Abstract

Unlike the coming of sound, colour did not revolutionise the film industry overnight, and charting the British experience of colour offers fascinating insights into the complex network of issues that accompany the introduction of new technologies. 

This talk reveals how colour was a controversial topic, greeted by some as an exciting development with scope for developing a uniquely British aesthetic, while others feared its impact on audiences accustomed to seeing black-and-white films that were frequently praised as being superior. Yet many British inventors and filmmakers were captivated by the possibilities created by colour, exploiting different processes in films that demonstrated remarkable experimentation and quality. 

Examples include The Glorious Adventure, This Is Colour, Blithe Spirit, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, The Tales of Hoffmann and Moulin Rouge, as well as two distinguished colour films produced by Ealing Studios, with which Alexander Mackendrick was involved: Saraband for Dead Lovers and The Ladykillers. The talk demonstrates the unique contribution of the many British technicians and directors who negotiated their way through the various economic, technical and aesthetic challenges posed by colour in the first half of the twentieth century.

Biography

Sarah Street is Professor of Film and Foundation Chair of Drama at the University of Bristol. Her publications include British National Cinema (1997, 2009), Transatlantic Crossings: British Feature Films in the USA (2002), Costume and Cinema (2001), Black Narcissus(2005) and Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination: Set Design in 1930s European Cinema (with Harris and Bergfelder, 2007).

Her latest book, Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900-55 (2012), won the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies’ Best Monograph Award. She has co-edited (with Simon Brown and Liz Watkins), Color and the Moving Image (2012) and British Colour Cinema: Practices and Theories (2013). She is currently co-authoring a book with Joshua Yumibe on Chromatic Modernity: Colour, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s, and is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded project, The Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema, 1955-85.

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/school-of-arts/people/sarah-c-street/