Chromatic Cinema

Chromatic Cinema Color permeates film and its history, but study of its contribution to film has so far been fragmentary. Chromatic Cinema provides the first wide-ranging historical overview of screen color, exploring the changing uses and meanings of color in moving images, from hand painting in early skirt dance films to current trends in digital color manipulation. In this richly illustrated study, Richard Misek offers both a history and a theory of screen color. He argues that cinematic color emerged from, defined itself in response to, and has evolved in symbiosis with black and white. Exploring the technological, cultural, economic, and artistic factors that have defined this evolving symbiosis, Misek provides an in-depth yet accessible account of color’s spread through, and ultimate effacement of, black-and-white cinema.

List of Plates ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1. Film Color 14 Coloration in Early Cinema, 1895–1927 14 The Rise of Technicolor, 1915–35 25 Chromatic Cold War: Black-and-White and Color in Opposition 29 “Technicolor Is Natural Color”: Color and Realism, 1935–58 35 Chromatic Thaw: Hollywood’s Transition to Color, 1950–67 41 2. Surface Color 50 Color in European Film, 1936–67 50 Chromatic Ambivalence: Art Cinema’s Transition to Color 57 “Painting with Light”: Cinema’s Imaginary Art History 65 Unmotivated Chromatic Hybridity 68 Monochrome Purgatory: Absent Color in the Soviet Bloc, 1966–75 77 3. Absent Color 83 Black-and-White as Technological Relic, 1965–83 83 Black-and-White Flashbacks: Codifying Temporal Rebirth 89 Black-and-White Films, 1967–2007 97 Nostalgia and Pastiche 111 4. Optical Color 117 Cinema’s Newtonian Optics 117 White Light: Hollywood’s Invisible Ideology 122 Darkness Visible: From Natural Light to “Neo-Noir,” 1968–83 132 Cinematography and Color Filtration, 1977–97 139 Case Study: Seeing Red in Psycho 147 5. Digital Color 152 Crossing the Chromatic Wall in Wings of Desire 152 An Archaeology of Digital Intermediate, 1989–2000 155 Digital Color Aesthetics, 2000–9 164 Conclusion: Painting by Numbers? 179 Notes 181 Bibliography 195 Index 210