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.
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.
Kodak´s Cineon system of mapping color negative density to 10 bit log files has been the dominate work flow in the film industry which uses, with few exceptions, color negative. In archival work, it is common to work with material that falls outside the range of what is possible to capture with this system and this presentation will cover strategies to capturing color positives, chromogenic, tinted and painted, that have a much higher density range and different color gamut than color negatives. Some of the strategies that will be discussed are high dynamic range scanning, matching the illumination to the dye set and creating lookup tables to get back into the industry work flow in order to accurately reproduce these material in the digital realm.
During the last few decades a variety of technical solutions have come into use for the preservation and presentation of applied colours. This paper is going to analyse comprehensively the advantages and disadvantages of every method that has been available so far (photochemical: internegative, Desmet, chemical dye; digital: scan in colour, scan in b&w) by comparing results deriving from a single nitrate element of Die ideale Filmerzeugung (The Ideal Film Production, 1914), concluding with a digital colour reproduction process of Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City without Jews, 1924) as a pragmatic and authentic solution for archival restorations.
Modern cinema has several technical standards and tools that aims at reproducing it through different devices and through time. This is not the case of the analog cinema from the past, even if recent.
When someone has to face the restoration of an aged film, usually no color reference is available. Even in the rare case of having some information about film characteristics, the film aging depends on so many parameters, like e.g. humidity and temperature of conservation, that no reliable model of the color fading can be used. As a consequence, we cannot properly use standard color management tools in the restoration pipeline.
What is done actually is restoring the frame by visual inspection, as main criterion of assessing the final results. This means that we operate in a “subjective way”. Thus, the restoration process “simulates” what we suppose could have been the original color. Then this is viewed in a new (modern) projection environment, in terms of gamut and overall balance and contrast.
Starting from these considerations, the talk will present an alternative approach for color and contrast processing in the digital restoration pipeline, able to lower the amount of supervision time required.
