pp. xvii + 192 / Federico Pierotti, La seduzione dello spettro. Storia e cultura del colore nel cinema, Le Mani, Genova 2012, pp. 296
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/21348/18955
13
 plaining the criteria that informed the selection of       alizing the film, one could say making it "speak,"
 audiovisual materials. Other essays reconstruct the        through paying attention both to the culture that
 cultural context in which the film was made. The           produced it and the audience to whom the film is ad-
 contributions that analyze American Orientalism            dressed. This methodological choice allows us to see
 from a historical and antropological point of view         the publication as contributing to the field of visual
 are particularly interesting. The attraction of the East   anthropology.
 was a mix of fascination and repulsion, based on ste-      Finally, equally important is the book's rich icono-
 reotypes that form part of a long anti Chinese liter-      graphic display. In addition to promotional stills
 ary tradition which was present in Western culture,        and screenshots from the film, the authors have as
 while the allure expressed itself in the appreciation      a result of thorough research been able to use pho-
 of exotic set designs and oriental costumes.               tographs, posters, magazine pages, and postcards
 The book tries to analyze how these subjects were          from public and private collections to illustrate the
 accepted by the public and evaluate how Chinese            book. In this respect, the iconographic and historic
 culture was portrayed. Among the most important            reconstruction of the promotional campaign that an-
 topics addressed in the book are the role of Orien-        ticipated and prepared the cinematic release of the
 tal women between the 19t and 204 centuries, the           film appears particularly accurate.
 foot-binding tradition, inter-racial sex and the off-
 spring that resulted from such unions, and the social      Maria Francesca Piredda - Università Cattolica del
 and historical implications behind the Boxer Rebel-                                        Sacro Cuore, Milano]
 lion. The analysis reveals the intention of contextu-



                                                                                                            color," "sur-
Joshua Yumibe,                                              nologies that have been practiced ("film
Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture,                     face color,» "absent color," "optical color" and "dig-
Modernism,                                                  ital color," as stated by the five chapter headings).
                                                            In 2012 two new books promoted further reflections
Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J.
2012, pp. xvii + 192                                        on chromatic cinema from a contextual standpoint:
                                                            Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modern-
Federico Pierotti,                                          ism by Joshua Yumibe and La seduzione dello spet-
La seduzione dello spettro. Storia e cultura del            tro. Storia e cultura del colore nel cinema by Fede-
colore nel cinema,                                          rico Pierotti.3
Le Mani, Genova 2012, pp. 296                               As the subtitle suggests, Yumibe's study focuses on
                                                            the three decades of silent cinema, broadening the
Colour was a neglected topic in film studies until          account of the four most common colour process-
recently.' Yet, since the second half of the 2000s,         es in early film (hand colouring, stenciling, tinting
the academic research on cinematic colour has bur-          and toning) to the wider horizon of mass culture and
 geoned and so have the publications pertaining to          modernism between 19t and 20th century.
 colour and cinema.? Some scholars adopt a textual          Yumibe starts from a physiological definition of col-
perspective, isolating a noteworthy canon, while            our: cinematic color is thought about primarily as a
 others choose a contestual paradigm, enlarging the         sensory experience. To make his point he refers to
viewpoint to the modes of production and consump-           two of the most authoritative theories of the past. In-
tion of colour movies. Richard Misek, for instance,         deed, while Newton described colour as an objective
joins the latter approach in Chromatic Cinema. A            and measurable feature (different hues correspond
History of Screen Color (2010), where he traces an          to different wavelengths of a dismantled beam of
unorthodox history of cinema from the beginning up          light), Goethe in his Farbenlehre (1810) claims the
to the present time through the various colour tech-        subjective and perceptual character of colour: colour


