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This module explores the global history of colour cinema from the 1890s to the present. Encompassing popular, independent, and experimental film, the module considers how technological, historical, social, and political forces have shaped colour film aesthetics and technologies. Drawing upon approaches to colour from art history, philosophy, and anthropology, the module will situate colour film within broader debates about colour’s role in visual culture. We will place cinema in dialogue with a range of chromatic media, including painting, photography, and television, while remaining attentive to the specific formal and conceptual problems that attend the study of colour in film. Questions of national colour styles, the materiality of film colour, and the ideological function of colour during political and imperial crises, are key areas of investigation here. The module encompasses films from Kenya, Senegal, China, India, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and North America.

The module is divided into two parts. The first traces a chronological history of major technologies, from the earliest modes of hand-applied colour, to recent digital techniques. In this part of the module, we will be particularly attentive to questions of production. We will consider how colour informed filmmaking practice - particularly below-the-line labour, how the possibilities of colour opened up new genres, and how new technologies forged transnational networks through the exchange of equipment, materials, and expertise. Throughout part one students will explore the methodological issues that make studying colour so challenging: the instability of the archive, the historical contingency of exhibition practices, and the mutability of colour nomenclature.

Part two attends to broader thematic, conceptual, and theoretical approaches to colour, with each class focused on a single hue: black (to consider the relationship between colour and race), pink (to explore colour and femininity), blue (to examine colour’s queer histories), and red (to understand the links between colour’s political and sensual properties). Combining attentive visual analysis with critical literature, we will interrogate the ways colour has informed issues of race, gender, and sexuality in global cinema. In part two we will focus more insistently on questions of reception and interpretation, thinking more profoundly about colour’s subjectivity and sensuality.