Colour in Film

Thinking Allowed

BBC

Society & Culture, Science

4.4 • 997 Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2026

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How did the arrival of colour and film technology transform cinema and its cultural politics? Laurie Taylor explores the intertwined histories of technology, aesthetics, and identity.

Swarnavel Eswaran, filmmaker and scholar at Michigan State University, introduces us to the remarkable story of Kodak Krishnan – Eastman Kodak’s “man from the East.” Krishnan played a pivotal role in bringing American film technology to India during the mid-20th century, a period when cinema was becoming a powerful medium for shaping ideas of modernity and national pride.

Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, Associate Professor in the History of Art department at University College London, is one of the organisers of the Bombay Colour Research Network. Her book The Rainbow’s Gravity asked how new colour media transformed the way Britain saw itself and its empire between 1856 and 1968. Her research also examines how colour technologies – from early tinting processes to the vibrant palettes of Bollywood musicals became part of debates over race, class, and cultural representation. Kirsty Sinclair Dootson is one of the academics who has been a New Generation Thinker, on the scheme run by the BBC and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to share research on radio.

Producer: Natalia Fernandez

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts.
0:05.7	Hello, you're about to listen to a BBC podcast, and I'm Ed Gamble, host of another BBC podcast, The Traitors Uncloaked.
0:12.7	But my show is available only on BBC Sounds, just like Ellis and John's Saturday bonus episodes,
0:18.2	The Pop Top Ten podcast with Scott Mills and Rylan, and comedy specials
0:22.2	from the likes of Harriet Kemsley, Susie Ruffle and Rommashranganathan.
0:26.0	However, and maybe I'm biased, it's really all about the traitors uncoaked.
0:30.3	So for a whole bunch of exclusive scoops and podcasts, listen only on BBC sounds.
0:35.4	This is a Thinking Aloud podcast from the BBC, and for more details and much, much more about Thinking Aloud,
0:42.5	go to our website at BBC.co.com.
0:46.6	Hello and welcome to this new series of Thinking Aloud.
0:51.4	While we were off air, I received a, well, it was a rather disturbing email from someone who described herself as a regular listener. What
0:59.2	troubles me most about sociologists, she wrote, is they are constantly looking for some
1:04.6	underlying meaning in everything they observe. They can't relax and enjoy the thing in its own right.
1:13.0	Well, I'd more or less forgotten that correspondence until I found myself sitting in a
1:17.4	packed cinema last week watching the highly acclaimed film Hamlet. And as the film unrolled,
1:24.4	I realised with mild alarm that I was becoming less and less interested in the plight
1:29.6	of Anne Hathaway and her daughter, Susanna, and the adorable twins, and more and more
1:35.8	captivated by the colours, the colours on the screen, the browns and greens of the woods,
1:42.9	the shades of the herbs and fungi Anne collected for her
1:46.9	pultuses and potions. And even as I watched, I knew exactly who was to blame for this errant
1:54.8	perspective. It was my first guest today, Kirsty Sinclair Doulson, an Associate Professor of University College, London.
2:04.2	Kirsty, let's start off rather simply, because let me ask you, why is colour film, if you're like so important?
	...

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