128
 perception is filtered by the human body (not only technologies in early 20t cent
 by sight, but also by the other senses, just like in extent influenced by the diverse artistic and in
 synaesthesia), which is not an inert "receiver." Rath-trial colour practices of 194-century visua
                                               From
 er, the viewer's body is an operating interface  bethis perspective, hand painting reveals the
 tween the inside and the outside, and plays a vital     legacy of serpentine dance spectacles and magic
 role in the deciphering and understanding of reality.   lantern shows; stenciling turns out to inherit wallpa-
 This concern toward embodied colour perception is       per illustrations and postcards colour designs, while
 part of the 19 century physiological turn described     tinting and toning convey the changes in stage light-
 by Jonathan Crary (1990). Within this conceptual ing made feasible by the development of artificial
 framework, that Yumibe depicts in the first chapter, light (Schivelbusch 1995). Moreover, these mutual
 motion perception and colour perception are closely      influences changed alongside with the transition
 interrelated.                                            from the cinema of attractions to forms of unobtru-
 Besides theory, the other three chapters provide sive narration and naturalistic or non-fiction genres
 accurate descriptions of the applied colour tech- such as travelogues, industrial and abstract films. In
 niques, relying both on some of the most grounded        fact, after 1910, in order not to distract viewers from
 works about early cinema (like Tom Gunning's and         the plot and overwhelm their senses, a shift toward
André Gaudreault's), and on primary sources and           pastel and subdued hues occurred, following the pat-
original materials like ads and reviews in the trade      terns of impressionist painting.
press, catalogues and handbooks, private exchange         While Yumibe's survey stops at the threshold of the
letters and, above all, a heterogeneous selection of      coming of sound, Pierotti's La seduzione dello spet-
films and frames (the book includes 32 color plates,      tro is a cultural history of chromatic cinema from the
as well as 29 black and white figures. Specifically,      1890s to the 1960s. Throughout its eight chapters,
many examples come from Davide Turconi's Frame            the book draws the chronological development of
Collection at the George Eastman House in Roch-           the different "chromatic types" of cinematic images:
ester, New York. As Paolo Cherchi Usai points out         from the polychromy of hand painting and stenciling
in the foreword, it is exactly thanks to archives like    (or pochoir) in the pre-nickelodeon era to the mon-
Turconi's - and its meticulous scrutiny by Yumibe
                                                     -    ochromy of tinting and toning in the second peri-
that detailed information about early colour has been     od of silent cinema; from the achromatic quality of
made available to scholars. Archivists and restorers,     black and white films in the 1920s and 1930s to the
as a matter of fact, customarily privileged black and     so-called "natural colour" that pretends to rule over
white prints' preservation, because coloured ones         the thirty-year season from the 1930s to the 1960s.
were more expensive and less enduring (aniline dyes       Pierotti is particularly concerned with the cultural
fade in a short time), therefore it seems as if silent    impact of technological innovation in each of these
moyles were for the most part colourless, greyish         transitions. Within a theoretical framework that goes
and dull. On the contrary, Moving Color greatly con-      from Goethe's Theory of Colors to Chevreul's princi-
tributes to a better understanding of silent cinema as    ples of chromatic harmony and Michel Pastoureau's
 -for the most part - a colourful experience.              historical work, the author defines colour first and
         Furthermore, looking deep into early colour design,foremost as a cultural factor. In the western world
the scholar decidedly denies any form of techno-          the main cultural significance ascribed to colour is
logical determinism, for applied colouring is not         seduction, which in turn can have the positive con-
just "a primitive attempt to simulate reality before      notation of attraction or the negative connotation of
technology evolved enough to reproduce the index-         distraction. This polarization crosses the entire his-
ical hues of reality." By wondering where cinematic       tory of cinema and, in wider terms, of modern pop-
colour styles derive from, Yumibe rather pays at-         ular media and arts. In order to support this thesis,
tention to the modernist intermedial context (even        Pierotti examines not only colour practices but also
though without giving a clear definition of "interme-     discourses about colour, with particular reference to
diality"). Thus, the ways of using cinematic colour       the cinema. For instance, the sixth chapter is devoted

