Technicolor

Liz Watkins, University of Leeds. contact: e.i.watkins@leeds.ac.uk  'Threads of Colour and Meaning in the Film Work of Nicolas Roeg and Anthony Richmond', Guest blog for the Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema 1955-1985. https://eastmancolor.info/2018/07/25/threads-of-colour-and-meaning-in-the-film-work-of-nicolas-roeg-and-anthony-richmond/ From the vibrant hue of a detail that punctuates the image to a single colour that envelopes the screen, the chromatic, in films by Nicolas Roeg, signals a greater acuity than cosmetic distraction. In Roeg's work I would find both an attention to a central paradox of cinema – a photographic inscription of an image by light as permanent record of a fleeting moment – and an experimental approach to photography and editing that has frequently been described as fragmented and labyrinthine (Roeg 2013, p.5, p.29; Houston 1973, p.205). However, my initial textual analysis of Don't Look Now, found that the colour red demanded an attention to the materiality of the film. Colours fade and colour balances shift: cyan and yellow dyes diminish emphasising the red hues. In viewing a 1973 Eastmancolor circulation print it seemed that the degradation of the image underscored the effects of lens flare as an element of film style (Watkins 2015). What I want to suggest is that Roeg's approach to colour combines a fascination with photographic materials and effects, filmmaking practices honed through his work as cinematographer for directors including Roger Corman, François Truffaut, and Donald Cammell, and experimentation with the possibilities of different colour technologies, lighting and editing. From a stated interest in the 'retained image', which Roeg describes as much like the indexicality of the photographic (associated with Bazin's concept of the death mask), to the complexity of a film form structured through layered flashbacks, Roeg's work examines the disquieting of belief systems and social structures. The thread that can be tracked through the labyrinthine form of Roeg's film work – social order and its enactment – is underscored by a tension in the organisation of colour, as it shifts between the lighting and design of classic cinema (bright reds, yellows set forth against greys and browns, else contrasting hues) and a spontaneity of camera movement and naturalistic lighting. For example, Roeg has cited classic Technicolor designs (c.1940-1950) as an influence for his cinematography on The Masque of the Red Death (Corman, 1964) and Fahrenheit 451 (Truffaut, 1966). In The Masque of the Red Death the progression of colour rooms (blue, purple, green, orange, white, violet), drawn from Edgar Allen Poe's text, is interspersed with a vibrant red hue as something that spills and consumes from within. A thread of colour can be tracked throughout the film, from the plague of the Red Death outside the castle, to the fantasies that consume from within it (Branigan 2017, p.121): its meaning lies in its movement. For Fahrenheit 451, shot on Eastman Color, Roeg recalls Truffaut's request for the 'artificial and glossy' colour schemes associated with the studio lighting of three-strip Technicolor (Petrie 1996, p.136). The film contrasts colour details – red fire engines – with a background of naturalistic hues. Roeg's references to Technicolor design are interlaced with a broader cultural shift in the visual style of 1960s filmmaking. As Duncan Petrie has written in his essay on British Cinematography, the 1960s saw a transformation from 'hard-edged, high-contrast lighting to a softer, more diffused use of illumination; from carefully composed images and minimal camera movement to a much freer, more mobile and spontaneous visual register; from the aesthetics of classicism to a much more self-conscious use of form appropriate to a decade associated with a new emphasis on spectacle and sensation' (Petrie 2018: p.204). Petrie's argument, that the availability new lenses and increased light sensitivity of film stocks facilitated 'a new topography and environment' (Petrie, p.210) links film technologies and aesthetics with a decade characterised by social and political change. However, I want to suggest that Roeg's collaborations with cinematographer Anthony Richmond further erode the dominant teleological form of a film history that has been determined by technological innovations (see Elsaesser's critique, 2016) and concepts of authorship. Roeg's work with Richmond – Walkabout (1970/1971), Don't Look Now (1973), The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Bad Timing (1980) – combines naturalistic colour with photography considered experimental to commercial cinema: inverse images, slow motion, and mirrors extend and complicate the filmed space to convey dystopian landscapes.[1] Each of these films utilises lens flare, and shots which 'fall away into underexposure on the actors in the background' concealing the peripheral areas of the image. Richmond has linked these characteristics in Don't Look Now to the increased sensitivity of film stock (Richmond 1976; Watkins 2015). The effects of lens flare – causing the overexposure of the film as the light refracts on the camera lens and effaces the legible composition of the image – persists as the filmic expression of disorientation, intoxication and cultural displacement in contemporary works – Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1976) – shot by Russell Boyd for director Peter Weir. Boyd combines time-lapse sequences of dark clouds, backlit with golden sun and reflected in the windows of a skyscraper (The Last Wave) and slow-motion, high angle and 360˚shots in Picnic at Hanging Rock. The diminished hues of each overexposed image disquiets otherwise familiar landscapes. The entanglement of film technologies and aesthetics testifies to the persistence of filmmaking practices beyond the perceived obsolescence of a colour process such as three-strip Technicolor and questions the borderlines of national cinemas.[2] The selection of film stock was significant to colour design of Performance (1970), a film which Roeg co-directed with Donald

