I feel honoured to be invited for this privileged position in the programme of the conference. All the more as I am no film scholar and I have not dealt with the subject of colour in silent cinema since the end of the 1990s. Therefore, my contribution can only be personal. I hope to share memories with you that can illuminate some of the reasons why it is here in the EYE Filmmuseum that we have this conference on colours in silent cinema.

More than fifteen years have passed since I made Diva Dolorosa (1999), my last film concerned with silent cinema. Even more significantly, twenty years have passed since the Amsterdam Workshop on colours in silent cinema took place, which is so vividly honoured with this conference. I was one of the instigators of that workshop. Oddly enough, it took place when I was in the process of leaving the Nederlands Filmmuseum. Being a victim of the famous sevenyear itch, I wanted to pick up my career as an independent filmmaker and start a new career as a writer. Hence, for me, the workshop was connected with a feeling of closure – the conclusion of seven years being part of the world of film archives. Seven years that had been invigorating from my first day.

Looking back on them now, I think you can say these years coincided with a significant period of transition in the world of film archives, not in the least in their attitude towards colours in silent cinema. I will talk about this period as a more or less defined episode. Firstly, because I only worked in these years in the world of film archives. And secondly, and much more important, I believe that these years indeed were some kind of hinge, a chapter in the history of film-archival practices, a moment of transition between two eras.

After being asked to deliver this keynote speech, memories easily came back. First of all, memories of faces: some of the people that, in the past years, sadly enough have passed away. Primarily, of course, the face of Hoos Blotkamp: she was the director of this institute from the late 1980s into the 1990s.