Title: Travelogue Archives and Amateur Colour
Date: Friday 30 September
Time: 18:00
Venue: Faculty of Arts Library, University of Malta Msida Campus

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On Friday 30 September, Prof. Jeff Geiger will be delivering a talk entitled ‘Travelogue Archives and Amateur Colour’. The talk will be held at 18:00 at the Faculty of Arts Library and will be open to the general public.

Colour media have long been used to enhance the affective and connotative potential of travel representations. As far back as the Enlightenment era, colour could strategically heighten reproductions of ‘far-fetched facts’ encountered around the world. For example, in the large- scale colour work of illustrators such as William Hodges – who accompanied Captain James Cook on his second circumnavigation – semi-fantastic scenes helped to market ‘South Seas’ fantasy and a burgeoning empire sensibility. Twentieth-century film travelogues might seem the direct inheritors of tendencies to market travel and empire as spectacle, with colour enhancing the films’ visual and sensory impact. Yet colour film applications were for a long time thought to be unable to afford the realism and depth that corresponded to perceptions of colours in the natural world. It is widely held that colour film – due to expense, varied qualities of competing processes, and generic conventions – was primarily associated with fantasy and spectacle until around mid-century. However, during the period between the two World Wars one process – Kodachrome – stood out for its vibrancy, immersive potential, and ease of use. Kodachrome began its marketing campaign in 1935, promising a colour ‘revolution’ that would enhance, through what Kodak called ‘colors of life’, an affective connection between filmgoers and the virtual world of the screen. This talk draws on colour film archives of the 1930s, looking at how amateur travel films portrayed global sites and peoples during Kodachrome’s early years. It also questions whether Kodak’s ‘natural’ colour process and perceptions of colour immediacy with respect to ‘foreign’ places and peoples potentially engaged with emerging transcultural sensibilities.

Jeff Geiger is Professor of Film at the University of Essex, where he was the first director of Film Studies and established the Centre for Film and Screen Media. His work encourages thinking across film practice and theory, and considers how the ‘cinematic’ echoes across various media. Books include Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination, American Documentary Film: Projecting the Nation, and the forthcoming Kodachrome Travels, and he has co-edited Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, and Cinematicity in Media History. His work has appeared in New Formations, Studies in Documentary Film, Third Text, African American Review, Film International, Cinema Journal, PMLA, and in numerous collections. He was recipient of a British Academy and Leverhulme Trust fellowship for 2021-22.