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Chromatic Modernity
Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s
by Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe
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Book Presentation:
The era of silent film, long seen as black and white, has been revealed in recent scholarship as bursting with color. Yet the 1920s remain thought of as a transitional decade between early cinema and the rise of Technicolor—despite the fact that new color technologies used in film, advertising, fashion, and industry reshaped cinema and consumer culture. In Chromatic Modernity, Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe provide a revelatory history of how the use of color in film during the 1920s played a key role in creating a chromatically vibrant culture.
Focusing on the final decade of silent film, Street and Yumibe portray the 1920s as a pivotal and profoundly chromatic period of cosmopolitan exchange, collaboration, and experimentation in and around cinema. Chromatic Modernity explores contemporary debates over color’s artistic, scientific, philosophical, and educational significance. It examines a wide range of European and American films, including Opus 1 (1921), L’Inhumaine (1923), Die Nibelungen (1924), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Lodger (1927), Napoléon (1927), and Dracula (1932). A comprehensive, comparative study that situates film among developments in art, color science, and industry, Chromatic Modernity reveals the role of color cinema in forging new ways of looking at and experiencing the modern world.
About the authors:
Sarah Street is professor of film at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900–55 (2012) and Deborah Kerr (2018), among other works.Joshua Yumibe is associate professor and director of the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University. He is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (2012) and coauthor of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015).
Press Reviews:
Chromatic Modernity makes a brilliant contribution to the history of color in film. Focusing on the pivotal period of the 1920s, the book skillfully situates modernist cinema within a sweeping "chromatic revolution" that impacted everything from fashion and advertising to urban planning and interior design. In so doing, it shows conclusively why color matters to film history—and why cinema mattered to the chromatic culture of modernity. Michael Cowan, University of St Andrews
This book differs from other studies of film color in its interdisciplinary approach. The authors have gone to great lengths to explore the cultural use of color outside of films and how that influenced and informed technical developments and audience tastes in cinema. I cannot think of a pair more qualified to analyze such overlooked cinema than Street and Yumibe. The convergence of these experts benefits their research and the text they have written. James Layton, coauthor of The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915-1935
Arguing against assumptions that intermediality decreases with the formation of the classical Hollywood system, Street and Yumibe assert that the twenties are, in fact, a key decade for cinematic engagement across art forms in the development of this heightened color consciousness. The focus on the transnational intellectual, aesthetic, and industrial cross influences between the United States and Europe and the historical synthesis of a large literature on the color revolution are two significant features of this book. Kirsten Moana Thompson, Seattle University
This is a remarkable book. Highly recommended. Choice
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
> From the same authors:
Color in Motion (2024)
Chromatic Explorations of Cinema
by Alexandra James Salichs, Kirsten Moana Thompson, Barbara Flueckiger and Joshua Yumibe
Subject: Technique > Aesthetics
Global Film Color (2024)
The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury
Dir. Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Colour Films in Britain (2022)
The Eastmancolor Revolution
by Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith and Carolyn Rickards
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Provenance and Early Cinema (2021)
by Joanne Bernardi, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Tami Williams and Joshua Yumibe
Subject: Silent Cinema
The Image in Early Cinema (2018)
Form and Material
by Scott Curtis, Tom Gunning, Philippe Gauthier and Joshua Yumibe
Subject: Silent Cinema
Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015)
by Tom Gunning, Giovanna Fossati, Joshua Yumibe and Jonathan Rosen
Subject: Silent Cinema
Color and the Moving Image (2012)
History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive
Dir. Simon Brown, Sarah Street and Liz Watkins
Subject: Technique > Aesthetics
Colour Films in Britain (2012)
The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900-55
by Sarah Street
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
> On a related topic:
The Emergence of Film Culture (2017)
Knowledge Production, Institution Building, and the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Europe, 1919–1945
Dir. Malte Hagener
Subject: History of Cinema
Hollywood on the Hudson (2010)
Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff
Subject: History of Cinema
The History of the British Film 1918 - 1929 (2011)
Volume IV
Dir. Rachael Low
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
Mexico on Main Street (2015)
Transnational Film Culture in Los Angeles before World War II
Subject: History of Cinema
'Film Europe' and 'Film America' (1999)
Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920-1939
Dir. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby
Subject: History of Cinema
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