Film Culture in Transition Color and Empathy

A close reading of the colour aesthetics in film, tracing the historical development of film styles in relation to colour. The collection of essays brings together texts from two decades, documenting two of the author's ongoing areas of interest: the poetics of colour in film as well as affective viewer responses. Employing a bottom-up approach as a basis for theoretical exploration, each of the essays concentrates on a particular film or a number of related films to come to terms with a set of issues. These include the differences between black-and-white and color works, the emergence of bold chromatic schemes in the 1950s, experimental aesthetics of color negative stock, idiosyncratic uses of colour, idiosyncratic uses of motor mimicry, genre-specific reactions to the documentary, and empathetic reactions to animals and to architecture in film. A close reading of the colour aesthetics in film, tracing the historical development of film styles in relation to colour.