4th International Conference Colour in Film

Following World War II, as Technicolor’s near-monopoly on colour for films was coming to a close, Hollywood studios sent units around the globe to produce colour features in ‘exotic’ locations. Many of these films were set against the backdrop of war— whether frontier wars, the Cold War or scenes of post-war reconstruction. The Colour Wars examines three Twentieth Century Fox productions Broken Arrow(1950), Untamed (1955) and House of Bamboo(1955), shot respectively in the United States, South Africa and Japan.  How were standardised palettes projected onto distinctive local landscapes and cultures? And, in the light of contemporary debates about the colourisation of the past, how might contemporary audiences understand their skewed and unstable hues?