Most people think of Kodachrome as the amateur film material that Paul Simon payed homage to in his song “Kodachrome”. However, as Norris Pope elaborately lays out in his article “Kodachrome and the Rise of 16mm Professional Film Production in America, 1938-1950” (2016) after its introduction to the market in 1935, Kodachrome color reversal film almost immediately was adopted by (semi-)professional filmmakers producing films for non-theatrical distribution. As a result, Eastman Kodak started to bring duplication reversal film material to the market as early as 1938.
In my presentation I will zoom in on the work of the French filmmaker Éric Duvivier, who made educational and other non-theatrical films in collaboration with several pharmaceutical companies as well as the French government from the 1950s until the 1980s. He extensively used Kodachrome, Ektachrome and other reversal film materials. During the 1960s he made a series of films on the topic of hallucinations. In one of these films Images du monde visionnaire (1963) color plays an extremely important role. As a result, questions on color rendition and color quality of the various reversal film materials that were used for this film, are extremely relevant.
Within the interdisciplinary team of the ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors we closely investigated three prints of this film: the camera material, an Eastman reversal duplication print from the 1960s, and a Gevacolor reversal print from the 1980s. This resulted in a combination of film historical, aesthetic, colorimetric and archival studies of which I will present the results. Finally, I will draw up a series of questions with regard to the restoration of Kodachrome films that were made for distribution outside of official cinemas.
