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(Film Color Surface: The Aesthetics of the Painted Image in Cinema, 1895–1930)

Subsequent colorization of black-and-white material was a common practice during the silent film era. The films were hand- or stencil-colored, tinted, and toned. The materiality of the applied color, often emphatically displayed, was in tension with the photographic image and created a specific dynamic between the impressions of flatness and plasticity, respectively. Thus, in early silent films, the applied color became an almost auto-thematic or self-reflexive example of what image theorists have referred to as the dual character of the image, that is, the oscillation between the perception of the image content, on the one hand, and the materiality of the color, on the other, between flatness and depth. In this way, early film color outlined what would later become a cornerstone of the chromatic avantgarde’s argument about media specificity – autonomous color.

Colorization was particularly effective in serpentine dance films, in the ornamental motifs of the féeries, in trick films, and in fashion revues. In this respect, the color application techniques of film show many parallels to other visual color media of the period (such as fashion illustration). Early colorized films also exhibit their proximity to industrial aesthetics, especially to the visual form of commercial color palettes. Thus, from an intermedial perspective, the attraction and conspicuous materiality of color function as a convergence point of chromatic modernism and the popular visual culture of the early 20th century.

Link to the open access book publication:
https://www.schueren-verlag.de/?task=openaccess.download&file=9783741003431.pdf

Blog entry: new book on early applied colors
https://blog.filmcolors.org/2021/05/02/rakin-early-applied-colors/

Cosmic Images: Astral Aesthetics in Film and Photography

Current post-doctoral project at the Film Studies Department of the University of Zurich
Affiliated with UZH Space Hub

The post-doctoral project “Cosmic Images: Astral Aesthetics in Film and Photography” examines the specificity of the representation of the cosmos in film and photography. The corpus constitutes selected material ranging from 19th-century to contemporary 21st-century images. The focus of the examination is the aestheticization of (visual) scientific knowledge about the cosmos as well as the ideologies that inform the production of cosmic images in cinema.
A study of contemporary film / photographic material in astronomy reveals an impressive array of colors, mystical-looking shapes of distant cosmic nebulae, and blurred patches of the deepest corners of the universe. These are awe-inspiring images with a pronounced sensory appeal. It is therefore not surprising that contemporary scholars identify in them the aesthetics of wonder, the sublime, or spectacle mechanisms of capitalism. Fluctuating between scientific measurement and aesthetic knowledge, film / photographic images of the cosmos call for a re-examination of the fundamental parameters of traditional aesthetics in relation to visual representation and meaning-making. At the same time, they indicate the pertinence of aesthetic categories in the visualization of science and space exploration. Using astronomy as an example, it is of importance to examine the processes of aestheticization in a cultural context where the production of knowledge is predominantly characterized by digitization and quantification. Such scrutiny often reveals that the seemingly ‘objective’ endeavors in visual representation draw on the mechanisms and traditions related to the civilizational roles of the myth, the magic, or the metaphysical.
In this vein, one of the particular interests of the project is the historically ascribed affinity of the film / photographic image for animism. This quality, which is argued to bring life to the inanimate world of the filmic images, gains momentum in the current context of the environmental crisis. The cosmos in contemporary cinema is increasingly being situated in narratives that deal with our Anthropocene futures. Some of the recent feature films anticipate a future at a moment when life on Earth is deemed no longer possible. The concept of ‘terraforming’ and colonizing other planets thus regains an awakened interest among filmmakers and artists. Apart from the interest in astral travel, contemplations about terrestrial forms of life also gain relevance; the cosmos and the cosmic become decidedly relevant in their organic dimensions. It is therefore furthermore of importance within the aims of the project to examine how cinema and photography shape the collective imaginary of the narratives of terrestrial and interstellar notions of life and ecological worldbuilding.

Honorable mention award at the “PX3 Prix de la Photographie, Paris”

One of the most iconographic buildings in the former Yugoslavia is the mausoleum The House of Flowers (Kuća Cveća) in Belgrade – the resting place of Josip Broz Tito, the country’s leader throughout most of its second half of the 20th century political history. As a socialist country, Yugoslavia had a strong national identity with the working class, with the rural and peasant origins – with the rugged character of its political history and the lives of the people in it. It is striking then that The House of Flowers has honored its symbolic figure by surrounding him with exotic plants, a sort of weird Tropicana, when there are so many folkloristic layers of meaning inscribed in some local plant life. But those local plants are also ‘weeds’. As such they are self-sufficient, resilient, and stubborn. Many of them have medicinal properties. Yet their aesthetics – as well as their symbolics – are not deemed high-brow, worthy, ‘pretty’, precious etc. Yugoslavia did not differ in this ‘othering’ of weeds from many other countries.
The project puts the flora of the Balkans at the center of attention. Some plants are photographed together with the utopian brutalist architecture of the period where they grow. Some of the double exposures of the buildings and the plants are made at the same location and directly in the camera to underline their ‘co-habitation’. Whereas the ideological sentiments that have helped build those utopian buildings have waned – the ‘weeds’ persisted. Many images of the project are monochromes, shifting from red to blue tones, thus abstracting the ubiquitous plant life from the sense of commonness. The superimpositions and the play with colors allude to the utopian notions behind much of the architecture and at the same time try to reinvoke the dreamy quality that is nowadays lost owing to the run-down character of the buildings and monuments.
The region of the former Yugoslavia has traditionally been torn in its (dis)orientation between the West and the East. Culturally, a sense of ‘self-othering’ is passed down through generations. In the current global context of discourses on sustainability through local orientation, the project is thus, also driven by the curiosity of what the local can mean besides – or despite – the overwhelming mainstream historical narratives of the leaders, religions, and nation states.

