Call for Proposals: The Moving Image 15, no. 1—Special Issue: Restoring Color

The editors of The Moving Image seek proposals for a special issue focused on color. We are looking for original contributions from scholars and archivists that explore archival, industrial, and cultural history issues related to color film and chromatic media.

From the production, exhibition, and reception of film in the earliest days to the present era of digital imaging, color has always been a vibrant yet ephemeral aspect of the moving image. And from the beginning, color has challenged those wishing to assess, preserve, restore, and re-create its hues in their original format. In addition to considering material properties, restoring color media often involves retrieving the original understanding of color’s significance as part of the media experience, which evolved throughout the twentieth century and continues to change. It could be considered a decorative add-on in some periods or, in others, an essential component of the image’s reality or of a filmmaker’s stylistic arsenal. These attitudes might be cyclical, but they also are shaped by industrial and artistic expectations and by technological transformations. Indeed, with new digital processes for rendering color being introduced regularly, the modes of producing color in contemporary films—not to mention the use of digitization to rescue and replicate colors of the past—constantly change.

We are interested in articles that address the preservation and restoration challenges implicit in these issues. For example, what can specific cases tell us about the nature of color in the moving image? Articles on the historical reception of color, and what might be called the color imagination, will also be welcome, especially those in which the theme of restoration is central. Articles might focus on, for example, recovering early applied and natural color systems and films; Technicolor dyes and two- and three-color restorations; the colors of experimental cinema; photochemical approaches in comparison to digital grading; digital color management; and the archival issues raised by specific color works from George Méliès to German expressionism to Nicholas Ray to Tacita Dean. Other topics might include discussions of the marketing and distribution of color processes and prints that draw on primary archival sources or studies of the reactions of exhibitors, critics, and audiences to new forms of color in the moving image.

Proposals are welcome for feature articles (double-blind peer reviewed, more scholarly in nature, and typically four thousand to six thousand words in length, with academic citations) and for Forum pieces (less formal, typically five to ten pages in length). Proposals (paragraph-long sketches of proposed topics) should be e-mailed to the guest editor for the issue, Joshua Yumibe (yumibe@msu.edu), by December 2, 2013.

Final submissions will be due by June 2, 2014, and will appear in The Moving Image 15, no. 1, in spring 2015.