THE COLOUR FANTASTIC

Round Table Archival Panel: Preservation, Restoration, Presentation, and Policy Sunday, 29 March 2015

PANELLISTS: Giovanna Fossati (moderator), Sonia Genaitay, Ulrich Ruedel, Bryony Dixon, Annike Kross, Tina Anckarman, Tone Føreland, Thierry Delannoy, Benjamin Alimi, Fumiko Tsuneishi

The conference started with presentations of archivists from various institutions, immediately followed by a panel discussion, moderated by Giovanna Fossati. The archival presentations focussed on concrete projects undertaken by the archives.

Sonia Genaitay from the British Film Institute (BFI) discussed the importance of documenting the colours (and techniques) on the nitrate stock within archives’ catalogues. Such colour logs were kept by BFI archivists for many decades, and today they have become crucial in cases in which the nitrate are no longer available (due to extreme material decay or the policy of destroying the hazardous nitrate print after copying onto safety material), since most surviving safety copies are in black and white. Ulrich Ruedel from the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) Berlin (previously at the BFI) presented the scientific methods used to analyse and record early colours, focussing particularly on the cases of mordent tones and later on Kinemacolor. This latter case provides an example in which the colour only becomes evident during projection, merging as it were ‘in our eyes and in our minds’. Such additive colour systems make it clear that analysing early colour does not mean only examining vintage prints on the bench, but should go beyond this to examining them during projection. Bryony Dixon, curator of silent film at the BFI, talked about the ways in which their institute tries to disseminate the message that early cinema was coloured, noting that, although restoring early colours adds significantly to restoration costs, the presence of colours also make the sponsors and the general audience more enthusiastic about new restorations. Dixon also stressed the differences of colour between various historic genres (such as the bright fantasy colours of the fairy films, opposed to the as-natural-as-possible colours applied to films showing wild life) and presented some of the new possibilities of bringing the films directly to audiences through streaming video like the BFI Player.