This story of a girl who dances in a cursed pair of red shoes until she dies parallels Vicky’s own ambitions as a dancer, as well as the decisions she must face between her love for Julian and her success at the ballet company. Powell and Pressburger compose a ballet rich with color, music, visual effects, and drama with such refined filmmaking, enhancing both the energy and the agony of the dance by taking advantage of various cinematic techniques and the technology of the time- such as the use of symbolic Technicolor. One of the greatest scenes in Michael Powell and Emetic Pressburger’s film ​The Red Shoes ​(1948) is the ballet performance from which the film is named after, drawing together all of the crucial elements of filmmaking such as writing, mise-en-scène​, and cinematography, to create a profound impression upon the audience through the scene’s highly artistic and emotionally engaging construction.

This essay aims to understand the relations between Stanley Cavell’s theoretical generalities regarding the medium of film and his readings of individual films, with a particular focus on his writing on color in his book The World Viewed. I argue that a specific idea of color as connected to abstraction (as well as a correlative idea of black-and-white as connected to figuration) grounds the relations between Cavell’s general statements about color and his readings of individual color films, and that this conception of color helps to bring out the level of medium specificity required for understanding Cavell’s notion of “projecting” a world. I likewise argue that this idea of color and abstraction lies behind Cavell’s claims about projecting a “unified” world in his writing on color’s connection with fantasy and futurity, in his approach to Jean-Luc Godard’s films, and even in his writing on color that follows The World Viewed.

The invention of motion pictures was only possible due to the prior discovery of the phenomenon of persistence of vision, the prior invention of photography and the ability to produce photographs with very brief exposure times. These discoveries were necessary before motion pictures could be invented, and given how human beings like to be entertained, it was also inevitable, that sooner or later in some society open to new ideas and technology, that motion pictures would be made to meet the human need for entertainment. Once motion pictures had been invented, sound and then color were added to create the motion pictures we are familiar with today. The order of discovery was inevitable and is an example of how social and cultural history has to follow a particular course determined by the structure of the world around us.

Se hace un análisis de la película predecesora de "La seducción" de Sofía Coppola, de Don Siegel, con Clint Eastwood, en la que se estrena como actor de carácter y Geraldine Page, donde se muestra una tragedia a puerta cerrada, donde el infierno son los demás, en medio de una moral de la ambigüedad.

Winner of the 2016 Henry Allen Moe Prize for Catalogs of Distinction in the Arts from the New York State Historical Association. Winner of the Theatre Library Association's 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award. In "The Dawn of Technicolor," authors James Layton and David Pierce recount the beginnings of one of the most widely recognized names in the American film industry, painstakingly reconstructing the company’s early years from a wealth of previously unavailable internal documentation, studio production files, contemporary accounts and unpublished interviews. Lavishly illustrated throughout, "The Dawn of Technicolor" includes fully-researched biographies of Technicolor’s key personnel and a comprehensive annotated filmography of all two-color Technicolor productions.

We summarize basic features associated to dynamical breaking of the electroweak symmetry. The knowledge of the phase diagram of strongly coupled theories as function of the number of colors, flavors and matter representation plays a fundamental role when trying to construct viable extensions of the standard model (SM). Therefore we will report on the status of the phase diagram for SU(N) gauge theories with fermionic matter transforming according to arbitrary representations of the underlying gauge group. We will discuss how the phase diagram can be used to construct unparticle models. We will then review Minimal Walking Technicolor (MWT) and other extensions, such as partially gauged and split technicolor. MWT is a sufficiently general, symmetry wise, model to be considered as a benchmark for any model aiming at breaking the electroweak symmetry dynamically. The unification of the standard model gauge couplings will be revisited within technicolor extensions of the SM. A number of appendices are added to review some basic methods and to provide useful details. In one of the appendices we will show how to gain information on the spectrum of strongly coupled theories relevant for new extensions of the SM by introducing and using alternative large N limits.

∗ Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244-1130, USA † Department of Mathematical Sciences, UAE University, Al-Ain, POB 17551, UAE ‡ Department of Mathematics, Ain Shams University, 11566, Cairo, Egypt and § Physics Department, ...

Colour in Context Symposium. 11:00-18:00 Friday 23rd March 2018. University of Bristol.  Key note speaker: Professor Lynda Nead, Birkbeck. ‘Greyscale and Colour: the Hues of Nation and Empire c.1945-60.'

The symposium examines colour – its specific hues, meanings and perception – as it continues to be a contentious issue in the study of film.  From the history of its technologies and the production of a ‘natural colour’ image to its association with all that is artificial and unreal, the interpretation of colour has been closely linked to its cultural, social and historical contexts. Colour in Context was a one-day interdisciplinary symposium that offered a space in which to discuss the diverse ways in which filmmakers and artists have used colour (and the strategy of its absence) as a technique of cinematic expression as well as those who have made a subversive use of colour that is intended to disrupt cinematic forms of representation in a range of cultural, social or historical contexts.

