This work in many ways dates back to the symposium “The Sense of Colour” organized by Stephen Barber and Carrie Tarr through Kingston University, UK, in 2005. Struck then by the color bug, we have been close friends and collaborators ever since. We each published our initial monographs on color and film in 2012—Joshua’s Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism and Sarah’s Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900–1955—yet even as these came out, we were already questioning what else we could say about color in silent cinema. It was clear to us at the outset of what has become this book that much more needed to be examined about the 1920s and the transnational and intermedial flows of color film and media. It was also clear that this should also be a collaborative project, given the necessary scope of such an undertaking. Thankfully, we have had generous support in this, from the Leverhulme Trust, UK, through a Research Project Grant that enabled us to conduct the project “Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and its Intermedial Contexts.” This also allowed us to collaborate with two exceptional postdoctoral researchers, Victoria Jackson and Bregt Lameris, who worked indefatigably with us in researching the many diverse sources required for this study in archives and libraries in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As part of this work, we co-organized a conference in 2015 with the EYE Filmmuseum to celebrate twenty years since the groundbreaking Amsterdam Workshop Colours in Silent Film, and we have been delighted to co-edit as a team The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema (2018) along with our remarkable colleagues Giovanna Fossati and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, as a record of the conference and the many advances that have taken place in color cinema research since 1995. We were also fortunate to cocurate a series on color film with James Layton and David Pierce for Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Pordenone, in 2014, another event that brought us into contact with many scholars, archivists, and artists working with silent color film.
We have enjoyed exchanges with numerous other scholars, archivists, and dear friends. This includes foremost our project’s brilliant advisory board—Ian Christie, Frank Gray, Luke McKernan, and Lynda Nead—who offered excellent advice as our research progressed. We have also benefited immensely from exchanging ideas and materials with numerous friends and colleagues, including Richard Abel, Giaime Alonge, Thomas Beard, David Bering-Porter, Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Kevin Brownlow, Robert Burgoyne, Paolo Cherchi Usai, Michael Cowan, Scott Curtis, Bryony Dixon, Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, François Ede, Ken Eisenstein, Sonia Genaitay, Giovanna Fossati, Nicholas Gaskill, Elena Gipponi, Lyn Goeringer, Tom Gunning, Ed Halter, Kenneth Harrow, Jan-Christopher Horak, Yelena Kalinsky, Sarah Keller, Anthony L’Abbate, Nicolas Le Guern, Esther Leslie, Jodie Mack, Kristin Mahoney, Nick Marshall, Luci Marzola, Maria Federica Mazzocchi, Ellen McCallum, Mihaela Mihailova, Alexandra Navratil, Patrick O’Donnell, Federico Pierotti, Murray Pomerance, Tom Rice, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, Jonathon Rosen, Ulrich Ruedel, Céline Ruivo, Matthew Solomon, Jack Theakston, Elizabeth Watkins, Kieron Webb, Anke Wilkening, Tami Williams, Lily Woodruff, Jeffrey Wray, Josh Wucher, Paul Young, and Gregory Zinman.
We are extremely grateful to Barbara Flueckiger, her collaborators, and the Timeline of Historical Film Colors for generous criticism and assistance with a number of frame enlargements. We are also indebted to Serge Bromberg, Guy Edmunds, Cindy Keefer, Sophia Lorent, Laurent Mannoni, Stéphanie Salmon, and George Willeman, as well as the staff of the numerous archives listed in our credits, for further assistance with illustrations and research queries.
We are very grateful to Scott Higgins, James Layton, Kirsten Moana Thompson, and other anonymous readers for excellent feedback while reviewing the manuscript with such care. We also benefited immensely from the detailed suggestions from our wondrous friends Kaveh Askari and Justus Nieland, who read numerous sections of the manuscript. Lastly, we thank our editors, John Belton and Philip Leventhal, whose support and enthusiasm for the project have been a tremendous help and encouragement throughout the process. Their careful shepherding of the manuscript from start to finish has been invaluable, as has their understanding of the project’s aims and contexts.
We are indebted to the various institutions that invited us to present papers on aspects of our research, including the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (Boston, 2012, and Seattle, 2014). Joshua would like to thank the Screen Studies Conference, Light Industry, the Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, the Orphans Film Symposium, Kalamazoo College, IULM University of Milan, and the Universities of Florence, Michigan, and Zurich. Sarah would like to thank the Barber Institute for Fine Arts, University of Birmingham; the Institute for Historical Research, University of London; King’s College, London; and the Universities of Leeds, Liverpool, Oxford, Reading, and Zurich.
We are grateful to our various colleagues at Michigan State University, the University of Bristol, and the University of St. Andrews, as well as to the profound support these institutions have offered.
Finally (and foremost), Joshua would like to thank Juliet for enabling the final stages of this book to happen in the magical city of Torino, where we both were hard at work on our manuscripts in the best of locales, and for her patience, love, and brilliance; and Livia, whose laughter and verve are infectious. Sarah would like to thank Sue for her enthusiastic support throughout this project; as always, she has shared with me the pleasure of watching so many wonderful silent films at home and in Pordenone.
For our introduction and chapter 5, we have adapted portions of Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, “The Temporalities of Intermediality: Colour in Cinema and the Arts of the 1920s,” Early Popular Visual Culture 11, no. 2 (2013): 140–157. This article formed our early thinking on color and intermediality and helped to shape our collaborative approach to the writing of this book. In chapter 1, we have adapted portions from Joshua Yumibe, “Industrial Research Into Color at Pathé During the 1910s and 1920s,” in Recherches et innovations dans l’industrie du cinéma, les cahiers des ingénieurs Pathé: 1906–1929, ed. Jacques Malthête and Stéphanie Salmon (Paris: Fondation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé, 2017), 197–208; and in chapter 4, we adapted portions from Joshua Yumibe, “Colour Magic: Illusion and Abstraction in Silent and Experimental Cinemas,” MIRAJ: Moving Image Review & Art Journal 2, no. 2 (October 1, 2013): 228–237.