Turning to Color

This course investigates the potential of color through the lens of cinema. Richard Misek notes that, while we cannot see colors without light, as Aristotle already pointed out, with photographic recording devices it became possible to record light without color. The earliest cinematic images were indeed displayed in black-and-white but, already in a matter of a few years, colors began to animate the film experience of international audiences. Since then, in the context of cinema and the visual arts, color and black-and-white did not represent mutually exclusive modalities, but rather the two poles of a continuous chromatic spectrum. In order to emphasize this theoretical reorientation, the course focuses, in particular, on instances of transition that highlight the tensive relationship between black-and-white and color.

We begin with a discussion of theories of color in the visual arts and film, before moving to the reconstruction of the salient moments of historical, aesthetic, and technological change concerning the use of color in cinema. Throughout the course, we discuss themes such as the relationship between the physical properties of light and the phenomenological experience of colors, the aesthetic relationship between line and color, the question of realism and artifice, and the larger social, cultural, and technological contexts shaping our understanding of colors in moving-image works.

The course program includes the analysis of scholarly close readings of specific films, in order to provide students with effective models for their own writing about the use of color in audiovisual works. Finally, this course also incorporates a practical assignment that will require students to work in groups on the realization of an audiovisual project.