Bregt Lameris

Chair(s): Gernot Howanitz (Universität Innsbruck, Österreich) Vortragende: Sarah-Mai Dang (Universität Marburg), Josephine Diecke (Universität Marburg), Ralph Ewerth (TIB / Universität Hannover), Bregt Lameris (Open University of the Netherlands), Thomas Scherer (FU Berlin), Teodora Vukovic (Universität Zürich), Ariadne Baresch (Universität Trier) Das von der AG Film & Video organisierte Panel setzt sich inspiriert vom Tagungsmotto „Open Humanities, Open Culture“ mit Fragen der Offenheit in der Filmwissenschaft auseinander. In den letzten Jahren wurden verschiedene Aspekte der Open Humanities im Kontext der Filmwissenschaft umrissen, und zwar in Einzelbetrachtungen, die zunächst den Umweg der Medienwissenschaften nehmen (Sondervan 2018; Hirsbrunner 2019). Darüber hinaus gab es Arbeiten zum Potential offener Forschungsdaten für filmwissenschaftliche Fragestellungen (Heftberger et al. 2020), zum Forschungsdatenmanagement in der Filmwissenschaft (Dang 2020) sowie zur Verfügbarmachung digitaler Filme durch das Bundesarchiv (Heftberger 2020). Auch die Frage der Analysevokabulare wurde aufgeworfen (Bakels et al. 2020), ebenso jene des Open Access (Kolleg-Forschungsgruppe Cinepoetics, FU Berlin; GfM-AG Open Media Studies: https://mediastudies.hypotheses.org/2633 Das Panel möchte diese Einzelbeobachtungen zusammenführen und gemeinsam mit weiteren Fragestellungen diskutieren. Dabei erweist sich die Frage nach Offenheit für die Filmwissenschaft als besonders virulent. Ein zentrales Thema ist die Wiederverwertbarkeit von Software: Digitale Tools für Bewegtbilder sind komplex und aufwändig, der erhöhte Entwicklungsaufwand ‚rechnet‘ sich erst bei intensiver Nutzung. Forschungsdaten können häufig nicht zur Verfügung gestellt werden, aus urheberrechtlichen Gründen – die milliardenschwere Filmindustrie wirkt hier entgegen – ebenso wie aus technischen – Filme brauchen im Vergleich zu anderen Medien ein Vielfaches an Speicherplatz – und organisatorischen – es fehlen etablierte Annotierungsstandards. Das Panel nimmt verschiedene Herausforderungen in den Blick: technische Infrastruktur und Standardisierungsbestrebungen, Lehre, Forschungsdatenmanagement und Citizen Humanities. Wir sind überzeugt davon, dass die Filmwissenschaft durch das Angehen ihrer spezifischen Probleme wesentliche Impulse auch für andere Geisteswissenschaften setzen und die Open Humanities entsprechend weiterentwickeln kann.

Within the context of the ERC Advanced Grant Filmcolors I investigate subjectivity, affect and aesthetics from an historical perspective, drawing on ideas developed within the field of the history of emotions. However, while most of this research is of a synchronic nature, my work contains a strong diachronic component, based on Fernand Braudel’s concept of the ‘pluralité des durées’ (La Méditerranée, 1966). Following Braudel, I distinguish three layers: 1. the layer of slowly changing affects and connected ‘topoi’; 2. the foundational layer of culture and discourse; and 3. the film under investigation. In this essay, I lay out my theoretical and methodological reflections by focusing on colour patterns used in films that represent hallucinations. I will lay out several examples of hallucinatory scenes (level 1) and explain their common (biological) grounds. Further, I will zoom in on 1960s psychedelic culture characterized by hallucinating drug use as entertainment and as therapeutic tool (level 2). The film of interest (level 3) is The Trip (Roger Corman, 1967), which precisely represents this culture. A combination of the analyses of the three levels brings interesting new perspectives on the 1960s, its psychedelic film culture, and how this relates to the topos of colourful hallucinations

In 1927, a group of young Parisian cinephiles founded the so-called Ligue du noir et blanc, positioning colour in the domain of the commercial, and black and white in that of the artistic cinema. This dichotomy between colour and black and white in cinema is still part of our present-day film-historical dis courses. As a result, the ligue strongly defined our relationship to early col our films in the archives and film museums. To better understand the 1920s debate, I position it within the broader French discourse on colour and film art, showing that there were other voices that declared colour to be an excel lent element to use in an artistic way. The debate was not as black and white as our current historiographical knowledge might make us believe.

