ABSTRACT

Images of rough seas – waves crashing against the seashore, sea storms, or shipwrecks – were one of the most potent visual tropes of the silent era. Rough seas appeared in numerous fiction films and were a staple of early nonfiction actualities, travelogues, and nature films. These and other water images were also frequently coloured with the applied hues that were common in the period: not just blue, but also green, orange, yellow, and pink tinting, toning, and stencil colouring. While the rough seas topos emerged in the Romantic era, this essay explores how it became a commercial style in silent cinema. Colour, with its contradictory tension between realism and sensation, functioned as an important part of this commercial transformation.

keywords

sublime, Romantic, lyricism, nonfiction, water

Colour is a tricky question for film history, spanning as it does the broad topics of science, technology, and aesthetics. As colour in silent-era cinema has become a newly important topic of research, scholars and archivists have made great strides in exploring its technological and industrial history in the late nineteenth and early 20th century, but the aesthetic questions raised by colour in cinema remain complex. Building upon recent work by Joshua Yumibe, Tom Gunning, and others, this essay explores the aesthetic dimension of colour in a handful of nonfiction films from the silent era. Specifically, I explore the depiction of water, which was a topic of fascination in its own right during this period. In my book, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film, I began to explore water as a common subject matter of early nonfiction. What is remarkable about early films featuring water – including rivers, waterfalls, oceans, fountains, ice, mist, and rough seas – is how frequently they display the colour processes of the era, including both applied colours and early photographic processes such as Kinemacolor and Prizmacolor. More often than not, colours are used in these watery shots to enhance tone, emotion, and mood. How do these films draw upon Romantic aesthetic traditions to shape a sense of water as poetic?