What is it about?
In the beginning the primary purpose of the cinema was to dazzle the eyes and minds of spectators with visual attractions: unseen wonders of the world, magical transformations, elaborates spectacles of costumes — all of these in bright, glowing colors. Colors? Didn’t the cinema have to wait for Technicolor to capture the spectrum of the natural world? Before photographic color was achieved filmmakers endowed their images with applied colors, dyes and tints that had nothing to do with photography and often little to do with naturalism. This early artisanal process of applying color to each individual print, liberated color from realism and allowed it to paint the black and white images with all the hues of fantasy. These unique color prints have been hard to preserve and even harder to reproduce and only recent digital process have allowed us to see the full range of these early applied color film. Drawn from the unique collection of early colored film in the EYE Film Institute of the Netherlands, we present here a voyage through the fantasia of early film color, from the recent book, Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema. — Tom Gunning
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Why is it important?
Accompanying essays discuss the history of early film and the technical processes that filmmakers employed to capture these fascinating images, while other contributions explore preservation techniques and describe the visual delights that early film has offered audiences, then and now. Featuring more than 300 color illustrations for readers to examine and enjoy, Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema will engage scholars and other readers of all ages and backgrounds.
Perspectives
As a professional static and moving image maker, I found it simultaneously sublime and mind-boggling to see copious piles of these rare images and artifacts that combine sublime aesthetic sensibility with chemistry, photography, dye processes, printing technology, electrical engineering, optics, theater, performance, painting, dance, color symbolism, pop culture, fine art, and literature delivered with incredible special effects, all brought together into one rapidly developing, cutting edge, new protean art form. For these film-artist pioneers, the excitement of the new process is palpable, the delirious color saturation hyper-real and hallucinatory – not to mention the haptic pressure inside the eye as multifrequency light waves of photons pour into the cornea and lens and start pushing on the rods and cones of the retina, causing electrochemical currents to surge into the ganglion cells, making the optic nerve go berserk, firing electrical impulses in rapid succession onto the primary visual cortex of the brain. Ecstatic? Most of the time, yes.
JONATHON ROSEN
JONATHON ROSEN
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This page is a summary of: Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, March 2015, Amsterdam University Press,
DOI: 10.5117/9789089646576.
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