Chromatic Cinema

Richard Misek is a film-maker and Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Bristol, UK. He has been published widely in film journals, and his short films have been shown at festivals including Cannes, Raindance, and Clermont-Ferrand, and broadcast on BBC2 and Channel 4.

• List of Plates ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction 11. Film Color 14Coloration in Early Cinema, 1895–1927 14The Rise of Technicolor, 1915–35 25Chromatic Cold War: Black-and-White and Color in Opposition 29“Technicolor Is Natural Color”: Color and Realism, 1935–58 35Chromatic Thaw: Hollywood’s Transition to Color, 1950–67 412. Surface Color 50Color in European Film, 1936–67 50Chromatic Ambivalence: Art Cinema’s Transition to Color 57“Painting with Light”: Cinema’s Imaginary Art History 65Unmotivated Chromatic Hybridity 68Monochrome Purgatory: Absent Color in the Soviet Bloc, 1966–75 773. Absent Color 83Black-and-White as Technological Relic, 1965–83 83Black-and-White Flashbacks: Codifying Temporal Rebirth 89Black-and-White Films, 1967–2007 97Nostalgia and Pastiche 1114. Optical Color 117Cinema’s Newtonian Optics 117White Light: Hollywood’s Invisible Ideology 122Darkness Visible: From Natural Light to “Neo-Noir,” 1968–83 132Cinematography and Color Filtration, 1977–97 139Case Study: Seeing Red in Psycho 1475. Digital Color 152Crossing the Chromatic Wall in Wings of Desire 152An Archaeology of Digital Intermediate, 1989–2000 155Digital Color Aesthetics, 2000–9 164Conclusion: Painting by Numbers? 179Notes 181Bibliography 195Index 210

“Chromatic Cinema provides a much-needed technological history of machines and techniques for producing moving images in color, as well as a cultural history of color films.”  (BRIAN R. JACOBSON, Technology and Culture, July 2012)“An invigorating critical intervention into the history, theory and aesthetic analysis of colour in the cinema.”  (JENNIFER M. BARKER, Screen, August 2012)“Chromatic Cinema provides a wealth of information and of examples of different approaches to colour in cinema and stimulates enough thoughts and reflections to be a worthy addition to any library on colour in cinema.”  (NICOLA MAZZANTI, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, April 2012"Chromatic Cinema is an excellent critical history of screen colour by Richard Misek, who teaches at the University of Bristol, near which, as I recall, is a plaque to mark the birthplace of William Friese-Greene, the somewhat unfortunate British movie pioneer, one of who patents was for his own colour system." (Times Literary Supplement, 25 November 2011) "The book touches on most of the important aspects of color cinema-from history to technology to ideology-and serves as an orientation course for a complex subject. It's a gateway read, neither intimidating nor frustrating. For a beginner (like me), it presented a smattering of philosophical ideas, a grounding in the why and how progression of color use, and a primer on the science of color technologies." (MUBI, September 2010)