Japan’s oldest surviving colour talkie, TheThousand-StitchBelt (Senninbari, 1937), was discovered at Gosfilmofond, the national film archive of Russia. The print found in Russia was a nitrate colour positive and it had to be scanned on-site. But fortunately, the film uses a two-color system, hence it had a limited amount of colors it could reproduce. This limitation turned out to be of great help because we could isolate the colors that could not be reproduced by the original film and utilized the measurements to create a specific LUT. We made a photochemical simulation with today’s film stock, while also conducting a material analysis of KingLee’s Visit (1940), a nitrate colour positive made using the same two-colour system and one that happened to be included in the NFAJ collection. In the end, we came up with a refined LUT by using a supplementary tool that prevents adopting colors the two-colour system cannot express during colour grading. In that way, the NFAJ has, in recent years, been developing methods of restoration based on the material characteristics of colour film. In this presentation, we will show two of the NFAJ’s recent experiments for colour restoration: (1) an quantitive approach that conducts colour resproduction based on the film data sheet of Fuji Color Negative 8515 / Fuji Color Positive 8819, and (2) a more material approach to colour reproduction based on a principal component analysis of Kamakura Carnival(1951), a surviving nitrate positive from the earliest period of Fuji colour.
