Overview

The collection of essays brings together texts from two decades, documenting two of the author's ongoing areas of interest: the poetics of colour in film as well as affective viewer responses. Employing a bottom-up approach as a basis for theoretical exploration, each of the essays concentrates on a particular film or a number of related films to come to terms with a set of issues. These include the differences between black-and-white and color works, the emergence of bold chromatic schemes in the 1950s, experimental aesthetics of color negative stock, idiosyncratic uses of colour, idiosyncratic uses of motor mimicry, genre-specific reactions to the documentary, and empathetic reactions to animals and to architecture in film. A close reading of the colour aesthetics in film, tracing the historical development of film styles in relation to colour.

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9781041177241

Table of Contents

Reviews

An extraordinary collection of essays addressing core issues of how we experience moving pictures. Brinckmann brilliantly discusses what watching films is all about: our cognitive, emotional and sensual engagement with the images on the screen - Prof. dr. Frank Kessler, Utrecht University, I highly recommend this text for undergraduate and graduate courses, and because the translation from German to English is excellent, the writing style is jargon-free and clear.- Angela Dalle Vacche in Millennium Film Journal No. 62 , The strength of this collection lies in the diversity and range of Brinckmann's six case studies on color, from silent film to the avant-garde, melodrama, and musicals [...] Brinckmann is especially alert to color's sensual and perceptual effects in unexpected cinematic places. - Kirsten Moana Thompson in Film Quarterly

Author Information

Christine N. Brinckmannis professor emerita of the Department of Cinema Studies at the University of Zürich. She has published widely on the poetics of film, on documentary and experimental work, on narrative, and on viewer response.

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