Capturing colour: public heritage and Screen Archive South East

Abstract

This article considers the role of film and film-related objects from archive and museum collections in the context of their use within exhibitions for museums. It first introduces the work of Screen Archive South East (SASE) and then turns to an exhibition it presented in 2010 on the history of colour film technology – Capturing Colour: Film, Invention & Wonder. Capturing Colour was laid out across three galleries, presenting a historical narrative through a set of 24 screens and around 100 objects. The objects were placed in relation to a set of related technologies and practices. It was planned over the course of two years and it was recognised from the outset that it could not be ‘a book on a wall’, meaning that it could not have the detail, discourse and narrative of a scholarly publication. The ‘chromatic’ content was organised chronologically around six key building blocks: pre-cinema colour, applied colour films, additive colour photographs and films, subtractive colour films, analogue video colour and digital colour. The exhibition was also conceived heuristically – as a designed, discovery environment that combined two-dimensional objects, a selection of video files on screens and anchor texts (panels and labels) within a well-defined historical and spatial framework. For the purposes of this article, it focuses on that part of the exhibition that traced colour history from coloured photography to the first coloured films and to Kinemacolor.