Colour Film Project at Bristol

Prof. Sarah Street   has been awarded a major grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a 3 year project entitled The Negotiation of Innovation: Colour Films in Britain 1900-55. The project is a comparative analysis of colour film processes introduced to British filmmaking during the first half of the twentieth century. It aims to provide an economic, cultural and aesthetic history of colour film, based on archival sources, the film trade press, related literature/periodicals and textual analysis. The project team (Sarah Street, Co-Investigator Simon Brown of Kingston University, a post-doctoral researcher, Dr Liz Watkins, and PhD student Vicky Jackson) will investigate how emergent technologies had to make a case for their superiority in a market that was dominated by cheaper, black and white films that were also privileged in aesthetic terms. In the second year of the project the Department will host an international conference on Colour and Film and in 2009-10 the University will run a series of Art Lectures on the theme of Colour which will involve speakers discussing the topic from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Throughout the project the team will conduct research in archives and libraries in the UK, USA and in Italy. They will also interview cinematographers and art directors who worked with colour film, particularly in a key period when Technicolor was challenged by other processes such as Eastmancolor in the 1950s. Hundreds of films will be analysed, ranging from silent films that used techniques such as tinting and toning, and hand stenciling, to films directed by key figures in cinema history that were celebrated for their experiments in colour cinematography, including Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and A Matter of Life and Death. .