Global Film Color

The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury

Edited by Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe

Rutgers University Press

Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury explores color filmmaking in a variety of countries and regions including India, China, Japan, and Russia, and across Europe and Africa. Most previous accounts of color film have concentrated on early 20th century color processes and Technicolor. Far less is known about the introduction and application of color technologies in the period from the mid-1940s to the 1980s, when photochemical, “monopack” color stocks came to dominate global film markets. As Eastmancolor, Agfacolor, Fujicolor and other film stocks became broadly available and affordable, national film industries increasingly converted to color, transforming the look and feel of global cinema. Covering a broad range of perspectives, the chapters explore themes such as transnational flows, knowledge exchange and transfer, the cyclical and asymmetrical circulation of technology in a global context, as well as the accompanying transformation of color film aesthetics in the postwar decades.

'Global Film Color brings together a truly international group of contributors working with sources in multiple languages to offer readers a vivid spectrum of fascinating insights about uses of color in world cinema.' Matthew Solomon, author of Méliès Boots

An important work that opens up new territory in global color, with particular strengths in Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian, and Indian film and media. New archival materials, case studies, and distribution and exhibition histories offer an exciting new direction to color studies.'
Kirsten Moana Thompson, chair of the Film and Media Department at Seattle University.

SARAH STREET is a professor of film and Foundation Chair of Drama at the University of Bristol in the UK. She has written and co-edited several books, including Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900-1955 and Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s, co-authored with Joshua Yumibe.

JOSHUA YUMIBE is a professor of film studies and English at Michigan State University. He has written, edited, and co-edited several books, including Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, w co-authored with Giovanna Fossati, Tom Gunning, and Jonathon Rosen.

Introduction SARAH STREET AND JOSHUA YUMIBE

Mapping the Laboratory: Technicolor across Asia and Europe: KIRSTY SINCLAIR DOOTSON
“Keeping Your Enemies Closer”: Strategies of Knowledge Transfer at the East German Filmfabrik Wolfen: JOSEPHINE DIECKE
“We’re Not in Sweden Anymore”: Technicolor’s Brief Venture in Swedish Cinema: KAMALIKA SANYAL
“Risk versus Conformity”: Soviet Color Film, 1956–1982: PHILIP CAVENDISH
Eastman Color in 1960s India: RANJANI MA ZUMDAR
Coloring the Coastline: Italian Beachside Comedies and the Color Film Transition: ELENA GIPPONI
Technological and Athletic Splendor: The Formation of Color in the Socialist Sports Film in China: LINDA C. ZHANG
The Chinese Film Collection at the University of South Carolina: HEATHER HECKMAN, LAURA MAJOR, AND LYDIA PAPPAS
The Lights That Raised Up a Storm: Neon and the Nikkatsu Action Color Film, 1957–1963: WILLIAM CARROLL
Color as a Foreign Accent: Brazilian Films and Film Laboratories in the 1950s: RAFAEL DE LUNA FREIRE
British Film Criticism and Global Color: SARAH STREET
All about Landscape: The Shift to Color in Australian Film at Midcentury: KATHRYN MILLARD AND STEFAN SOLOMON
Moving Monochromatics: Paul Sharits and Color Field Aesthetics in a Global Context: GREGORY ZINMAN
On Vivid Colors and Afrotropes in African and Diasporic Cinemas: JOSHUA YUMIBE

Acknowledgments
Notes on Contributors

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