Joshua Yumibe

Visual diplomacy: Projections of power from the field in Ethiopia

Between the fall of 1926 and late spring of 1927, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in conjunction with the Chicago Daily News mounted an expedition to Ethiopia. What appealed to the Field Museum and the Chicago Daily News about Ethiopia was that it was relatively unexplored scientifically at the time. The Field Museum hoped to rectify this, and the Daily News planned on making the expedition into a major media event by running frequent updates on the status of the journey in its pages. This essay focuses on one of the museum’s records of the expedition: the film Abyssinian Expedition, which was produced by expedition member Suydam Cutting. What is of interest in the film is that it documents the regent and heir to the throne of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari Mekonnen, during a period of growing international exposure. The film shows his attempts to use the expedition’s media coverage as a channel of visual diplomacy through which he intended to project an image of a modernizing Ethiopia to the world.

The temporalities of intermediality: Colour in cinema and the arts of the 1920s

This article presents a case study in intermediality concerning the intersection of cinema, colour, and a range of related media in the 1920s. In film history, colour is a rich yet understudied field in the 1920s, particularly in light of the recent attention paid to both early cinema colour and 1930s Technicolor. Following the constraints of the First World War, there was a surge in colour production in the early 1920s across media and national cinemas. To understand this increase in colour during the ‘Jazz Age’, it is vital to appreciate the significance of colour before the First World War; specifically for cinema, one must also examine the intermedial role of colour during cinema’s early years. For developing theoretical insights into this material, we turn first to André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion’s analysis (2005) of the institutionalization and accompanying stylistic transformation of the cinema around 1910, as it emerged as an autonomous and self-sustaining narrative medium. With this change, according to Gaudreault and Marion, the fundamental intermedial relations that characterized the earlier years of cinema were no longer so apparent; rather, the structure of cinema’s intermediality transformed with institutionalization. We argue that the 1920s presents a vital perspective on this history, when cinema and other media were profoundly influenced by a colour wave that surged across the arts. Far from intermediality disappearing, in the 1920s cinema’s engagement with the other arts was going through a particularly exciting and innovative phase.

Discovering Cinema: Learning to Talk & Movies Dream in Color (2003–2004) (review)

Lloyd’s first independent production after parting ways with Roach, commands particular attention. The scene begins as Harold drifts in a rowboat, sighing over a box of Acme dog biscuits (a totemic souvenir from his first meeting with The Girl, and The Girl’s dog) and sees his beloved’s reflection in the calm surface of the lake. Of course the audience knows that The Girl has walked onto the bridge and is leaning over the edge sighing with her Cracker Jack box clutched tight in her hand (her souvenir from the first meeting with The Boy). But neither character recognizes the presence of the other. Harold takes the reflection of her face as a projected mirror of his thoughts; lost in her own thoughts, The Girl walks away. The dramatic suspense of the missed moment tightens as The Girl exits the bridge and then stumbles, falling onto a raft that clumsily sails into his side. From melodramatic suspense to slapstick pratfall, the scene now shifts to shy sentimentality, even as the natural world turns coyly sensuous. On dry ground, “girl shy” Harold labors towards conversation. His stutter gets in his way as does a litter of piglets suckling at their mother’s teats. Moving The Girl away from any semblance of suckling, he leans against a sapling that oozes on his hand. He inadvertently wipes the sap on his pants. He nervously seeks a safer spot for chatting. Sitting down seems wise, so as she rests on a tree trunk, he collapses on a rock, which the audience sees is not a rock at all but rather a large turtle. Finally at ease, The Boy gazes into her eyes as the tortoise carries him slowly towards the murky depths. Lloyd never shouts about the sensuous. It rather leaks, bubbles, shimmers and sprays through and across the surface of things. Because he so loudly voices the platitudes of romance and the secure recognition of the couple—“LETS GET MARRIED” reads the final intertitle for Grandma’s Boy—it is sometimes hard to hear what is flooding everywhere beneath. The miracle ultimately revealed to us in this collection is a figure in which the sentimental and the sexual, the dramatic and the comic, the innocent victim and the sly trickster, the certainty of direction and the aimless quality of spray, seamlessly merge in what appears, at first glance, to be a rather simply dressed kind of fellow, the most average of Nebraskan guys.