Co-Author: Bregt Lameris In Western culture, colour has long been perceived as powerful, emotional, and dangerous, despite its aesthetic qualities. During the 1920s in the United States, however, colour experienced a rehabilitation caused by the specific conditions of the decade. The rise of consumer culture brought with it new moralities and a revolution in women’s fashions, including short skirts and bobbed hair. Within this new consumer society, colour became a useful tool for producers to stimulate more demand for their goods. In order to exploit colour, its old meanings had to be tamed, but at the same time its edgy, racy side is what made it commercially successful. In this article, we analyse the effects of these conditions on how colours were defined, perceived, and used in media such as newspapers, advertisements, fan magazines, posters, films, and musical songs. In order to provide a close reading of the changing meanings attached to colours and the ways in which they were used, we will focus on two case studies, Alice Blue and Phantom Red. Fashionable in the 1920s, these two shades functioned as tie-ins to popular culture such as cinema, musicals, fashion, and make-up. In addition, both were related to films in Technicolor II, the latest innovation that permitted filming in natural colours. The name Phantom Red was based on the film Phantom of the Opera (1925), which showed the Phantom’s cloak in Technicolor II red. Alice Blue was the colour of a dress the actor Colleen Moore wore in the finale of the film Irene (1926), a fashion show in Technicolor II.1 Each colour played unique roles in the history of fashion and was subject to different, changing connotations. We will provide a cultural historical analysis of both colours, studying the ways in which they appeared, were used, and were commented upon. We introduce Roland Barthes’ semiotic theories on connotation and denotation into the domain of colour, to show that the flexibility of colour to adopt layers of meanings turns them into strong rhetorical tools. This study could not have been written without the digital availability of many sources such as newspapers and fan magazines. As a consequence, it is a good example of the changes that are occurring due to the digital revolution that has also found its way into the archives and libraries.

From the tremendous video libraries of YouTube and the Internet Archive to the text collections of the HathiTrust and the Media History Digital Library, media historians today confront the challenge of engaging with an abundance of cultural works and archival materials. For those invested in the digital humanities, this abundance presents an opportunity to transform these materials’ availability into data to be studied using a variety of methods. — Eric Hoyt, Kit Hughes, and Charles R. Acland, “A Guide to the Arclight Guidebook,” The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities

Article excerpt (source: https://www.questia.com/magazine/1P4-1972152354/the-search-for-the-lost-colours-of-albatros-films ): In December 1926, the London distribution company Wardour Films wrote to Alexandre Kamenka, head of Albatros Films in Paris. His letter concerned the film Carmen, which the company wanted to distribute in Great Britain the following year. The English company was unhappy with the colours of the print: they were regarded as too bright and too "present" for British taste: One of the chief faults of the copy is due to the mixing of toning with tinting - indeed, in our opinion this is so noticeable that it almost becomes confusing, and certainly detracts considerably from the quality of the photography [...]. This matter as a whole appears to us to be very serious, and it is therefore not only important, but absolutely necessary, that you have prepared for us at once another copy [...], and please note that we require no toned sections - the copy should ...

Rich in detail, this is a study of the interrelationships between film historical discourse and archival practices. Exploring the history of several important collections from the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam, Bregt Lameris shows how archival films and collections always carry the historical traces of selection policies, restoration philosophies, and exhibition strategies. The result is a compelling argument that film archives can never be viewed simply as innocent or neutral sources of film history.