Like color harmonies, color stories are hard to define or delimit. Color is metamorphosis, flux, eternal becoming, panta rhei. The elusive nature of color holds many levels of possible “truths” and contradictory semantics. In the natural world, an arresting color may bear conflicting meanings: a danger warning or a sign of seduction – sometimes both. Modern science based on measurement, predictability, and quantifiability has largely dismissed the information obtained through color as a secondary quality of the physical world and relegated it to the domain of subjective perception. Yet the conundrum of taming color into taxonomies has perpetually intrigued the natural sciences. “Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours” (1814) ventured to classify the colors of the natural world with a language reminiscent of poetry: “Rose Red, is carmine red, with a great quantity of snow white, and a very small portion of cochineal red.” Even in the 21st century, when color nomenclatures have long resorted to more “objective” taxonomies by numbers, we continue to inscribe our aesthetic selves into the way we tell the stories of colors and give them names – like in the “End of Days Orange” coined on social media to describe the fire and smoke that engulfed San Francisco Bay at the height of the 2020 pandemic. We romanticize the mystery. We need the context of a story.

Color is perfect for mystery. H. P. Lovecraft was aware of this when he conceived of a clandestine source of a color, one of an alien entity. In his short story “The Colour Out of Space,” strange and gradual color changes of the natural world occur after an asteroid has hit the Earth. The apocalyptic in his story creeps in gently and is primarily noticeable through odd color shifts. The chromatic uncanny is located in uncertainty, in that moment of limbo between the possible, the known, and the unimaginable.

“Fantastic Color Nomenclature” lingers in the suspense of uncertainty – before a Kippmoment, a turning point, where aesthetic pleasure possibly veils tragic implications. A dark, seemingly lifeless photographed forest is furnished with drawings of birds that evoke the visual registers of scientific taxonomies. In the darkened palette of the forest, the harmonious arrangement of colors holds the promise of seduction as well as doom. By joining the pictorial and photographic traditions, the work stages a fantastic scenario against the background of the forest on Zurich’s Käferberg hill. And sure enough, as this text is finished, the forest areas on the Käferberg no longer exist. A thunderstorm in summer 2021 obliterated the trees. Both the drawings and the photographs now refer only to imaginary pictures. In the “Age of Extinction” proclaimed by the contemporary media, however, these images may always point to a tomorrow. At the outset, as with Lovecraft’s asteroid, the causes of strange, beautiful, alarming, or fascinating colors are usually clad in an air of mystery. And sometimes the resolution of the mystery points back to our ecological, cognitive, or simply aesthetic selves.

Exhibited at Photobastei (Zurich) from April 20—May 7, 2023

The photography cycle “Montage as a cosmic principle” consists of images that join two photographs in a similar way to the physical montage of a film strip. The images bring together disparate places and moments and nevertheless suggest a sense of their interconnectedness. In this way, the never fully encompassed time and space come together in the process of the aesthetic meaning-making. Whereas the physical surface of the image joins the green of the fern with the geometrical pointiness of the reed leaves, water with the moon that controls its times, the body of a bird with a thorn, the mental process of the montage invites additional layers of associations and connections. “Montage as a cosmic principle” is thus a meditation on the editing technique as a mechanism through which to think not only about the ecological interconnectedness of the life forms that the images show but also of their poetic dimensions – of the ecology as poetics.

Early 20th century and avantgarde filmmakers recognized the potential of the montage to create meaning beyond linear storytelling – beyond the mere ‘sum’ of two images. Whereas Sergei Eisenstein explored the intellectual dimensions of editing in this regard, the American avantgarde film maker Maya Deren made a poetic practice of it. For Deren, the montage had the potential to put layers of meaning upon meaning on images. She described this as the vertical montage and contrasted it with the linear montage of storytelling. To give a visible form to something that is invisible – to an emotion, to a feeling or an association – was what defined for Deren the poetic practice of the moving image montage.

