Watkins, E orcid.org/0000-0003-2093-6327 (2021) The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive. Comparative Cinema, 9 (17). pp. 123-145. ISSN 2604-9821
Abstract
Colorization describes the digitization and retrospective addition of color to photographic and film materials (celluloid nitrate, glass negatives) initially made and circulated in a black-and-white format. Revisiting the controversial 1980s colorization of 24 classic Hollywood studio titles, which incited debate over questions of copyright, authorship and artistic expression, this essay examines the use of colorization to interpret museum collections for new audiences. The aesthetics of colorization have been criticized for prioritizing image content over the history of film technologies, practices and exhibition. An examination of They Shall Not Grow Old (Jackson, 2018) finds a use of digital editing and coloring techniques in the colorization of First World War film footage held in the Imperial War Museum archives that is familiar to the director’s fiction films. Jackson’s film is a commemorative project, yet the “holistic unity” of authorial technique operates across fragments of archive film and photographs to imbricate of fiction and nonfiction, signaling vital questions around the ethics and ideologies of “natural color”, historiography, and the authenticity of materials and spectator experience.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © Comparative Cinema, 2021. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons licence (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International). |
Keywords: | Color, Colorization, Archival images, Photography, First World War, Peter Jackson |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 17 Nov 2021 14:46 |
Last Modified: | 05 Jan 2022 17:31 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Center for Aesthetic Research on Audiovisual Media (CINEMA) |
Identification Number: | 10.31009/cc.2021.v9.i17.07 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:180313 |
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