Colour, Spectacle, Entertainment and Empire

Anidroc Reflections on a talk by Prof. Jeff Geiger entitled ‘𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐯𝐞𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞 𝐀𝐫𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐀𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐮𝐫 𝐂𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐮𝐫’ delivered at the University of Malta at the Faculty of Arts Library 30th September 2022

The people of the 1930's were fed on Black and White colour movies. First colour films were expensive and for the people of the time it was a novelty, a fiction and a fantasy. The first colour movies were all about fictional epics which Tom Gunning coined as the Cinema of Attraction. It is hard to see how Black and White can be perceived as being more realistic than colour, but this was indeed the challenge that Kodachrome had to overcome with its audience. It marketed its product to amateur filmmakers claiming that Kodachrome reflected real life, with natural colours rather than the brilliant 'unreal' colours that its competitors were producing at the time. The link between marketing, tourism and capturing the exotic, unreachable sights in colour is duly explained by Movies on Home Ground : Explorations in Amateur Cinema.  

Amateur film was made for a home audience, for family and friends, for personal gain. It placed the spectator in the position of the camera as an external viewer of the spectacle. 

Film with a capital 'F' is aimed to involve its viewer, to ask questions and immerse its audience into the screen as if it were. 

Amateur Film rules of the time (e.g. Establishing Shot to closer, Always pan from Left to Right) were compared to an amateur film where the pan was of an opposite nature and then tracked back in the same shot as the camera instinctively followed a little girl running into the frame rather than focus on the scenery.  This mistake or breaking of the convention seems to take the viewer out of his or her comfort zone. The magical spectacle is broken and instead we are pulled in to focus and interact with the girl. 

Another comment made by Profs Geiger intrigued me deeply. He made an analogy to Nietzsche's typewriter; that is that Nietzsche found that the typewriter was changing his thought process. In similar fashion Kodachrome was changing the reality of the film, by creating a new 'Realism.' This links colour to spectacle to entertainment and makes it crucial for new empire builders to embrace it. America showed off its new additions to its Empire in colour film. Business marketed World Cruises for Touristic purposes in colour. 

These are the questions that inspired me: 

1. These studies are aimed at distinguishing between 1930 Amateur Film and the Hollywood, professional films of the time. How many studies are aimed at distinguishing between and exploring the differences between today's iPhone or Android amateur, home made films to professional cinematic films? 
2. These travelogues completely embody the concept of visual exploration and yet I also feel that they embody an exploration of vision, of absence, of sound and silence. They did so for the audiences of the day in that they could not physically hear the sounds of the tribes, the waves and the exotic animals featured. Today's viewer cannot physically visit these bygone places or talk to these people from the 1930s.  The exploration of Absence and Silence seems to grow with time. 

Memory is always a ruin, scattered, buried, invisible . . . . "Ruins, on the other hand, can be gotten into; they do not exclude, even though they may have been excluded, condemned and marginalized."

Without memories, the future is impossible, not because the past can predict what will happen, but because it allows us see the movements and paths that we have unwittingly taken. It is memory that allows our stories to be recorded, to be written. Writing is itself a form of memory, as are visual records. From stone carvings to videodisks, people have always attempted to mark their passing, the movements of which they were a part. Yet, memory is itself always moving, changing one thing into another.—Teshome Gabriel

Must Reads on the Subject: Kodachrome, History, Time Mag, Kodachrome vs Ektachrome


Jeff Geiger is Professor of Film at the University of Essex, where he was the first director of Film Studies and established the Centre for Film and Screen Media. His work encourages thinking across film practice and theory, and considers how the ‘cinematic’ echoes across various media. Books include Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination, American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation, and the forthcoming Kodachrome Travels, and he has co-edited Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, and Cinematicity in Media History. His work has appeared in New Formations, Studies in Documentary Film, Third Text, African American Review, Film International, Cinema Journal, PMLA, and in numerous collections. He was recipient of a British Academy and Leverhulme Trust fellowship for 2021-22.