We are delighted to announce that Dr. Kirsten Thompson, Professor and Director of Film Studies at Seattle University, will offer a special graduate seminar for the CMS curriculum during spring quarter 2021. The course description is as follows:
“Seminar in Color: Aesthetics, Technologies, Materialities, and Philosophies”
In recent years, colour studies has emerged as a new interdisciplinary field in the humanities and social sciences and has been taken up by a number of film and media scholars from Tom Gunning to Sarah Street and Scott Higgins. While earlier research in film has focused on the introduction and development of colour film cinematography, from silent era tinting and toning to later processes like Agfacolor, and Technicolor, more recent work has focused on color media’s aesthetic, material and philosophical histories and its relationship with other art forms, from painting to advertising. This advanced seminar will introduce you to these technological and material histories but also engage with phenomenology, aesthetics, spectatorship and race, read in and through colour media. How does colour function narratively, abstractly and affectively? How do our optical and neurological capacities shape our perception of color? How does color cinematography and lighting intersect with questions of race and representation? How have writers, philosophers and film and media scholars, from Kant to Benjamin, and from Rudolf Arnheim to Giuliana Bruno, among many others, thought about color? This seminar will introduce you to this rich intermedial and interdisciplinary field and encourage you to develop your own research into film & media topics and colour.
Recommended Films to watch may include: La Cucaracha, Willie Wonka, The Wizard of Oz, Three Caballeros, Pinocchio, Dumbo, Pleasantville, Blue, Imitation of Life, Once Were Warriors, The Aviator, Touki Bouki, Gabbeh, Münchhausen, The Holy Mountain, Raise the Red Lantern, 2046 and a wide selection of animation shorts.