The Hybrid Color Film: Multiplicity of Space, Time, and Matter

Hybrid color films of the 1920s such as The King of Kings (Cecil B. DeMille, 1927)—that is, films comprising a mix of different historical color processes—are a particularly fruitful resource for the comparison of the silent era’s various color technologies. This article analyzes these cinematic hybridizations and argues that this type of film is much more than the sum of its parts. In embodying a multiplicity of layers of space, time, and color on a literal and metaphorical level, hybrid color films are not only symptomatic of the transformation of the medium in the 1920s but also symbolic of current approaches to film historiography based on media archaeology.

True Colors: Chromaticity, Realism and Technological Honesty

I propose an application of agential realism to my practice as research, a film about my mother getting one tattoo covered with a new one, to investigate the material-discursive role played by the camera in determining meaning within the film image. I use my practice as a comparative case study, considering how a specific camera apparatus determines and negotiates standards of colour accuracy, and what it means to remove those colour values in post-production. I argue that the different colour processing of the same footage produces perceptible onto-epistemological difference, even while it remains indexically equivalent. Second, I will show exactly how this particular digital photosensitive technology meets the pro-filmic event to record colour, enacting agencies that reduce matter to fit a specifically programmed colour system, prior to any manipulation in post-production. The system itself draws the boundaries of accuracy it claims to achieve, with inevitable ethical implications.

The “Exaggerated” Colors of Black Narcissus (1947 and 2020)

This article explores the correspondences and differences in terms of color design between two screen versions of Black Narcissus, a popular novel by Rumer Godden published in 1939. Conceptual approaches drawn upon include ideas of “the figural,” intertextuality and hybridity as central to understanding how Black Narcissus operates on many complex levels, arguing that color is a key expressive mode in their articulation. Powell and Pressburger’s 1947 film and a 2020 television mini-series directed by Charlotte Bruus Christensen are for the first time compared in relation to landscape and the natural environment; interior spaces; costume; race. The texts’ experimentation with color, lighting and diffusion enables boundaries between exterior and interior spaces, as well as between characters’ memories and repressed desires, to be problematized. As “end of empire” texts, the literary and screen iterations of Black Narcissus are related to postcolonial theories in which a series of hybrid, “in-between” spaces and cultural attitudes are explored.

Memories from the Darkness in the Films of Pedro Costa and Affonso Uchôa

This essay analyses realist works from contemporary world cinema wherein the representation of space-time is directly affected by the color black, referring to both night and dark shadows. It investigates exactly how darkness participates in moments when the filmed subjects remember traumatic events and confront them through their courageous retellings. My hypothesis is that the color black converts the space—realistic and concerning the characters’ present time—into a place where different temporalities coexist. Through a comparative analysis of films made by the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa and the Brazilian filmmaker Affonso Uchôa in the past two decades, I show how this modulation in space-time produced through color has a political meaning, since the narrated memories are related to a social experience of class and race.

The True Colors of “False” Color: Representing Data Chromatically in NASA Films

This paper investigates the multifaceted uses of color — not (only) to aesthetic ends, but as a tool for translating data into narrative — in a corpus of recent NASA films. Often called ‘false’ color or accused of manipulation, these uses of digital color stray from photorealism but nonetheless have a direct, measurable relationship with physical reality: they use data to render visible that which lies outside the spectrum of visible light. The focus of this paper is on the truth status of these digital films and on the practices used to produce them. It situates them, as a corpus, within and in response to film studies historiographies of color centered around spectacle and the dichotomy of fantasy versus reality, addressing how color can deploy the powers of the false to reveal otherwise invisible truths through art and artifice.

The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive

Colorization describes the digitization and retrospective addition of color to photographic and film materials (celluloid nitrate, glass negatives) initially made and circulated in a black-and-white format. Revisiting the controversial 1980s colorization of 24 classic Hollywood studio titles, which incited debate over questions of copyright, authorship and artistic expression, this essay examines the use of colorization to interpret museum collections for new audiences. The aesthetics of colorization have been criticized for prioritizing image content over the history of film technologies, practices and exhibition. An examination of They Shall Not Grow Old (Jackson, 2018) finds a use of digital editing and coloring techniques in the colorization of First World War film footage held in the Imperial War Museum archives that is familiar to the director’s fiction films. Jackson’s film is a commemorative project, yet the “holistic unity” of authorial technique operates across fragments of archive film and photographs to imbricate of fiction and nonfiction, signaling vital questions around the ethics and ideologies of “natural color”, historiography, and the authenticity of materials and spectator experience.

Reading the Biopic through Persona: A Comparison between "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Rocketman"

Personas are the public expressions of a private identity, the performance of personality in the social world. They are particularly visible and familiar in the world of celebrity, where entertainers regularly adopt an alter-ego for performance. This has intriguing consequences for biographical representations of performers. Biopic actors are obliged to duplicate the public-facing persona, which is an already-known, semi-fictional construction, and the private individual beneath. The narrative of the biopic must account for this relationship between the persona and the person who authors it. This article explores this process in two high-profile rock biopics, Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Rocketman (2019), comparing their different approaches to reproducing and exploring the persona of their subjects in performance, style and mise en scène.

The Van Gogh Enigma: Re-Mythifications of the Artist’s Genius in "Loving Vincent" and "At Eternity’s Gate"

Few painters have had as many films made about their lives as Vincent van Gogh. The interest in his story is due in part to the mystery surrounding his last days, in Arles, France. It is thus no coincidence that all the biopics about the Dutch painter focus on this stage of his life, including the recent works Loving Vincent (2017), an animated film by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, and Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate (2018). A comparative study of these two feature films, representing two different aesthetic and dramatic approaches, is conducted in pursuit of the two objectives of this paper: to identify the conventions of the subgenre of the artist biopic; and consequently, to analyze how both films reflect on the artist’s creative practice in order to determine whether the film camera is in fact capable of capturing the brushstroke and the mystique of the genius.