Color and the Moving Image


Book Description

This new AFI Film Reader is the first comprehensive collection of original essays on the use of color in film. Contributors from diverse film studies backgrounds consider the importance of color throughout the history of the medium, assessing not only the theoretical implications of color on the screen, but also the ways in which developments in cinematographic technologies transformed the aesthetics of color and the nature of film archiving and restoration. Color and the Moving Image includes new writing on key directors whose work is already associated with color—such as Hitchcock, Jarman and Sirk—as well as others whose use of color has not yet been explored in such detail—including Eric Rohmer and the Coen Brothers. This volume is an excellent resource for a variety of film studies courses and the global film archiving community at large.




Moving Color


Book Description

Color was used in film well before The Wizard of Oz. Thomas Edison, for example, projected two-colored films at his first public screening in New York City on April 23, 1896. These first colors of early cinema were not photographic; they were applied manually through a variety of laborious processes—most commonly by the hand-coloring and stenciling of prints frame by frame, and the tinting and toning of films in vats of chemical dyes. The results were remarkably beautiful. Moving Color is the first book-length study of the beginnings of color cinema. Looking backward, Joshua Yumibe traces the legacy of color history from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the cinema of the early twentieth century. Looking forward, he explores the implications of this genealogy on experimental and contemporary digital cinemas in which many colors have become, once again, vividly unhinged from photographic reality. Throughout this history, Moving Color revolves around questions pertaining to the sensuousness of color: how color moves us in the cinema—visually, emotionally, and physically.




Making Images Move


Book Description

Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media and art forms. In this richly illustrated volume, Gregory Zinman explores how moving-image artists who worked in experimental film pushed the medium toward abstraction through a number of unconventional filmmaking practices, including painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with water, dirt, and bleach; and applying materials such as paper and glue. This book provides a comprehensive history of this tradition of “handmade cinema” from the early twentieth century to the present, opening up new conversations about the production, meaning, and significance of the moving image. From painted film to kinetic art, and from psychedelic light shows to video synthesis, Gregory Zinman recovers the range of forms, tools, and intentions that make up cinema’s shadow history, deepening awareness of the intersection of art and media in the twentieth century, and anticipating what is to come.




The Process Genre


Book Description

From IKEA assembly guides and “hands and pans” cooking videos on social media to Mister Rogers's classic factory tours, representations of the step-by-step fabrication of objects and food are ubiquitous in popular media. In The Process Genre Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky introduces and theorizes the process genre—a heretofore unacknowledged and untheorized transmedial genre characterized by its representation of chronologically ordered steps in which some form of labor results in a finished product. Originating in the fifteenth century with machine drawings, and now including everything from cookbooks to instructional videos and art cinema, the process genre achieves its most powerful affective and ideological results in film. By visualizing technique and absorbing viewers into the actions of social actors and machines, industrial, educational, ethnographic, and other process films stake out diverse ideological positions on the meaning of labor and on a society's level of technological development. In systematically theorizing a genre familiar to anyone with access to a screen, Skvirsky opens up new possibilities for film theory.




Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema


Book Description

Presents and discusses a treasure trove of early color film images from the archives of EYE Film Institute Netherlands, bringing to life their rich hues and forgotten splendor.




Color Mania


Book Description

Since the earliest days of cinema, fi lm has been a colorful medium and art form. More than 230 film color processes have been devised in the course of fi lm history, often in close connection with photography. In this regard, both media institutionalized numerous techniques such as hand and stencil coloring as well as printing and halftone processes. Apart from these fundamental connections in terms of the technology of color processes, fi lm and photography also share and exchange color attributions and aesthetics.0This publication highlights material aspects of color in photography and fi lm, while also investigating the relationship of historical fi lm colors and present-day photography. Works of contemporary photographers and artists who reflect on technological and culture-theoretical aspects of the material of color underline these relations. Thematic clusters focus on aesthetic and technological parallels, including fashion and identity, abstraction and experiment, politics, exoticism, and travel.0Color Mania contains a general introduction to color in film and photography (technique, materiality, aesthetics) as well as a series of short essays that take a closer look at specific aspects. An extensive image section illustrates the texts and color systems and continues the aesthetic experience of the various processes and objects in book form.00Exhibition: Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (07.09. - 24.11.2019).




Films that Sell


Book Description

While moving image advertising has been around us, everywhere, for at least a century, the topic has tended to be overlooked by cinema studies. This far-reaching new collection makes an incisive contribution to a new field of study, by exploring the history, theory and practice of moving image advertising, and emphasising the dynamic and lasting relationships between print, film, broadcasting and advertising cultures.In chapters written by an international ensemble of leading scholars and archivists, the book covers a variety of materials from pre-show advertising films to lantern slides and sponsored 'educations'. With case studies of advertising campaigns and archival collections from a range of different countries, and giving consideration to the problems that advertising materials pose for preservation and presentation, this rich and expansive text testifies to the need for a new approach to this burgeoning subject that looks beyond the mere study of promotional film.




Abstract Video


Book Description

Offering historical and theoretical positions from a variety of art historians, artists, curators, and writers, this groundbreaking collection is the first substantive sourcebook on abstraction in moving-image media. With a particular focus on art since 2000, Abstract Video addresses a longer history of experimentation in video, net art, installation, new media, expanded cinema, visual music, and experimental film. Editor Gabrielle JenningsÑa video artist herselfÑreveals as never before how works of abstract video are not merely, as the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe once put it, Òpictures of nothing,Ó but rather amorphous, ungovernable spaces that encourage contemplation and innovation. In explorations of the work of celebrated artists such as Jeremy Blake, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, Takeshi Murata, Diana Thater, and Jennifer West, alongside emerging artists, this volume presents fresh and vigorous perspectives on a burgeoning and ever-changing arena of contemporary art.




Jung and Film


Book Description

Jung and Film brings together some of the best new writing from both sides of the Atlantic, introducing the use of Jungian ideas in film analyis. Illustrated with examinations of seminal films including Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner, and 2001 - A Space Odyssey, Chris Hauke and Ian Alister, along with an excellent array of contributors, look at how Jungian ideas can help us understand films and the genres to which they belong. The book also includes a glossary to help readers with Jungian terminology. Taking a fresh look at an ever-changing medium, Jung and Film is essential reading for academics and students of analytical psychology, as well as film, media and cultural studies.