Call for Papers: deadline for submission of abstracts: 15th January 2018.

Colour in Context Symposium, University of Bristol. Friday 23rd March 2018.

Key note speaker: Professor Lynda Nead, Birkbeck.

Call for Papers: Colour – its specific hues, meanings and perception – are a contentious issue in the study of film.  From the history of its technologies and the production of a ‘natural colour’ image to its association with all that is artificial and unreal, the interpretation of colour has been closely linked to its cultural, social and historical contexts. Colour in Context is a one-day interdisciplinary symposium and offers a space in which to discuss the diverse ways in which filmmakers and artists have used colour (and the strategy of its absence) as a technique of cinematic expression as well as those who have made a subversive use of colour that is intended to disrupt cinematic forms of representation in a range of cultural, social or historical contexts.

We welcome papers on the specificities of colour and its contradictions in a range of cultural, social or historical contexts. Topics for consideration include, but are not limited to:

  • Colour in the context of a specific theory or work of a theorist/ philosopher.
  • Colour and its contradictions, a context in which colour deviates from the expected.
  • Cultural and historical contexts of colour in cinema.
  • The use of colour/ lighting in exhibition and gallery spaces.
  • Colour technologies and design: Gasparcolor, Dufaycolour, classic Technicolor to digital media.
  • Questions of colour in film archives and their conservation projects.
  • Colour and genre: science fiction, non-fiction, melodrama, travel films, musicals and /or horror.
  • Colour context and perception.
  • Colour and textual analysis: in a genre and in the context of this text.

To submit an abstract, please send the following details – name, affiliation, abstract (200 words) and short biographical notes – to Dr Liz Watkins e.i.watkins@leeds.ac.uk no later than the deadline: 15th January 2018.

The Colour in Context symposium is funded by the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies. The symposium is organized by the Special Interest Group on Colour and Film. Symposium convenors: Liz Watkins and Sarah Street.

Screening:  The Colour in Context Symposium is organised in conjunction with a screening and workshop event about Some People (Clive Donner, 1962) at the Watershed, Bristol 24th March 2018. The screening is organized by the AHRC-funded project The Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema, 1955-85, which is based at the Universities of Bristol and East Anglia.

Dr Elizabeth Watkins, University of Leeds.
Contact: e.i.watkins@leeds.ac.uk
Recent publications:
Gesture and Film: Signalling New Critical  Perspectives (Routledge 2017).
‘Don’t Look Now: Transience and Text’, Screen (2015), vol.56, no.4: 436-449.
Color and the Moving Image (Routledge 2013).
Co-convenor: BAFTSS Special Interest Group on Colour and Film https://colourandfilm.wordpress.com