This book is dedicated to colour in silent cinema before 1930, and it features a selection of essays originally presented at the conference, The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema, that took place in 2015 at EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. It was convened by Giovanna Fossati (EYE Filmmuseum and University of Amsterdam) and the Leverhulme Trust-funded research project Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts led by Sarah Street (University of Bristol) and Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University).

The conference celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the groundbreaking Amsterdam Workshop Colours in Silent Film by providing a new forum to explore contemporary archival and academic debates around colour in the silent era. The use of colour in silent cinema was, for many years, a neglected aspect of film history but thanks, in large part, to the 1995 workshop, the last twenty years have seen the topic receive increasing attention from scholars and archivists. During this period, the importance of colour in silent cinema and the extent of its presence have been revealed to be of a much greater scale and significance than previously thought. This book reflects on the Colours in Silent Film workshop, revisiting key topics from the original event and looking at how more recent research sheds light on these issues. In addition, it considers the new directions research into silent colour has taken by exploring a diverse range of archival and academic topics.

The examination of colour in cinema during the silent period remains significant today, particularly in light of the digital revolution that has seen not only an explosion in colour in new digital media, but has also digitally transformed the options for preserving and restoring the chromatic elements of film and media. By examining colour in silent cinema, its uses, and the contemporary discourses surrounding colour's power and function, we can better understand the chromatic developments of the 21st century's digital age.

THE AMSTERDAM WORKSHOPS

Since the opening of the EYE Filmmuseum in 2012, it has provided an international forum for archival and scholarly research through its annual EYE International Conference, which hosted the Orphan Film Symposium in 2014 and The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema in 2015.

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.