Film History, Volume 21, pp. 164–176, 2009. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America ‘Harmonious sensations of sound by means of colors’: vernacular colour abstractions in silent cinema Harmonious sensations of sou nd by means of colors Joshua Yumibe Why should I prefer the colored picture? Yan- essay, I want to use this modernist tradition of colour kee-like I answer ‘Why should you?’ Why do and abstraction as a context for discussing more the poor of a great city spend their small sav- popular or ‘vernacular’ experiments with synaesthe- ings in occasional efforts to get away from the sia in silent cinema. This discussion will focus spe- dull gray monotony of their lives to where they cifically on the work of two technicians: Charles can obtain a glimpse of radiant sea or vari- Francis Jenkins, who designed an early film projector egated woodland? The beauty of nature lays in the 1890s and was one of the first exhibitors of hold of our senses as does the charm of good colour films, and Loyd Jones, who developed a music without our being aware of an effort of number ofcolour technologiesatthe Kodak Research attention; we lose consciousness of ourselves Laboratories. Through this history I will show that a and our bitter thoughts when we are pos- ‘synaesthetic’ approach to colour was not only crucial sessed by the external will; the love of colour- for experimental modes of filmmaking but was also audition seems to be universal. If I am central to how colour in the cinema was thought about mistaken set me down as an impressionist. in general since the very emergence of the medium. – Louis Reeves Harrison (1912)1 Before discussing Jenkins and Jones, it will be useful to first outline a brief history of colour and abstraction Abstract painting is not so much an anti-real- in silent cinema in order to situate their experiments. istic movement as a realistic revelation of the Colour was present in the cinema throughout prevailing abstractness. its emergence, both in the intermedial context of – Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (1960)2 lantern slides and lithographed posters that accom- n various strands of abstract cinemacolour has panied the earliest exhibitions and also through often been used ‘synaesthetically’ to invoke an various applied-colouring techniques that were used Ianalogy with music. This derives from a tradition dating to antiquity in which colour is thought to have the potential to provoke one physiologically to Joshua Yumibe is an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Oakland University. He has hear music, even in silence. Such a provocation to published essays on Paul Fejos’s Lonesome, colour ‘colour-audition’ may be suspect, at least as a uni- theory and design in silent cinema, and the Davide versal response to colour, but, nonetheless, it has Turconi and Josef Joye film collections. He is currently historically been a key metaphor in modernist film preparing a manuscript for Rutgers University Press on silent cinema colour aesthetics titled ‘Moving Color: (and more generally art) for explaining the abstract On the History of Color in Mass Culture, Modernism, uses and sensual-emotional influences of colour vis- and Silent Cinema’. à-vis the non-representational nature of music. In this Correspondence to [email protected] FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 164 ‘Harmonious sensations of sound by means of colors’ FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) 165 on films from at least 1895 on. Unfortunately, many instance, makes a version of this argument in ‘The silent films now only survive in black-and-white cop- Myth of Total Cinema’, categorizing natural colour ies, but originally most were manually coloured in (along with sound) as one of the elements that en- part or in whole through techniques such as hand ables the cinema to bring about a more complete colouring, stenciling, tinting, and toning. In hand-col- ‘recreation of the world in its own image’; applied oured prints, elements of each coloured frame were colouring, by contrast, fakes reality even as it shows individually treated by hand, usually by women and a desire for it.4 Rudolf Arnheim also makes a similar, young girls working slowly with tiny brushes and functional analysis of colour’s relation to realism in magnifying glasses [Plate 1]. The work was repeti- his 1933 chapter on ‘The Complete Film’, though for tive, as every release print would have to be individu- different aesthetic reasons than Bazin.5 Colour, for ally hand coloured, frame by frame. Stenciled prints Arnheim, functions to bring about a more total imita- were similar to hand-coloured ones in that selected tion of nature on film; however, this degrades the elements of each treated frame would be coloured. medium, for with Arnheim the cinema’s aesthetic However, the stencil process used to achieve this strength lies not in technological reproduction but in was quite different and eventually