Given the canonical status in avant-garde media history of Fernand L\ue9ger and Dudley Murphy\u2019s Ballet m\ue9canique (1924), its preservation history is perhaps surprisingly complex. As a consequence, it has been the object of many debates on the practice and ethics of restoration and reconstruction. In 2011, EYE Film Institute Netherlands, in collaboration with the Haghefilm Foundation, carried out the most recent restoration work of the film and employed coloring techniques as used in the 1920s. Although the work conducted did not result in a new projection copy, the project remains a potential next step in the evolving restoration history of Ballet m\ue9canique

Blot-Wellens, “The Colors of Phantom,” trans. Debra Lyn Christie, in the DVD booklet for Phantom: The Authorized Restored Edition (Los Angeles: Flicker Alley, 2006). 5. Variety wrote of the scene: “At one place in the story the philosophical Tchernoff, holding to view an apple, has a speech to the effect it was well chosen as the ‘forbidden fruit,’ but that, stripped of its brilliant covering, it is like a woman’s soul which, stripped of its cloak of virtue, is an ugly thing to behold. Rex Ingram probably spent many weary hours getting the proper light on the apple so as to make it, in spite of its relative tininess, the biggest thing on the screen. But someone thought it needed verisimilitude and colored it. With the result it stuck out in technically perfect production like a sore thumb.” From “Inside Stuff Pictures,” Variety, February 25, 1921, 44. 6. Ibid. 7. During 1920, Prizma produced a series of prologues for monochrome features, and it would appear it was one of the services they specifically marketed to producers. Other films with Prizma prologues include the US distribution of Madame Du Barry, retitled Passion (Lubitsch, 1919); Kismet (Gasnier, 1920); and The Gilded Lady (Leonard, 1921). See Carroll H. Dunning, “Color Photography in 1922,” Film Year Book (1923), 171. 8. E.g., tints convey a shift in mood when the opulent interiors of a grand house are first seen in amber tints but we subsequently see the same sets infused with a violet tint for a fireside scene to introduce a romantic theme. In addition, a violet-tinted fantasy sequence from the heroine’s perspective of a romantic cruise with her would-be lover is inserted into the scene before the return to normality is signaled by amber. Later, when the heroine starts to lose confidence in holding on to her younger husband, a dancing scene is unusually tinted red. on the Restoration history of Colored Silent Films in germany An Interview with Martin Koerber

The Magnus-Rademaker scientific film collection (1908-1940) deals with the physiology of body posture by the equilibrium of reflex musculature contractions for which experimental studies were carried out with animals (e.g., labyrinthectomies, cerebellectomies, and brain stem sections) as well as observations done on patients. The films were made for demonstrations at congresses as well as educational objectives and film stills were published in their books. The purpose of the present study is to position these films and their makers within the contemporary discourse on ethical issues and animal rights in the Netherlands and the earlier international debates. Following an introduction on animal rights and antivivisection movements, we describe what Magnus and Rademaker thought about these issues. Their publications did not provide much information in this respect, probably reflecting their adherence to implicit ethical codes that did not need explicit mentioning in publications. News...

Historical films made by neuroscientists have shown up in several countries during past years. Although originally supposed to have been lost, we recently found a collection of films produced between 1909 and 1940 by Rudolf Magnus (1873-1927), professor of pharmacology (Utrecht) and his student Gysbertus Rademaker (1887-1957), professor of physiology (1928, succeeding Willem Einthoven) and neurology (1945, both in Leiden). Both collections deal with the physiology of body posture by the equilibrium of reflex musculature contractions for which experimental studies were done with animals (labyrinthectomies, cerebellectomies, and brainstem sections) and observations on patients. The films demonstrate the results of these studies. Moreover, there are films with babies showing tonic neck reflexes and moving images capturing adults with cerebellar symptoms following cerebellectomies for tumors and several other conditions. Magnus' studies resulted in his well-known Körperstellung (192...

Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography is a meticulously researched work and a welcome addition to the already growing body of work related to film archiving practices. Lameris’ book is not only about engaging with the history of the Nederlands Filmmuseum but also about situating this case study within the larger context of film history and film archiving practices throughout the world. Indeed, students and scholars of cinema studies along with archival and museum studies will find Lameris’ approach particularly useful." - Rahul Kumar, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 2018, Vol. 38, No. 2