                                                                                                                 129
to the European theoretical debate which in Ultimately,
                                             different one of the brightest goals of this volu
ages involved, among others, Arnheim, Kracauer,
                                           - as well as Yumibe's - is the emergence of a bistor.
Bazin, Antonioni, Balazs, Dreyer and Ejsenstejn.         ical paradigm based on continuity: social processes
With regards to the choice of the case studies, the      and cultural values change very slowly and, beyond
volume - unfortunately without pictures - encom-         crisis and turning points, the transformations - both
passes both cult and minor movies, with a special        theoretical and practical - flow gradually and with-
care for the Italian highbrow and lowbrow produc-out sudden breaks. According to Yumibe and Pierotti,
tion ("diva film," comedy, musical melodrama). the history of chromatic cinema itself did not start
With its anti-deterministic intersection of technolo- in 1895, but well before that year, thanks to pre-ex-
gy, industry and aesthetic theory, this historical in-
                                                    isting techniques and psychological attitudes toward
quiry on cinematic colour style undermines the lead-     colour images. Therefore new colour technologies do
ership of "masters" and "masterpieces" allowing,         not merely replace old ones in a one-directional and
instead, a reappraisal of the collective and nameless    irreversible way, but they keep on coexisting and cir-
contributions to chromatic practices. Colour was         culating, though in a minor mode. Significantly, this
actually often designed and processed by laborato-       idea of continuity is still valid and useful to approach
ry technicians, who supported a codified and con-the current techniques of digital colouring, which
venient array of aesthetic options untied from the enable to recreate all the previous colour styles and
director's will (this happened, for example, with the looks, from hand painting onwards, in a genealogy
coloured copies of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, that is more and more complex and multilayered.
Robert Wiene, 1920, which we were used to think
exclusively in black and white).                                  [Elena Gipponi, Università IULM, Milano]


Aaron Delwiche, Jennifer Jacobs Henderson (eds.),        and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson, The Participatory
The Participatory Cultures Handbook,                     Cultures Handbook is therefore not remarkable in
Routledge, London-New York 2012, pp. 313.                   terms of the originality of the topic. But it differs
                                                       from the numerous reflections on participation in
In recent ears the term participation has become the   at least three wavs. The first is the structure of the
watchword for a broad range of studies on media andwork: the book is a collection of twenty eight essays,
   communication processes in the digital realm. Its divided in eight sections, that cover the main aspects
fortune is essentially linked to the need to mark the of the debate on participation: fan cultures, co-crea-
distance from the interpretative models developed tive processes, building cultures of knowledge, civic
between the end of the nineties and the beginning cultures, activism, education and media literacy, as
of the new mill ennium, with their store of categorieswell as the introduction and conclusion that provide
and labels. In particular the concept of participation an interesting definition of the issue. It is therefore
has progressively replaced the concept of interactiv- an extremely versatile text, providing both a global
ity, to illustrate - as Nico Carpenter effectively set view of the issue as well as examining its individ-
out in an essay from a few years ago* - a more com-    ual aspects in depth. The strength of Delwiche and
plex experience, which is not limited to changing the Henderson's book lies in the selection of the authors,
interface or the single media environment, but ex-     which includes media theoreticians, communication
tends its range of action to the entire system and con-professionals and young researchers. The multipli-
sequently society. In simple terms we can say that cation of the points of view and the debate - literally
participation is part of the debate around web 3.0, as in the question and answer essay between Suzanne
interactivity was part of the debate on web 2.0. The   Scott and Henry Jenkins - between different ways
importance of the concept of participation in the cur- of intending and criticising participation allows for
rent reflection on the media has triggered a wealth of a rich and detailed reconstruction of the phenome-
 contributions. The book edited by Aaron Delwiche non. Last, but not least, The Participatory Cultures


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