Embedment And Disturbance:An Archaeology Of The "Technicolor"

Technicolor is not only a company,a color cinematography system updated over several generations,synonymous with color cinema(1930s-50s),it was also a complex technical-economic-aesthetic-perceptual system at the pivot of the color revolution that took place in various fields in the first half of the 20 th century.This dissertation attempts to participate in the recent academic "rediscovery" of film color technologies,considering the Technicolor as an "archive" with a complex profile,exploring how it travels through different fields and engages in a continuous exchange of material,information and ideas.The first chapter attempts to trace some of the ideas that the inventors and users of cinematic color systems developed together through the reconciliation of multiple factors,such as characteristics of the apparatus,imagination,cultural and intellectual preconceptions,the conditions of other related systems,and adapted oneself to circumstances.Each section focuses on a representative early film color system,while placing the development of early Technicolor in a historical context.The second chapter examines the practice of the Technicolor System 4(1932-1940)in the fields of short animated films and sponsored films,which were very "peripheral" compared to Hollywood narrative films.But the function of Technicolor,actually,depends on the exchange of information between it and other actors in the same network,as well as other media.This chapter shifts focus away from the Hollywood production system,locating the Technicolor in larger and cross-media cultural circuits.The third chapter deals with the color design strategies of the Technicolor system in Hollywood fiction films,the debates about the superiority of color versus black-and-white,and the compatibility of color with the established Hollywood classical style.At that time,dissent about color centered on its ability to distract the viewer,so this chapter focuses on the "attention-distraction" dynamic relationship that color evokes,analyzing the efforts of the Technicolor color consultant department to incorporate color into the classical Hollywood narrative paradigm.This explanatory framework is rethinked through the case of the global proliferation of the Technicolor in the last section.