Archive

Past events organised by the BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG.

The Colour, Film, Research Seminar Series of Spring/ Summer 2023 Online (Zoom) culminated in a Book launch 16:00-17:30 (BST) Thursday 22^nd June 2023. The British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Colour and Film SIG hosted an online book launch for two new publications on colour: Professor Charlotte Ribeyrol’s William Burges’s Great Book Case and the Victorian Colour Revolution (Yale University Press, 2023) and Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson’s The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity (Paul Mellon Centre. 2023). The authors spoke about their new publications and discussed questions surrounding the materiality and intermediality of colour with Professor Sarah Street (University of Bristol), Professor Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University) and Dr Liz Watkins (University of Leeds).

The speakers and discussants were:

Professor Charlotte Ribeyrol: Professor in 19th century British Literature, Sorbonne Université Paris and Principle Investigator of Chromotope, University of Oxford.
Dr Kirsty Sinclair Dootson: Lecturer in Film and Media, University College London is author of Rainbow’s Gravity.
Professor Sarah Street: Professor of Film and PI of the Studiotec project and author of books on The Negotiation of Innovation: Colour Films in Britain (2013), The Eastmancolor Revolution (2022) and co-author of Chromatic Modernity: Colour, Cinema and the Media of the 1920s (2019) and co-editor of Color and the Moving Image with Simon Brown and Liz Watkins.
Professor Joshua Yumibe. Michigan State University. Professor Yumibe’s books include Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (2012), Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015), and coauthor of Chromatic Modernity: Colour, Cinema and the Media of the 1920s (2019).
Dr Liz Watkins, University of Leeds: authored journal articles on Eastmancolor, Technicolor, the materiality of film, and has co-edited books on Color and the Moving Image (2013) and British Color Cinema (2013) with Simon Brown and Sarah Street.

For further information contact: e.i.watkins@leeds.ac.uk and Zoom enquiries: vicky.jackson@bristol.ac.uk

Thanks to the Studiotec Project who convened this year’s Colour and FIlm SIG panel at the BAFTSS Conference 2023, University of Lincoln. The three speakers focussed on ‘Colour in the Studios’ and included presentations from Eleanor Halsall ‘Experimenting in colour: The film studio as laboratory in Germany’; Sarah Street on ‘Encounters with Colour at Denham Studios; and Carla Mereu Keating on ‘Blinding lights: Ferraniacolor and the hazards of working with novel film technologies.’

The panel session was followed by the BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG Annual Meeting. Thanks to all who attended.

The BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG: is supporting the Colour Across Chinese Cinemas: Pan Si Dong (Dan Dayu, China, 1927) Screening 20 November 2022 at Dundee Contemporary Arts. The screening is part of the Colour Across Chinese Cinemas programme taking place this autumn across Fife and Angus. The programme has been co-curated by Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, Zhaoyu Zhu (University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China), Yixiang Lin (University of Edinburgh) and Hiu Man Chan (DeMontfort University/UK-China-Film-Collab). The series explores the kaleidoscopic history of colour across cinemas of the Chinese speaking world, considering the varied aesthetic and political function colour played in film from the silent era to the present across China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The free/public 35mm screening of the silent, Chinese film Pan Si Dong, which has extensive colour tinting. Although long thought of as lost, the discovery and subsequent restoration of the film in 2014 by the National Library of Norway (who are providing the print) means a new generation of audiences can enjoy this remarkable film. The film will be accompanied live by experimental Edinburgh-based harpist Aurora Engine. Introduced by Kirsty Sinclair Dootson and Xuelei Huang (University of Edinburgh).

Image credit: Pan Si Dong/ Cave of the Silken Web (1927)

Colour in Context Symposium. 11:00-18:00 Friday 23rd March 2018. University of Bristol. Key note speaker: Professor Lynda Nead, Birkbeck. ‘Greyscale and Colour: the Hues of Nation and Empire c.1945-60. Abstract

The symposium: Colour – its specific hues, meanings and perception – are a contentious issue in the study of film. From the history of its technologies and the production of a ‘natural colour’ image to its association with all that is artificial and unreal, the interpretation of colour has been closely linked to its cultural, social and historical contexts. Colour in Context is a one-day interdisciplinary symposium and offers a space in which to discuss the diverse ways in which filmmakers and artists have used colour (and the strategy of its absence) as a technique of cinematic expression as well as those who have made a subversive use of colour that is intended to disrupt cinematic forms of representation in a range of cultural, social or historical contexts. Thus, this symposium aims to explore the specificities of colour and its contradictions in a range of cultural, social or historical contexts. CFP Colour in Context Symposium This call has closed.

Colour in Context Symposium Full Programme Abstracts and Delegate Biographies

The Colour in Context Symposium was organised in conjunction with a Screening and Workshop event: When the New Wave Came to Bristol: Remembering Some People (Clive Donner, 1962) at the Watershed, Bristol 24^th March 2018.

The Colour in Context symposium was funded by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies. The symposium was organized by the Special Interest Group on Colour and Film. Symposium convenors: Liz Watkins and Sarah Street. The Some People Workshop was been organised by the AHRC-funded project The Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema, 1955-85, which is based at the Universities of Bristol and East Anglia.

added 7th December 2017

Journeys through Colour: experimentation, realism and artifice in non-fiction travel films. Seminar. 18:00-20:00 Tuesday 27th February 2018, Royal Anthropological Institute, London. This public event was sponsored by BAFTSS and the RAI, an independent charity organisation. It is not affiliated with current UCU actions.

Speakers: Professor Jeffrey Geiger (University of Essex), Jan Faull (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Dr Liz Watkins (University of Leeds). Introduced and chaired by Dr Natasha Eaton (University College London).

Full abstracts, bio notes and photographs

A study of colour in film – its multifarious technologies and practices – offers a way to question teleological film histories that have written of a progression toward ‘colour realism’. This event explores the aesthetics, rhetoric and meaning of colour in travel films of the 1920s and 1930s. Colour is entwined with the practices of film making, representation and exhibition which associate spectacle and the fantastic as integral to the formation of images and narratives in non-fiction film. The presentations begin to unpick a complex of materials and techniques utilised to mediate views of the world to geographically diverse audiences. Colour signals a discourse of fiction and non-fiction, realism and expression, nature and artifice in travel and expedition films. The speakers discuss topics from the rhetoric of Kodachrome’s ‘living color’ in amateur travel films of the Pacific to the observation and interpretation of ‘natural colour’ in early 1900s expedition films to Everest and the Antarctic. How are landscapes and travel represented in film?

updated 13th March 2018

Past events organised by the BAFTSS Colour and Film SIG.

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