Symposium organised by Dr Liz Watkins (University of Leeds) and Sarah Street (University of Bristol)

Charla dictada por mí en El Café con Notas do Ateneo Mar de Arousa, el día 4 de octubre, como parte de un grupo de apreciación musical, donde quise mostrar el uso inicial que hizo Walt Disney del cine sonoro, que había inaugurado en 1927, "El Cantante de Jazz" ¿Se deben hacer los dibujos animados antes que la música o visceversa? Enigma que se queda sin contestar; pero, podemos disfrutar de la belleza de estos pequeños cortometrajes.

The Dawn of Technicolor is the first detailed history of Technicolor's formative years. Authors James Layton and David Pierce recount the first two decades of one of the most widely recognized names in the American film industry, painstakingly reconstructing the company's early years from a wealth of previously untapped internal documentation, studio production files, firsthand accounts, and unpublished interviews. The book is lavishly produced with more than 400 images, and it includes a comprehensive annotated filmography of all two-color Technicolor titles.

Technicolor is today most associated with films made during the height of the Hollywood studio era—color classics such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Singin' In the Rain (1952). But this celebrated period of creative and technical achievement was possible only after twenty years of tireless research and development.

Following its incorporation in 1915, Technicolor developed a series of two-color processes as necessary steps toward full-color photography and printing. Despite success in the laboratory and in small-scale production, the company was plagued by repeated disappointments. The feature films The Gulf Between (1917), The Toll of the Sea (1922), Wanderer of the Wasteland (1924), and The Black Pirate (1926) each showed tremendous promise in photography and color design, but implementation flaws resulted in technical problems and commercial failure. Each time, the company retooled and tried again. With the support of patient investors and the visionary leadership of Herbert T. Kalmus, Technicolor eventually prevailed against daunting odds to create the only commercially viable color process for motion pictures.

http://eastman.org/technicolor/book

The invention of motion pictures was only possible due to the prior discovery of the phenomenon of persistence of vision, the prior invention of photography and the ability to produce photographs with very brief exposure times. These discoveries were necessary before motion pictures could be invented, and given how human beings like to be entertained, it was also inevitable, that sooner or later in some society open to new ideas and technology, that motion pictures would be made to meet the human need for entertainment. Once motion pictures had been invented, sound and then color were added to create the motion pictures we are familiar with today. The order of discovery was inevitable and is an example of how social and cultural history has to follow a particular course determined by the structure of the world around us.

‘Views on Colour: Finding the Filmmakers, Technicians and Archivists’, Sarah Street, Liz Watkins, Carolyn Rickards and Paul Frith, International Association for Media and History. posted: 14th January 2020.

http://iamhist.net/2020/01/views-on-colour/

Fighting to remain relevant after the demise of three-strip color photography, Technicolor entered the widescreen market with its own process. In 1957, it launched the large-format Technirama widescreen system in which the film was run horizontally through the camera instead of vertically, creating a larger, higher resolution film frame. On top of this, an anamorphic lens optics compressed the image horizontally to facilitate even wider compositions. Technirama’s improved image quality heralded a more expansive cinema experience, enabling the production of historical epics such as Spartacus (1960) and El Cid (1961).

This video was produced by George Eastman House as part of the http://eastmanhouse.org/technicolor100 website that celebrates 100 years of Technicolor through highlights from related collections at the museum.

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant number MA-10-14-0234-14. http://www.imls.gov/

Technicolor’s superior dye-transfer printing process was its greatest legacy. Introduced for two-color printing in 1926, it was adapted for three-color in the 1930s and remained in use in the United States until the mid-1970s.

This video was produced by George Eastman House as part of the http://eastmanhouse.org/technicolor100 website that celebrates 100 years of Technicolor through highlights from related collections at the museum.

This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services grant number MA-10-14-0234-14. http://www.imls.gov/

The possibility of dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking by strong coupling gauge interaction in models with D-branes in String Theory is examined. Instead of elementary scalar Higgs doublet fields, the gauge symmetry with strong coupling (technicolor) is introduced. As the first step of this direction, a toy model, which is not fully realistic, is concretely analyzed in some detail. The model consists of D-branes and anti-D-branes at orbifold singularities in (T2 × T2 × T2)/Z3 which preserves supersymmetry. Supersymmetry is broken through the brane supersymmetry breaking. It is pointed out that the problem of large S parameter in dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking scenario may be solved by natural existence of kinetic term mixings between hypercharge U(1) gauge boson and massive anomalous U(1) gauge bosons. The problems to be solved toward constructing more realistic models are clarified in the analysis.

This website celebrates 100 years of Technicolor through highlights from related collections at George Eastman House. It presents an accessible introduction to the technology, people, and films at the heart of the company’s success through new videos, animations and digitized artifacts.

Color cinematography has ignited debates about how color should be used, and what color aesthetics can add to cinema. While Technicolor's aesthetics required painstakingly designed artificial lighting to achieve naturalist effects, Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1991) uses primarily natural lighting to produce a surreal colorscape I call water color. This radical aesthetics of color disrupts classical notions about color and cinema in several ways: it supports Dash's radical feminist narrative style, challenges the purity of whiteness and the notion that dark skin tones are difficult to film, and historicizes the power relations of color pigment production.