CFP: Conference on Color in Silent Cinema

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema

29 to 31 March, 2015
EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam

Twenty years on from the groundbreaking Amsterdam workshop ‘Disorderly Order’: Colours in Silent Film, the conference will celebrate this milestone anniversary by providing a new forum to explore contemporary archival and academic debates around colour in the silent era. The conference will explore a diverse range of archival and academic topics and provide a stimulating environment for specialists from across different disciplines. It will also include screenings of restored and/or rarely seen films. The event will be held at EYE (Amsterdam) on 29 to 31 March, 2015.

We welcome papers and in particular pre-formed panel proposals on the following themes: avant-garde and abstract colour; restoration and preservation; technologies; animation; intermediality; aesthetics and cultural contexts. We also welcome papers working with films from EYE’s Open Beelden website (eye.openbeelden.nl). Proposals of 300 words for papers should be sent to  colourfantastic@eyefilm.nl no later than 1 September 2014.

The conference is co-organised by EYE, Giovanna Fossati (University of Amster- dam), Tom Gunning (University of Chicago) and the Leverhulme Trust research project ‘Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts,’ run by Sarah Street (University of Bristol) and Joshua Yumibe (University of St Andrews / Michigan State University).

In conjunction with the conference, a new book on silent film colour, Fantasia of Color by Gunning, Fossati and Yumibe will be published by the University of Amsterdam Press and presented at EYE.