ABSTRACT

Colour in early 1900s nonfiction films was designed to be viewed sensuously (Yumibe, 2012; Peterson, 2014), a practice that persisted in the public exhibition of scientific expedition photography. An analysis of polar expeditions, contemporary to the emergence of cinema, reads references to colour (sunrise, sunsets, Aurora Australis) recorded at a specific time and place as coordinates mapping the interactions of body and environment. Liminal perceptions, signalled through a configuration of references (sketches, journals, photographs), trace a combination of interests in the scientific study of landscape and its elaboration as spectacle in modern visual culture. In exhibition, the sensual appeal and connection of technologies and subject matter in visual display (Gunning, 1991) conveyed what eluded direct registration: chroma, sound, touch, odour.

KEYWORDS

Ponting, Wilson, exhibition, lantern slides, Antarctic, scientific expedition, colour, performance, script, photography, Hurley

LIMINAL COLOURS

The colours of early 1900s fiction films – although variously elusive in their photographic registration – were designed to be viewed sensuously, a practice more recently linked to nonfiction works. Colour, although complicated by the technical limits of photographic technologies, was a topic of concern for the scientific study of Antarctic wildlife, the landscape, and the chromatic effects of meteorological phenomena during the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration (1897–1922), thus contemporary with the emergence of cinema. Experiments with ‘natural colour’ processes, deemed unsuccessful or lost, can be tracked throughout expedition records from notes regarding Reginald Koettlitz's colour still photographs, produced on the Discovery expedition (1901–1904), to Herbert G. Ponting's Autochromes on Scott's fated South Pole expedition 1910–1913. In this context, Ponting's work formed the first cinematographic record of the Antarctic for which the colours of the landscape were predominantly mediated through black-and-white images to be evoked through the descriptions given by explorers and lecturers and the combination of different media (lantern slides, film, sketches, watercolours, text) in public exhibition. The narratives and pictorial display of material from these scientific expeditions were elaborated by use of applied colour processes, including tinting, toning, and painting by hand. Natural phenomena such as the uncertain movement of a storm at sea could offer an enchanting spectacle and, as Gunning suggests, even in films with little narrative to discern, ‘colour seems to function as an attraction, a very direct visual stimulus. It's something to look at, something to surprise you, to amaze you’.