Chromatic Modernity

Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe provide a revelatory history of how the use of color in film led the way in creating a chromatically vibrant culture. Focusing on the final decade of silent film, Chromatic Modernity portrays the 1920s as a pivotal and profoundly chromatic period of cosmopolitan exchange, collaboration, and experimentation.

Sarah Street is professor of film at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900–55 (2012) and Deborah Kerr (2018), among other works.

Joshua Yumibe is associate professor and director of the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University. He is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (2012) and coauthor of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015).

Kirsten Moana Thompson, Seattle University:
Arguing against assumptions that intermediality decreases with the formation of the classical Hollywood system, Street and Yumibe assert that the twenties are, in fact, a key decade for cinematic engagement across art forms in the development of this heightened color consciousness. The focus on the transnational intellectual, aesthetic, and industrial cross influences between the United States and Europe and the historical synthesis of a large literature on the color revolution are two significant features of this book.

James Layton, coauthor of The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915-1935:
This book differs from other studies of film color in its interdisciplinary approach. The authors have gone to great lengths to explore the cultural use of color outside of films and how that influenced and informed technical developments and audience tastes in cinema. I cannot think of a pair more qualified to analyze such overlooked cinema than Street and Yumibe. The convergence of these experts benefits their research and the text they have written.

Michael Cowan, University of St Andrews:
Chromatic Modernity makes a brilliant contribution to the history of color in film. Focusing on the pivotal period of the 1920s, the book skillfully situates modernist cinema within a sweeping "chromatic revolution" that impacted everything from fashion and advertising to urban planning and interior design. In so doing, it shows conclusively why color matters to film history—and why cinema mattered to the chromatic culture of modernity.