From the margins to the mainstream? The Eastmancolor Revolution and challenging the realist canon in British Cinema

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Street, Sarah, Johnston, Keith ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1989-8549, Frith, Paul ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5608-5088 and Rickards, Carolyn (2019) From the margins to the mainstream? The Eastmancolor Revolution and challenging the realist canon in British Cinema. Cinema & Cie, 32. ISSN 2036-461X

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Official URL: https://www.cinemaetcie.net/issue32/

Abstract

This article focuses on Eastmancolor’s introduction in the British film industry from 1954 to the complete adoption of colour by the end of the 1960s. We discuss how aesthetic experiments with colour offer a compelling parallel history to debates concerning British film genres, films and filmmakers. This approach allows us to see British film history through a different lens, to move beyond the constraints of the monochromatic realist canon and explore familiar and unfamiliar films in the ‘fresh light’ of colour. We select key film genres including the adoption of colour within the social realist film, considering whether black-and-white conventions were disrupted by the addition of colour. The section on Hammer horror films demonstrates how colour popularised a largely dormant British genre, while our consideration of the popular Carry On… comedies looks at colour’s centrality to a new narrative approach for that series. Finally, we consider the historical biopic, focusing on Isadora (1969) in relation to how colour defined thematic and narrative concerns with psychology, temporality and symbolism. We conclude that these years of experimentation constitute an essential transition period in which filmmakers were engaged in a complex negotiation with intermedial chromatic trends.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	british cinema,realism,film,canon,genre,horror,comedy,social realism
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies (former - to 2024)
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > Film, Television and Media Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Research Groups > British Cinema & Television
Related URLs:	https://www.cinemaetcie.net/issue32/
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	14 Feb 2019 10:30
Last Modified:	25 Sep 2024 13:55
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/69926
DOI:

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