Uncanny Colours of the Past. Phenomenological Notes on Remediation and Colourization of Black-and-White Footage

Series Film and Media Studies Issues Volume 24, 2023 – Uncanny Intermediality Uncanny Colours of the Past. Phenomenological Notes on Remediation and Colourization of Black-and-White Footage

Volume 24, 2023 – Uncanny Intermediality

Kamilla Simor

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies, 24 (2023) 15–38

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2023-0012

Abstract. The article analyses the problem of colouring black and white archival footage in Spain in Two Trenches: The Civil War in Colour (España en dos trincheras. La guerra civil en color, Francesc Ecribano and Luis Carrizo, 2016), which was made by digitizing and colouring more than 450 surviving films of the Spanish Civil War. The analysis focuses on the kind of affects and perceptual mechanisms which might ensue from the colourization of archival black and white footage, and on the justification of the use of colour to authenticate an event that has already happened. At the beginning of the paper, the author briefly reviews the approaches of the increasingly close relationship between mediatization and memory, then focuses on the justification of colourization in the light of the Spanish documentary and compares it with issues of perceptual realism. In the final part of the analysis, the author examines the historical consequences of the reconfiguration of the past in colour.

Keywords: colourization, remedialization, perceptual realism, found footage films, media ecology

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Volume 24, 2023 – Uncanny Intermediality

Uncanny (Inter)Mediality and Photo Futures, Arild Fetveit Uncanny Colours of the Past. Phenomenological Notes on Remediation and Colourization of Black-and-White Footage, Kamilla Simor The Uncanniness of Intermediality. Joanna Hogg’s Eerily Self-Reflexive Cinema, Ágnes Pethő Filial Care and Familial Postmemory. On the Uncanny and Affective Intermediality of Analogue Media Use in Recent European Documentaries, Melinda Blos-Jáni The Crisis of Care and Uncanny Intersensuality in Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken, Judit Pieldner Rural Landscapes and Affective Encounters in Radu Muntean’s Film, Întregalde, Katalin Sándor Ritual as Intermedial Interjection in Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star, Sanskriti Chattopadhyay, Deb Kamal Ganguly Jane Austen and the Uncanny: The Colonial Past in Patricia Rozema’s Adaptation, Mansfield Park, Polina Rybina Media Representation and Affective Intermediality in Der Tote im Bunker and Vielleicht Esther, Giulia Bigongiari Medium Specific Uncanny in Contemporary Video Games, Tamás Csönge Pandora’s Myth and Cultural Trauma in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Boglárka Farkas Framing Anxiety. Intermedial Techniques of the Uncanny, Michaela Wünsch Front pages in PDF, Inside covers in PDF,

Uncanny Colours of the Past. Phenomenological Notes on Remediation and Colourization of Black-and-White Footage - Acta Universitatis Sapientiae