Following this notion, the layering of meanings in “Montage as a cosmic principle” purposefully aims to bring to mind organic processes of birth, growth or metamorphosis. The choice of the motifs, texture and color works to underscore the permeability of matter and shape. It is almost as if the organic life of one image desires to spill over into the other. Along the line that formally both separates and joins two images, the photographs thus ultimately propose material and metaphysical oneness of life on Earth and the invisible principles at work of the perpetual flow.

Exhibited at Photobastei (Zurich) from April 20—May 7, 2023

Jelena Rakin, Ph. D.

Artist Statement

In my artistic work, I principally explore the images of nature. I frame them into narratives that point out beyond the seeming, self-evident appearance of the surface phenomena in photography and video. I examine the possibility of subliminal presence, undercurrent principles, and tacit knowledge in the images. I am additionally interested in the clash of different regimes of knowledge, histories, or ideologies that appear unrelated or even juxtaposed. In this vein and in the academic context of my postdoctoral project about the aesthetics of the images of the cosmos in film and photography, I study the convergence of scientific and magical thinking. Building upon these interests, in my artistic work I find an even more compelling format to explore associative, somatic, and aesthetic approaches for combining different perspectives within images.

Short Bio

Jelena Rakin studied film and literature in Switzerland (Zurich), the United States (Princeton), Germany (Essen), and Croatia (Osijek). Since 2010, she has taught courses on the aesthetics, theory, and history of film and photography at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich, where she is currently a staff member. From 2010 to 2018, she conducted and finished her doctoral dissertation on the colorized films of the silent film era, published in German in 2021 under the title “Film Farbe Fläche: Ästhetik des kolorierten Bildes im Kino 1895–1930” (“Film Color Surface: The Aesthetics of the Painted Image in Cinema, 1895–1930”). Jelena is currently working on her second post-doctoral project on the aesthetics of images of the cosmos.

Short CV / Teaching

Published essays and conference papers

The cycle represents a myse an abyme of negative and positive photography providing a curious synthesis of time and place. The images within images show sculptures of the female shape that repose in the ashen vegetation of a graveyard landscape. Moss covers the inorganic curves of the stone flesh, indicating the eternal metamorphoses of death and rebirth, Eros and Thanatos, past and future, the flows and shifts in which every action has a corresponding reaction, every black its white, each color its contrasting complement, each purple its yellow. The photographs were then placed in nature and photgraphed themselves. The image surface becomes an alchemisitic place that underlines the flux of eternal reversals: of black and white, absence and presence, the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown. “The Ashen Picture” contrasts two seminal ideas: that photography embalms life and that it turns it to ashes. The series tests the possibilities and limits of the medium to navigate between the visible and the invisible, to both capture the phenomena of the visible material world and suggest the shadowy world of specters. By exploring the notion of photography’s “optical unconscious” (Walter Benjamin) in this way, the series meditates on the inextricable web of connections where the flesh turns to ashes, then returns as organic matter – a flower, a tree, or the moss that mimics a skin layer on the stone. All these metamorphoses are entangled in the image surface of the world, the next transformation lurks in the moment to follow.

The short film shows cemeteries where sculptures of women in sensual postures act as hosts and subordinates of the teeming plant life. The sculptures exhibit varying states of decay. Many are covered with layers of moss and lichen, giving the stone an organic layer, almost a living skin. The images oscillate between stillness and motion, suggesting not only the suspension between life and death but also the vitalist potential of film as a medium that can “preserve” life.

This peculiar placement of the female shape offers a departure point for reflection on its shifting functions from mythical narratives to contemporary ecofeminism.
A sense of commodification hovers over the use of the female shape in the cemetery sculptures. They draw on the symbolic connection of the woman to nature, love, and the cycle of life, but also on the notion – as Edgar Allan Poe wrote – that the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetic topic in the world. There is something slightly jarring about these sculptures and their use of naked, potentially erotic female bodies as a counterpoint to death through the conventional association of the woman with life and nature (an association that traditionally served to exclude women from the domains of intellectual and political life).

But if the stone as a material is intended to withstand time, the plants expose the human claim to a physical presence through symbols as feeble. As if in defiance of the symbolic orders created by humans, the plants assert their silent agency, engulfing everything from stone to earth. They introduce and offer a standpoint beyond the polarity of the sexes inherent in the sculptures, pointing to an agency and forces altogether beyond the anthropocentric volition and narrative. As the anthropocentric viewpoint is abandoned, all the power and symbolism of the human order seem to lose their validity and relevance.
Long camera takes sometimes make it hard to discern whether the image is still or moving, blurring the boundaries between film and photography. Then something in the background moves minimally – or does it? The uncertainty reclaims animism as a possible principle at work: “it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye… a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious” (Walter Benjamin). Is our mind playing tricks on us? Or has something in the still image come to life? The “optical unconscious” of the medium is also at work here, excavating the cultural unconscious and its bias, which favors a standpoint of anthropocentric agency.

Screened for the audience at the international conference IMAGES OF NATURE (Zurich),
May 8, 2021