La séance sera animée par Charlotte Ribeyrol. Gabriel Saada et Claire Pascal seront les répondants.

ABSTRACT : This paper considers how three of the crucial raw ingredients for manufacturing film stock—cotton, silver, and gelatine—forged film as a racialised material. Focusing on Anglo-America contexts of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, when US manufacturer Eastman Kodak dominated the global film stock market, I consider how film was not merely an instrument of racial representation, but through its physical components became a racialized material itself. I focus in particular on how the materiality of film was routinely analogised as a kind of skin and ask how this skin was racialised and gendered through the substances that composed its make-up. As I reveal, these materials were not inert or stable, but underwent radical aesthetic and physical transformations in the process of becoming motion picture stock, forging multiple understandings of film’s racialized nature across different stages of its production and consumption, from abattoir and plantation to factory and laboratory.

Bio: Kirsty Sinclair Dootson is a Lecturer in Film and Media at University College London. Her research thinks across film studies and art history to explore how the materials and techniques used to make images shape both their aesthetics and politics. Her first book The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity won both the Best First Monograph Award from the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies, and the Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize. She has previously held research fellowships at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, and at Cambridge University. She is currently the co-convenor of the AHRC-supported Bombay Film Colour Research Network.

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