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.
Elena Gipponi and Joshua Yumibe, Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture: An Introduction
William Carroll, The History of a Broken Blue Fusuma: Colour in Suzuki Seijun’s Nikkatsu Films
Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith and Carolyn Rickards, From the Margins to the Mainstream? The Eastmancolor Revolution and Challenging the Realist Canon in British Cinema
Kirsten Moana Thompson, The Colour Revolution: Disney, DuPont and Faber Birren
Federico Pierotti, Biopolitics of Colour in Mid-Century Italian Visual Culture: Red Desert and the ‘New Techniques of Life’
Justus Nieland, Colour Communications: László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Paepcke, and the Humanities Program of Design Workshops
Bregt Lameris, Hallucinating Colours: Psychedelic Film, Technology, Aesthetics and Affect
BEYOND CINEMA
Anna Caterina Dalmasso, The Body as Virtual Frame: Performativity of the Image in Immersive Environments
REVIEWS / COMPTES-RENDUS
PROJECTS & ABSTRACTS