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Copyright

Bregt Lameris

Published On

2025-03-06

Page Range

pp. 133–168

Language

  • English

Print Length

36 pages

6. Coloured Light, Vibrations, Temperature, and Mood

Chapter of: Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture, 1950s–1960s(pp. 133–168)
Chapter Six delves into the use of coloured light in films during the 1950s and 1960s, which was strongly connected to the discourses discussed in Chapter Five. Coloured light was also believed to make the human body and its molecules vibrate. It was believed to have healing powers and influence moods. Deviant and non-diegetic uses of coloured light were also used to increase ‘ostranenie’ or atmospheres of strangeness. This practice is traced back to Nouvelle Vague films, that experimented with the effect of Verfremdung, but also in horror films such as the then very popular Giallo films with their estranging colour palettes. These developments of increasing uses of colour to create strangeness are investigated for their correlation with the unleashing of colours during the investigation period.

Contributors

Bregt Lameris

(author)
Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Open University in the Netherlands
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3077-7331
https://www.ou.nl/web/open-universiteit/zoek-medewerker#!user/bl1

Bregt Lameris works as a senior lecturer in Media Studies at the Open Universiteit (Heerlen), where she develops courses on for example the digital transition and the experience of cultural heritage, stigma in media, clothes and identity, disability studies and culture. Her colour research was embedded at the University of Zurich, where she was a postdoctoral researcher within the ERC Advanced Grant project ‘FilmColors’. Other research interests are stigma, media and mental health, media archaeology, film archiving, film historiography, affect, emotions and subjectivity in audiovisual representation, and disability studies. In 2017 she published her monograph Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography which is available in Open Access through Amsterdam University Press. She was a co-editor of the book The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema (2018), as well as of several special issues of various journals (Journal for Media History, Montage AV, Necsus, Locus.