Chromatic modernity : color, cinema, and media of the 1920s /

Street (Univ. of Bristol, UK) has written a number of excellent books on British cinema, including her magnum opus to date, Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900--1955 (2012). In the present volume she joins forces with Yumibe (Michigan State Univ.) to offer a look--replete with numerous dazzling color stills--at the very early days of color in the cinema. The book also details the impact of color films on the worlds of advertising and fashion. Though the authors cover mainstream cinema, they are most at home discussing, in exquisite detail, 1920s avant-garde filmmaking in Europe and, to lesser extent, the US. They point out that it was the sudden, electric vibrancy of color on the screen--the wow effect--that brought early cinema spectators up short, astonished when color images erupted on the screen in an otherwise black-and-white world. The book covers numerous color processes, from hand-tinted to stamped dye, and later two-strip Technicolor, and ends with a brief chapter on the coming of sound and how it affected the use of color in film. This is a remarkable book. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, University of Nebraska--Lincoln