(1) T, Gunning, "Colorful Metaphors: the Attraction of Color in Early Silent Cinema", in this issue, pp. 249- 255.
(2) See for example J. Allen, "The Film Viewer as Con- sumer," Quarterly Review of Film Studies, n.4 (Fall 1980); S. Culver, "What Manikins Want: The Wonderful World of Oz and the Art of Decorating Dry Goods Windows," Representations, n. 21 (1988); J. Gaines, "The Queen Christina Tie-Ups: Convergence of Show Windows and Screen," Quarterly Review of Film and Video, n. 11 (Winter 1989); M. Hansen, Adventures of Goldilocks: Spectatorship, Consumerism and Public Life," camera obscura, n. 22 january 1990); K. Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women in Turn-of-the- Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); J. Staiger, "Announcing Wares, Winning Patrons, Voicing Ideals: Thinking about History and Theory of Film Advertising," Cinema Journal, n. 3 (Spring 1990); R. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); J. Wolff, "The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity," Theory, Culture and Society, n. 2 (1985).
(3) R. Abel, "Pathé's Heavenly Billboards," in this issue, pp. 256-267.
(4) W. Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Vol. I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982), p. 235.
(5) Quoted in Benjamin, p. 253-4.
(6) Kroloff quoted in Benjamin, p. 240.
(7) Benjamin, pp. 234-235.
(8) Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Vol. II, p. 661.
(9) Etimology of the word comfort: "Il signifiat autrefois en anglais, consolation (comforter est 1'épithète de 1'Esprit-Saint, consolateur)." Quoted in Benjamin, Vol. I, p. 297.
(10) "The XIX century was quite singular in its morbid attachment to the house. The house was seen as a con- tainer for man and in it he crammed everything belonging to him. This compactness brings to mind a compass case in which the instrument is snugly set with all its accessories in deep grooves of violet velvet. It is almost impossible to find anything for which the XIXth century did not invent a container." Benjamin, Vol. I, p. 292. In the house-shell, nineteenth century sensibility slumps into boredom: "Boredom is a hot grey cloth, lined with really bright colours" (p. 161). But these colours are a sort of comforting lining, a sort of "peluche for the eye" ("Peluche is the material of the Louis Philippe period," p. 181). This peluche quality of colour is what Brusatin refers to when he detects in nineteenth century taste forcolour a sort of "resistance" towards new techniques of industrial colour production: "Besides the industrial evening out of the hue, the opposite attitude comes about as a refusal of all mechanical colours." This opposite attitude is a taste for an 'aesthetic colour' fixed in memory, an educated sensibility which causes all that interest in lost colours, softened shades worn out by use and looks, the varnishes of time." M. Brusatin, Storia dei colori (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), pp. 7-8. This is precisely the "chromatic harmony" preferred by stencil-color, as for example is seen in this description of the Handschiegl process (see note 23): "This process does not confer excessively radiant colors on the film, but softens and tones down the coloring of the scenes, rendering a sort of pastel effect.... [These colors] are like the tints and hues of Du Lac's famous illustrations. They match and blend but are not too obvious." "Lasky Chiefs Working on Color Process," Moving Picture World (9 February 1918), p. 832.
(11) For childish characteristics of early cinema ("infantilisme au sens clinique") see N. Burch, La Lucarne de I'infinie (Paris: Nathan, 1991), pp. 64, 184-185.
(12) For toys in the cinema of Méliès, the basic reference is Antonio Costa's essay, La morale del giocattolo (Bologna: Clueb, 1989), "With cinema a device enters on the boulevards which allows 'living toys' to be shown and move and live on the screen. Living toys such as the 'petit souillon' with which the child in Baudelaire's Moral de joujou (1853) was playing and for which the parents "par economie, avait tiré le joujou de la vie meme." Méliès is definitely one of the first to grasp the nature toy-like nature of moving images,
(13) The image of the aquarium as metaphor of the window comes up in the comment of one of Gerstacker's underwater visions which Benjamin describes as "a perfect sublimation of the passages with their knick-knacks which are densely arrayed in the windows," a description which could equally well be applied to Méliès' underwater phantasmagoric world, Benjamin uses the aquarium metaphor to bring out the "fairy-tale" element of the modern market. This metaphor is probably derived from La Paysan de Paris [1926] by Louis Aragon (Paris: Gallimard, 1953) which is one of the main sources of inspiration for the study on the passages. Pre-empting Benjamin, Aragon defines the passages as "ces aquariums humains déjà morts à leur vie primitive, et qui méritent pourtant d'étre regardés comme les recéleurs de plusieurs mythes modernes" (p. 21). Lighted up by a "lueur glauque, en quelque manière abyssale," the objects in the windows appear to emanate "la phosphorescence des poissons." In a walking-stick shop in the Passage de 1'Opéra (pp. 30-31), Aragon's eye is caught by a strange image, "une forme nageuse... ce charmante spectre nue jusqu'à la ceinture"; a mermaid!
(14) Brusatin.
(15) J. Epstein, "Bonjour Cinéma" [1921], in Ecrits sur le cinéma (Paris: Seghers, 1974), p. 95.
(16) Henry, "Colored Motion Pictures," Moving Picture World, Vol. VIII, n. 13 (1 April 1911), p. 721.
(17) Ibid.
(18) Benjamin, Vol. I, p. 286.
(19) Ibid., p. 288.
(20) Ibid., p. 286.
(21) Ibid., p. 292.
(22) Henry, p. 721.
