Any: 2021 Num.: 17 (2021): Color Contrast. Chromatic Connections in Cinema
http://hdl.handle.net/10230/49268
2024-03-29T00:03:55ZThe Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive
http://hdl.handle.net/10230/49351
The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive
Watkins, Liz
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.
2021-01-01T00:00:00ZThe True Colors of “False” Color: Representing Data Chromatically in NASA Films
http://hdl.handle.net/10230/49354
The True Colors of “False” Color: Representing Data Chromatically in NASA Films
Harris, C. E.
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.
2021-01-01T00:00:00ZMemories from the Darkness in the Films of Pedro Costa and Affonso Uchôa
http://hdl.handle.net/10230/49349
Memories from the Darkness in the Films of Pedro Costa and Affonso Uchôa
Costa Júnior, Edson
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.
2021-01-01T00:00:00ZTrue Colors: Chromaticity, Realism and Technological Honesty
http://hdl.handle.net/10230/49350
True Colors: Chromaticity, Realism and Technological Honesty
Philip, Andrew I.
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.
2021-01-01T00:00:00Z