Department of Film Studies

Dr Joshua Yumibe

Lecturer in Film Studies

Research profile

My work focuses on the aesthetic and technological history of cinema. I am the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), which examines early colour cinema in relation to the cultural and aesthetic horizon of modernism and modernity. Other areas of interest include avant-garde and experimental cinemas, nineteenth and early twentieth century visual culture, Frankfurt school theory, and archival theories and practices.

Currently I am the Director of Postgraduate Studies in Film. Since 2003, I have been co-directing the Davide Turconi Project in conjunction with George Eastman House, the Cineteca del Friuli, and the Giornate del Cinema Muto. With Dr Tom Rice, I am also the co-director of Cinema St Andrews, an archival research project established in 2011. In 2012, the Leverhulme Trust awarded the University of St Andrews and the University of Bristol a Research Project Grant for 'Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts', which I am coordinating with Professor Sarah Street (University of Bristol).

Beginning January 2013, I am the Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University and maintain a part-time, joint appointment at the University of St Andrews. 

See also the PURE research profile.

Research students

I am interested in supervising students working on issues of silent cinema history and historiography; technology, intermedial practices, and aesthetics; avant-garde and experimental cinemas; archival theories and practices; and film theory, in particular classical and Frankfurt school theory.

Selected publications

Books

Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012).   

 

Selected Articles:

With Alicia Fletcher, “From Nitrate to Digital Archive: The Davide Turconi Project,” The Moving Image 13.1, Special Issue: Histories of Moving Image Archives (forthcoming 2013).

“Color Space as Play Space: On Children’s Books, Early Film, and the Féerie,” trans. Priska Morrissey, 1895,­­­ revue d’histoire du cinéma 69 (forthcoming 2013).

"The Illuminated Fairy Tale: The Color's of Paul Fejos' Lonesome," in Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, ed. Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins (New York: Routledge, 2012).

"Visual Diplomacy: Projections of Power from the Field in Ethiopia," Early Popular Visual Culture 9.4 (November 2011): 309-323. Shortlisted for the British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies’ Best Article in a Refereed Journal Award, 2011–2012.

"On the Education of the Senses: Synaesthetic Perception from the ‘Democratic Art' of Chromolithography to Modernism," New Review of Film and Television Studies 7.3, Special Issue: Synaesthesia (September 2009): 257-274.

"‘Harmonious Sensations of Sound by Means of Colors': Vernacular Color Abstractions in Silent Cinema," Film History 21.2, Special Issue on Color (2009): 164-176.

"From Switzerland to Italy and All around the World: The Josef Joye and Davide Turconi Collections," in Early Cinema and the "National," ed. Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, and Rob King (Bloomington/New Barnet, UK: Indiana University Press/John Libbey, 2008), 321-331.

“Silent Cinema Color Aesthetics.” In Questions of Color in Cinema: From Paintbrush to Pixel. Ed. Wendy Everett. 41–56. Oxford: Peter Lang Publishing, 2007. 

Further publications and activities.

 

Current research

I am working on a new manuscript project, Strange Afterlives: The Creative Receptions of Film and Media (working title), which examines the transnational circulation and creative reception of archival film and media.  The case studies for this project range from the Rastafarians' political appropriation of Haile Selassie's globalized image to the use of colonial imaging and antiquated media by filmmakers such as Gustav Deutsch, Guy Maddin, and Michel Gondry. The question that this project focuses on pertains to how and why certain images have unexpected afterlives, as they are recycled in creative and often unforeseeable ways. Given our current digital milieu, I am interested in exploring the cultural, technological, and archival conditions that enable such reuses of visual history.

As a follow up to my book, Moving Color, I am co-directing the Leverhulme Trust funded research project, 'Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts' with Professor Sarah Street of the University of Bristol. The project aims to investigate the major spheres of colour expression in motion pictures of the 1920s. Taking cinema as the galvanizing focus, the project will contextualize colour’s intermedial role in other arts—including commercial and print culture; fashion and industry; theater and the performing arts—in order to produce a fully comprehensive, comparative study that situates colour cinema firmly within the chromatic culture of its time. We are planning a symposium at the EYE-Film Institute Netherlands in 2015 and a co-authored monograph on the topic.

With Giovanna Fossati and Tom Gunning, I am developing the book, Fantasia of Color for Amsterdam University Press (2015). It will examine the technologies, aesthetics, and archival life of early color cinema. We are also planning an exhibition at the EYE-Film Institute, Netherlands. 

I am also collaborating with Paolo Cherchi Usai on the Davide Turconi Project, which is an archival, research project based on a massive collection of nitrate film fragments. In 2011 we launched a website that provides access to the collection as part of the 30th anniversary of the Giornate del Cinema Muto. We are developing a book that will provide a detailed history of the project.

Teaching

I am teaching or have recently taught in the following modules:

Postgraduate modules

FM5001:Theory and Practice of Research in Film Studies 
(convener)

FM5103: Film Technologies and Aesthetics: Colour Cinema (convener)

Undergraduate modules

FM1002: Film History and Historiography

FM2002: Film Theory, Culture, and Entertainment

FM2001: Modern World Cinemas (convener)

FM3001: Contemporary Film Theory

FM4104: Film and History (convener)

FM4109: Film and the Archive: Cinema St Andrews (convener)