Description
Book SynopsisSusan Murray traces four decades of technological, cultural, and aesthetic debates about the possibility, use, and meaning of color television within the broader history of twentieth-century visual culture.
Trade Review"
Bright Signals is an important, engaging study that helps readers understand media history and anticipate developments going forward." -- Linda Levitt * PopMatters *
"What makes
Bright Signals distinguishable from others on the subject is the detailed historical and cultural analysis of why color television did not replace black-and-white television until the 1960s. . . . Recommended. All readers." -- C.L. Clements * Choice *
"A joy to read: it is meticulously researched, rhetorically lucid, and refreshingly jargon free. Beyond the book’s delightful illustrations, the text of
Bright Signals paints a vivid picture of the personalities and corporate campaigns most responsible for introducing color to the small screen. . . . Murray’s work should appeal to television studies generalists (especially those specializing in the network era), midcentury-media historians, and scholars of new media and technological transformation." -- Catherine Clepper * Film Quarterly *
"A remarkably fresh approach to the social and cultural relationships created by the medium." -- James McConnachie * TLS *
"Cogently written and richly illustrated,
Bright Signals tracks the invention and normalization of color television from 1928 to 1970 with interdisciplinary precision and historical depth. . . . A a remarkable achievement in media history and theory." -- Joshua Yumibe * Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *
"With over one hundred color images from television programs, advertisements, charts, test patterns and photographs, the book is, on top of everything else, a strikingly beautiful object. Beyond being an extraordinarily researched and lively account of this key period in media history,
Bright Signals also demonstrates the importance of further theorizing our relationship to colored moving images today. . . . We are still learning how to live with color visual media, and
Bright Signals is invaluable in advancing the understanding of the historical and theoretical issues at play." -- Doron Galili * Cinéma & Cie *
"While colour cinema has been the focus of numerous recent publications, television scholarship has yet to catch up with this chromatic turn.
Bright Signals, the first critical history of colour television in America, thus makes a very welcome and necessary contribution to the field. . . . Through meticulous archival research, Murray has constructed an account of colour television that at once offers a comprehensive history of a technology while remaining attentive to much larger social and political issues around race, class and cold war politics." -- Kirsty Sinclair Dootson * Critical Studies in Television *
"In terms of providing readers with a comprehensive cultural history of color television,
Bright Signals is a tour de force." -- Laura Kalba * Public Books *
"
Brights Signals provides such important research that it's surprising someone hadn't taken it on earlier. . . . A balanced analysis of the complex struggle to develop color technology amidst intense corporate competition." -- Christopher H. Sterling * Communication Booknotes Quarterly *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. "And Now—Color": Early Color Systems 11
2. Natural Vision Versus "Tele-Vision": Defining and Standardizing Color 34
3. Color Adjustments: Experiments, Calibrations, and Color Training, 1950–1955 86
4. Colortown, USA: Expansion, Stabilization, and Promotion, 1955–1959 127
5. The Wonderful World of Color: Network Programming and the Spectacular Real, 1960–1965 176
6. At the End of the Rainbow: Global Expansion, the Space Race, and the Cold War 217
Conclusion 251
Notes 259
Bibliography 293
Index 303
