Joshua Yumibe
Director of film studies | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Expert in the history of film
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Biography
Joshua Yumibe’s research focuses on the aesthetic and technological history of cinema. He is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), which examines early color 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. He is also the co-author of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), with Giovanna Fossati, Tom Gunning, and Jonathon Rosen.
With Sarah Street (University of Bristol), Yumibe is working on the co-authored book Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (under contract with Columbia University Press). The book investigates the major spheres of color expression in commercial and experimental motion pictures of the 1920s, and derives from research conducted through the Leverhulme Trust funded project, "Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts."
Since 2003, Yumibe has been collaborating with Paolo Cherchi Usai on the archival collection, Davide Turconi Project. In 2011, they launched the project online to provide access to the collection as part of the 30th anniversary of the Giornate del Cinema. In 2018, Yumibe has curated the related exhibit "Dreaming in Color: The Davide Turconi Collection of Early Cinema" at George Eastman Museum.
In 2016, he was a recipient of the Michigan State University Teacher-Scholar Award, which is granted to faculty who early in their careers have earned the respect of students and colleagues for their devotion to and skill in teaching, and whose instruction is linked to and informed by their research and creative activities.
Since 2013 he has served as the Director of the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University. He has also served on the executive committee of Domitor, the International Society of the Study of Early Cinema, since 2011 and has been the vice-president of the organization since 2016.
Industry Expertise (3)
Writing and Editing
Education/Learning
Motion Pictures and Film
Areas of Expertise (4)
Archival Theories and Practices
Experimental Cinemas
History of Cinema
Frankfurt School Theory
Accomplishments (2)
SCMS Award for First Book (professional)
2013 Joshua Yumibe’s Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism explores a little known topic – color cinema before 1912. This inspiring book presents a vibrant history of applied color – the coloring, tinting, toning, and stenciling of early films performed by hand. Moving Color brings a startling moment in cinema’s genealogy to life.
2016 Teacher-Scholar Award (professional)
Given by MSU
Education (1)
University of Chicago: Ph.D. 2007
Affiliations (2)
- Film Studies Program : Director
- Domitor, the International Society of the Study of Early Cinema : vice-president
Links (5)
News (3)
The Wonder of Hand-Painted Early Cinema
The New Republic online
2016-01-22
Early film historians have the unhappy lot of repeatedly needing to remind non-specialist readers that whatever assumptions they’ve inherited about the movie’s first decades are basically wrong, or incomplete, or given with the stress in the wrong places. Early movies, they insist, were often not screened in black and white, and hardly ever in silence. Many of Edison’s accomplishments, they admit, are better attributed to his lesser-known collaborators. And the first films were not, they caution, the charmingly naïve productions they sometimes seem to be.
Beyond Black and White: The Forgotten History of Color in Silent Movies
The Atlantic online
2015-06-25
For many modern audiences, silent films are virtually synonymous with black and white. Yet as far back as 1895, more than 80 percent of them were all or somewhat colored with dyes, stencils, color baths, and tints. These additives and techniques transformed an already magical medium into transcendent dreamscapes that were colored by craftspeople—mostly women—who painted every tiny black-and-white frame one-by-one, prefiguring the colorization process developed in the 1970s. Archived at Holland’s EYE Filmmuseum, more than 250 still images culled from 96 of these largely forgotten films are featured in an eye-popping new book, Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema.
Now Premiering: MSU's New Film Studies Program
MSU Today online
2015-02-11
As Michigan continues to welcome blockbuster filmmakers to the state, Michigan State University has launched a new bachelor’s degree program in film studies.
Journal Articles (3)
Chariots of Fire Rerun: Locating Film's Cultural Capital on a Contemporary Stage
Journal of British Cinema and Television
Tom Rice and Joshua Yumibe
2015 The title sequence of Chariots of Fire – filmed on the West Sands beach of St Andrews, Scotland – has become one of the most reworked and reinterpreted moments of British cinema, transposed across a variety of places, politics and times. In exploring these moves – from the period of its setting in 1924, through its production in 1980, and to its most recent reworkings in the London 2012 Olympics – the article examines the constantly evolving legacies of the sequence and the cultural capital which it has accrued via these various contexts. By considering the original production and its subsequent multiple receptions, the article positions the sequence at the vanguard of shifts in film production and cultural heritage. Viewed from the vantage point of the 2012 Olympics, the film provides an integral source of cultural capital not just for national but also for local and regional economies as they increasingly target new sources of revenue in a post-industrial age.
FROM NITRATE TO DIGITAL ARCHIVE: The Davide Turconi Project
The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists
Alicia Fletcher and Joshua Yumibe
2013 This article examines the Davide Turconi Nitrate Frame Collection. The collection centers on the work of the Italian film historian Davide Turconi (1919–2005), who culled a massive collection of 23,491 frame clippings from the unique and influential Joye Collection of early cinema. Since 2003, the George Eastman House has preserved and digitized the collection in its entirety, and in 2011, the Giornate del Cinema Muto launched a publicly accessible website that opens digital access to the collection for research. We are interested in tracing the ways in which the collection—in its origin, circulation, and now digital transformation—usefully calls attention to the history of archival practices over the past century.
Visual diplomacy: Projections of power from the field in Ethiopia
Early Popular Visual Culture
Joshua Yumibe
2011 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.