Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture, 1950s–1960s - cover image

Copyright

Bregt Lameris

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-170-2
Hardback978-1-80511-171-9
PDF978-1-80511-172-6
HTML978-1-80511-175-7
EPUB978-1-80511-173-3

Language

  • English

Print Length

298 pages (vi+292)

Weight

Paperback283g (10.00oz)
Hardback283g (10.00oz)

THEMA

  • AGA
  • ATF
  • JHMC
  • AGZC

BIC

  • ABA
  • JMA
  • JMR
  • APF
  • AGZ

BISAC

  • PER004030
  • ART015000
  • PSY013000
  • SOC002010
  • SCI034000
  • ART007000

Keywords

  • Colour film
  • Film studies
  • Mid-20th-century culture
  • Cross-modal synesthesia
  • Colour psychology
  • psychedelic culture

    Feeling Colour

    Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture, 1950s–1960s

    FORTHCOMING
    The shift back from quasi monochrome to coloured motion picture during the 1950s and 1960s famously provided moviegoers the dazzling opportunity to more fully engage their senses, all the while opening new modes of affective possibilities for filmmakers. Set against the intersection of media studies, emotion theory, biology, and digital humanities, Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture (1950s-1960s) delves into the role colour played in the oft-fraught relationship between cinema and its audiences. This transnational analysis of an extensive range of midcentury cinematography examines the multilayered effects which extend beyond the silver screen, offering a high-level theoretical elaboration and in-depth historical exploration of both experimental and mainstream movies.

    Lameris takes an interdisciplinary perspective, examining the different ways colour creates—or was believed to create—embodied reactions. From perception theory and 'putting the nerves in motion’, to colour psychology and how to ‘steer’ the spectator, to cross-modal perception (or ‘synaesthesia’), Lameris asks how how colours and feelings in film are entangled in the colour cultures, discourses and beliefs of a particular historical context.

    With its influential cultural scholarly contribution and accessible writing style, this book will delight both students and specialists in film and media studies. In addition, those interested in the history and use of color in advertising, neuroscience, gender studies, and emotion will find the book engaging and useful.

    Endorsements

    Lameris’s Feeling Colour is a remarkable work of media archeology that traces concerns about colour and embodiment through the material fabric of cinema at midcentury. Ranging across mainstream and new wave films to b-movies and erotic works, the way in which Lameris pivots from close analyses of the colours of these films to their theoretical and historical implications is a model within the field.

    Prof. Joshua Yumibe

    Director of Film Studies, Michigan State University

    Contributors

    Bregt Lameris

    (author)
    Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Open University in the Netherlands
    https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3077-7331
    https://www.ou.nl/web/open-universiteit/zoek-medewerker#!user/bl1

    Bregt Lameris works as a senior lecturer in Media Studies at the Open Universiteit (Heerlen), where she develops courses on for example the digital transition and the experience of cultural heritage, stigma in media, clothes and identity, disability studies and culture. Her colour research was embedded at the University of Zurich, where she was a postdoctoral researcher within the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘FilmColors’. Other research interests are stigma, media and mental health, media archaeology, film archiving, film historiography, affect, emotions and subjectivity in audiovisual representation, and disability studies. In 2017 she published her monograph Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography which is available in Open Access through Amsterdam University Press. She was a co-editor of the book The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema (2018), as well as of several special issues of various journals (Journal for Media History, Montage AV, Necsus and Locus.