Learning on ScreenColour Films in Britain
THE LADYKILLERS (1955), directed in Technicolor by Alexander Mackendrick
The contributions of individuals such as Jack Cardiff, Natalie Kalmus and Ossie Morris are considered in relation to prevailing colour styles and the opportunities for experimentation within British cinema. Colour Films in Britain is beautifully illustrated by stills from many important short and feature films and with detailed textual analyses of celebrated and lesser known films including The Open Road, The Glorious Adventure, Rainbow Dance, This Is Colour, Blithe Spirit, This Happy Breed, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Blanche Fury, Saraband for Dead Lovers, The Tales of Hoffmann, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, The Ladykillers and Moulin Rouge. A new history of British cinema is mapped in which colour played an important role throughout several decades. The book includes a listing of colour films released in Britain 1938-55, and a Technical Appendix by Simon Brown (Kingston University), providing further details of the large number of colour processes referenced in the book, from Lee and Turner to Technicolor, as well as explaining the technical specifications of approaches to colour such as subtractive and additive.
From XIV Olympiad, THE GLORY OF SPORT (1948), this section shot in monopack.
Colour Films in Britain is an outcome from an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project that ran from 2007-2010. Two further books are forthcoming, Colour and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive, co-edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street and Liz Watkins (Routledge, Dec 2012), and British Colour Cinema: Practices and Theories, co-edited by Sarah Street, Liz Watkins and Simon Brown (British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Colour and the Moving Image brings together contributions from a number of scholars who attended an international conference on colour film held in Bristol in 2009. British Colour Cinema contains transcripts of interviews with key British technicians, including Ossie Morris and Chris Challis, as well as with archivists and film restorers. It is supported by a selection of documents relating to the many contexts discussed in the book, from the planning and production of a colour film, through to post-production, and eventual restoration.
Professor Sarah Street
