#1 - Global Film Colour
This is Film! 2025 #1: Global Film Colour
In this first session of the public lecture series This is Film!, guest speakers Joshua Yumibe and Sarah Street, both professors of film studies, will discuss the collaborative and collectivist possibilities that colour introduced to the moving image worldwide. The conversation will be paired with a screening of short films.
The transformations that colour brought to the moving image in the 1960s and 1970s continue to reverberate globally today. This was the era when the availability of new, ‘monopack’ colour stocks reversed the dominant mode of filmmaking from black and white to colour. However, the transition to colour was also marked by various asymmetries, in which economic and infrastructural inequities, trade barriers, and cultural norms profoundly shaped this chromatic transition differently across the world.
This conservation between researchers Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, paired with a screening of short films, explores the collaborative and collectivist possibilities that colour posed and continues to enable across a range of experimental and minor cinemas that have envisioned alternative aesthetic and political formations of chromatic media.The conversation will be moderated by Giovanna Fossati, professor Media Heritage, Technology and Culture at Utrecht University.GuestsSarah Street is Professor of Film at the University of Bristol, UK. She is the author of Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900-55 (2012) and co-author of Colour Films in Britain: The Eastmancolor Revolusion (2021) and Chromatic Modernity (2019). Her latest book is Pinewood: Anatomy of a Film Studio in Post-war Britain (2024).Joshua Yumibe is Professor of film studies at Michigan State University. He is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (2012), co-author of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015). He is also an editor of Screen and of the Contemporary Film Directors Series.Together Street and Yumibe have written Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (2019), and also co-edited Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury (2024).
Programme
La mort de Gandji (Alassane Moustapha, NE 1965, 5')
A fantastical tale of a village’s battle with a threatening creature, the film is one of the earliest African-directed animations. Sparkling in a variety of handcrafted tints, this wondrous animation demonstrates the creative exchanges that were taking place globally through colour and the moving image in the 1960s.
Remembrance: A Portrait Study (Edward Owens, US 1967, 6')
A filmic portrait of the artist’s mother, Mildred Owens, and her friends. The loving film both evokes the intimacy of a home movie, while also making these African American women shimmer like Hollywood stars, accompanied musically by Marilyn Monroe and Dusty Springfield.
Four Women (Julie Dash, US 1975, 7', 16mm)
An interpretation of Nina Simone’s song of the same name through a sensuous performance of dance, moving camera, and coloured lighting to evoke and deconstruct four different African American female stereotypes. Not properly colour-graded when completed, Dash worked with the UCLA Film Archive and restorer Ross Lipman to recover the colours as originally conceived.
16mm restored print courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television ArchiveTerritories (Isaac Julien, Sankofa Film Collective, GB 1985, 25')
This, and other seminal films produced by Black British film collectives in the 1980s, examine contemporary experiences of cultural and diasporic identity. These were often expressed using experimental techniques, found footage and collage aesthetics. Territories focuses on the Notting Hill Carnival in London, an annual festival of Caribbean music and dance, for a radical interrogation of regimes of representation and the politics of race.
Alternative Economies (Rehana Zaman, GB 2021, 28')
A meditation on regulation (nerval as well as financial), accumulation and health, and the promises and failures of Cryptocurrency. Between these strands, possibilities for an alternative network of exchange and subsistence are explored. While different visually from Territories, the film uses a similar approach to the film collectives of the 1980s in creating a politically charged aesthetic that centres collaborative action across a range of spaces, viewpoints, colours and sounds.
This is part of
Details
Production year
2025
Length
157 min.
Event language
English
Country
NL
Part of
This is Film! 2025
This is Film! Film Heritage in Practice is an annual public lecture series in collaboration with the University of Amsterdam devoted to notable projects in the fields of film restoration and film heritage, with international guest speakers and film screenings.
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