much more pre- its modernist ability to produce for the viewer an cise. Each colour on a print (typically numbering experience formally different from reality. between three and seven for a segment) would have Such emphases on colour’s realistic function its own stencil strip, cut in registration for the se- are too limiting to account fully for colour’s role in the quence of frames. Ink was then sponged through the cinema. If one examines the historical record more stencil cuts onto a print, one stencil at a time, pro- closely, interest in the realism of colour cinema was ducing in some instances an extremely verisimilar secondary and subsumed to broader concerns effect and in others a dazzling, spectacular quality. about its sensual and affective nature. To understand Though laborious to cut, once produced, stencils the contours of this broader aesthetic horizon, it is could be reused on multiple prints, thus saving time necessary to explore cinema’s relation to concurrent and labor on large print runs. In contrast to hand media practices and theories of colour perception in colouring and stenciling, tinting and toning were rela- the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifi- tively quicker processes. With tinting, a length of a cally with regard to colour perception in the cinema, print (typically a scene or a shot) was dyed a specific a central issue is the way in which historical under- colour, whereas with toning, the silver in the emulsion standings of this topic interrelate with the nineteenth- (again, either of a scene or a shot) was chemically century theorization of colour’s influence upon the changed into a coloured compound or was bleached observer. In the latter half of the century, much of the and then coloured by a dye that would only adhere interest in colour perception focused on the notion of to the bleached silver [Plate 2]. Tinting was often synaesthesia: the mixing not only of the individual used with other colour processes to produce a wide senses (which is a documented physiological condi- variety of effects: tinting with hand-colouring, tinting tion among a small percentage of people) but also with toning, tinting with stenciling3 [Plate 3]. more broadly, and perhaps metaphorically, of the What fascinates me about early colour cinema, nervous, emotional, and spiritual impulses suppos- however, is not only this technical history but also the edly coursing through the human body. With roots aesthetic questions that it raises. Why, for instance, running at least to the Greeks, synaesthesia was was so much labour invested in creating these col- most frequently a subject of scientific and aesthetic ourful images, and how were they thought about, inquiry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted to, and received by audiences? Accounts among physiologists, philosophers, and artists. In of colour in film theory and history have often sub- opposition to positivist epistemologies that vener- sumed questions about the aesthetics of colour to ated quantifiable data, this historical interest in issues of realism and have privileged the develop- synaesthesia often emphasized the significance and ment of so-called ‘natural’, photographic colour sys- complexities of sensory experience for the attain- tems (e.g. Kinemacolor and Technicolor). ment of transcendental knowledge.6 Non-photographic, applied colouring has been deni- To illustrate how the history of synaesthesia grated in this logic as a primitive attempt to simulate interrelates across various media, and gets taken up reality before technology evolved enough to repro- by film technicians such as C. Francis Jenkins and duce the ‘natural’ colours of reality. André Bazin, for Loyd Jones, I would like to focus on an image from FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 165 166 FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) Joshua Yumibe thetic horizon of colour theory and practice that I aim to explore here within the context of silent cinema. As one last point of contextualization, I would like to return to the issue of colour abstraction in modernist film and art. When synaesthesia and col- our are discussed in relation to the cinema, it is typically in reference to a particular strand of high modernism dating from this period for which synaes- thesia brings together the interest in abstraction in, for example, the romantic and symbolist poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, the musical compositions of Al- exander Scriabin, the experimental films of Léopold Survage, Walter Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger, and so forth [Plate 4]. This is a varied genealogy running from Romanticism and Symbolism into abstract painting, music, and film. The late William Moritz, for instance, explored this history of abstraction through Fig. 1. an 1899 research article in the journal Medical Re- Fischinger (and others), and the recent 2005 visual Illustration from cord7 [Fig.