(23) "A somewhat related process of applying color to black and white films was invented by Max Handschiegl, a St. Lowis engraver, and Alvin Wycoff of the Famous Players-Lasky Studio Laboratory, under the guidance of Cecil B. DeMille. This system... incorporates the application of multicolor litographing techniques to motion pictures." R. Nowotny, The Way of All Flesh Tones (New York & London 1983). This text contains the complete list of the films coloured using the Handschiegl system, which represents an ambitious even if somewhat late American reply to the Pathé stencil-coloured films. It is ambitious in that it took place despite the emergence of the feature film, which had rather forced Pathé to give up its famous colours for ever.
(24) DeMille alludes here to the process of "cinemato- graphy in natural colours" developed by Albert G. Smith as early as 1908 and put on the market by Charles Urban under the name of Kinemacolor.
(25) C.B. DeMille, quoted in "Lasky Chiefs Working on Color Process," p. 832.
(26) C. Kattenbelt, "Color and Black and White in Early Film Theory", in this issue, pp. 324-330.
(27) I. Degenhardt, "Presence and Absence of Colour in Films", in this issue. pp. 273-281.
(28) The practice of painting sets for photographic needs had been widespread since the early years of cinema (Méliès himself, for example, resorted to such a convention). It depended on the fact that at that time orthochromatic film was used which was sensitive to blue and violet but almost completely insensitive to yellow and red, (The Eastman Kodak panchromatic film was put on the market only from 1926 onwards). However, obviously the con- trol reached by Caligari in the photographic quality of the orthochromatic films cannot be compared to Méliès' early attempts. The extraordinary photographic consciousness which marks the whole Expressionist movement is a clear sign of his peculiar penchant for black and white. In Caligari too, the control of black and white photographic qual- ity is a preliminary condition of the success of the colour effects. This research into photographic practice which is of late necessarily a research into black and white, apart from the numerous discoveries of coloured copies, still supports the historiographic hypothesis in which expressionism is seen as an important field of exploration for the aesthetics of black and white.
(29) G. Fihman, "De la 'Musique chromatique' et des 'Rythmes colores' au mouvement des couleurs," in this issue, pp. 319-323.
(30) L. Gandini, "Noir in colour," in this issue, pp. 302-306.
(31) Brusatin, pp. 115-116.
(32) Ibid., p. 115.
(33) Ibid., p. 5.
(34) The "aesthetics of the shining" which prevails in the twentienth century appears as the exact reversal of nineteenth century "auratic colour." Whereas the latter conveys an idea of antiquity (the idea of a colour on which time has left its traces, cf. note 10), the varnishes, chrome plating and metallic hues of the twentieth cen- tury exhibit their quality of "eternal colour." "This is everywhere evident in the glittering and glassy quality of varnishes and enamels which confer on the colour the roaring effect of the 'brand-new' object just out of the factory. With the use and appearance of shining metal... one is seeing the falsification of the concept of durability.... And this has not to do with just real metals, but with a general use of the surface of shining metal as 'colour' which takes on a smooth aspect similar to glass." Brusatin, p. 115.
(35) H. Salmi, "Color, Spectacle and History in Epic Film," in this issue, pp. 297-301.
(36) L.A. Jones, "Tinted Films for Sound Positives", Transactions of the Society of Motion Pictures Engineers (New York, 1929), pp. 1-24. The author is a Kodak laboratory technician. This article deals amongst other items with a technical solution to the problem the sound- track poses for the tinting. This problem is often put down to the abandoning of colouring methods in connection with the coming of the sound. Jones' article shows how this thesis is marked by technical reductionism which is always dangerous. In point of fact the sound- track did pose a problem but one for which there was a solution. The passage to black and white indicates a pass- age of an aesthetic rather than technical nature, the emergence of a new "sensibility in grey." Of the same opinion is Stephen Neale who relates the affirmation of pure black and white to the development of a new conception of realism associated to the coming of the sound.
(37) Ibid., p. 22.
(38) Ibid., p. 21.
(39) Ibid., p. 20.
(40) Ibid., p. 21, 20 and 22.
(41) The idea of thymism is one of the basic theories of Greimas' semiotics. The expression derives from the French thymic, "humour, basic affective disposition" (Petit Robert). The "thymic category" (opposition euphoria/disphoria) "serves to articulate the semanticism which is directly bound to the perception human beings have of their own bodies... and plays a fundamental role in the transformation of semantic microuniverses into axiologies: by connoting as euphoric a deixis of the se- miotic square and the opposite one as disphoric, it pro- duces a positive and/or negative valorisation of the va- rious terms of which the elementary structure of meaning is made up." A.J. Greimas, J. Courtés, Semiotique. Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (Paris: Hachette, 1979), entry "Thymique".
(42) W. Uricchio, Color and Dramatic Articulation in the Lonedale Operator, pp. 268-272.
(43) Jones, p. 23.
(44) It is curious to note that it is Jones (p. 5) who maintains that "without doubt the use of substances which confer different and pleasing colors to the image can... break the monotomy of looking at length at a film in black and white and soften the sharp contrasts which might otherwise cause unpleasant impressions."
(45) G. Fihman, "De la 'Musique chromatique' et des 'Rythmes colores' au mouvement des colours," in this issue, pp. 319-323.
(46) G. Roque, "La couleur: simultanée et successive," in this issue, pp. 307-318.
(47) L. Moussinac, Naissance du cinéma (Paris: Povolozky et Cie, pp. 65-66.
(48) G. Simmel, Rembrant (Milan: SE, 1991) p. 74.
(49) J. Aumont, "Couleurs d'homme: la chair le cosmétique, 1'image," pp. 282-290.
(50) L. Fievet, "Vertiges chromatiques," in this issue, pp. 291-296.
(51) B. Mayer, "Eisenstein; The Sound of the Image, the Colour of Black and White," in this issue, pp. 331-337.