Chromatic Cinema (review)

Chromatic Cinema provides a much-needed technological history of machines and techniques for producing moving images in color, as well as a cultural history of color films. Surveying coloring methods from frame-by-frame hand painting in the 1890s to today's digital postproduction processes, Richard Misek productively challenges two basic ideas of film history: the often-debated notion that technological development has pushed cinema toward greater degrees of realism, and the common assumption that black-and-white and color are mutually exclusive categories of film aesthetics.

By analyzing the films and industry discourses that came with new techniques for reproducing movement in color, Misek shows that, like all technologies, new forms of film color had to be negotiated. Existing production practices, economic conditions, ideas about the nature of film realism, and assumptions about how audiences interpreted the cinematic image all helped shape color's development. The book's precise descriptions of coloring techniques, analysis of theories of color, and classification of cinematic color types will offer film and media scholars a valuable model for analyzing one of the medium's most evident yet least investigated formal properties. Its recognition of engineers' key role in film's chromatic history should be of interest to historians of technology, who themselves have much to offer to the history of film and media technologies.

The book's most valuable contribution is Misek's taxonomy of technologies and practices for producing cinematic color. Color is not just the opposite of black-and-white. Rather, chromatic cinema has taken form through shifting combinations of what Misek terms film color (pigments applied to celluloid prints), surface color (the color of objects placed before the camera), absent color (black-and-white), optical color (the color of light used to illuminate objects during filming), and digital color (computer-generated color codes manipulated in postproduction). Each of the book's chapters chronicles the history of one type of film color and explains how and why new color techniques emerged and how they remained in dialogue with older color forms.

Along the way, Misek examines topics including: color's role in Hollywood genres, recounting arguments from the 1930s about which genres were best fit for Technicolor; color's place in European art cinema, where directors had greater freedom than in the Hollywood studio system to choose between black-and-white and color; black-and-white's persistence after the widespread transition to color, in places such as India and the Soviet bloc, where color film stock remained largely unavailable into the 1970s, and in Hollywood, where black-and-white became a sign of both documentary realism and fantasy; and the combinations of surface color, optical color, and digital color with which filmmakers create chromatic cinema today.

Misek's producer-centric approach would have benefited from further consideration of audiences' reactions to cinema's shifting chromatic forms. His discussion of Hollywood's genre-driven adoption of color in the 1930s and '40s, for instance, leaves readers to wonder if filmgoers were frustrated by the studios' unwillingness to apply Technicolor beyond musicals, romances, and fantasies, or if they concurred with filmmakers' and critics' insistence that Technicolor was too unrealistic for newsreels, documentaries, or crime films. Also absent is any systematic analysis of animation, a form, Misek acknowledges, that deserves greater attention from scholars of film color.

On the other hand, the book shows the importance of close visual analysis of film images (especially using its sixty-four color plates) and points to the importance of bringing art historical methods to bear on film texts. In addition, Misek's attention to the key role that the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has played in negotiating color's use in Hollywood will be of interest not only to film scholars investigating aesthetic motivations found below the line, behind the scenes, and beyond the set, but also to historians of technology interested in the mutually reinforcing histories of technology and visual culture. As the interplay of artistry and engineering described in Chromatic Cinema suggests, scholars in film...