Guest Editor’s Foreword: Restoring Color

Four sets of images appear on this issue’s cover, prepared by Swiss artist Alexandra Navratil from her installation piece Sample Frames (2011–12). Comprising 324 slide images synchronized across four slide projectors running on a loop, Sample Frames (Plate 1) reproduces the luminance of the nitrate frame samples of Eastman Kodak’s various editions of its tinting and toning guides for motion pictures.¹ These manuals were meant to codify and better commodify the resplendent hues of the silent screen: producers could select their tints and tones for scenes through this color card system of the film industry. In the color codes of silent cinema, the iron blue tone in the third set of images on the cover might represent night, or perhaps a snowy landscape, whereas the reddish-pink uranium tone of the fourth set might have reflected the magisterial hues of the sunset.

Beyond Kodak’s attempts at standardization, what Sample Frames elegantly calls attention to is the variability of color over time. These images, selected by Navratil from fifteen different copies of the Kodak guides, point not only to the attempted systemization of color but also to the inherent disorder of archival color. Kodak’s manuals—even as they aim to codify chromatic style—open up a disparate range of hues within the same image over time as reproduced across these various copies. Each of the fifteen guidebooks used in Sample Frames, just as every print of a film, has its own history of use, disuse, care, and neglect, and these variables register across the material differences foregrounded by Sample Frames. As such, Navratil’s projection work illustrates color’s ephemeral tendency to fade and fluctuate over time.

These considerations are central to the present issue of The Moving Image, which examines archival, industrial, and cultural concerns related to color film and media. From the earliest days to the present era of digital imaging, color has always been a vibrant yet ephemeral aspect of the moving image, and throughout this history, color has challenged those wishing to assess, preserve, and restore its hues in their original splendor. In addition to evaluating material properties, the restoration of chromatic media often involves considering color’s historical significance as part of an evolving media experience that has been transformed throughout the twentieth century and continues to change. In some periods, color has been considered a decorative add-on, in others an essential component of an image’s reality or a filmmaker’s stylistic arsenal. These attitudes are cyclical, but they are also shaped by industrial and artistic expectations and technological change. Indeed, with new digital processes for rendering color being introduced regularly, the modes of producing and exhibiting color in contemporary films—not to mention the use of digitization to rescue and replicate colors of the past—are shifting rapidly. Color now, just as with the historical hues of Navratil’s Sample Frames, is in an ongoing state of transformation.

The articles and Forum essays in this issue span the chromatic archive of the past century, yet within this range, silent cinema plays a prominent role. In recent years, work on the period has been vital for innovating archival and scholarly approaches to film color. The famed Brighton conference of 1978 has been a cornerstone for much of the current scholarly and archival work on silent cinema, yet significantly early color was barely discussed at the conference—in the published records, Barry Salt briefly brought up stenciling.² Subsequent research has shown that color was vital to the expansion of the film industry during the 1900–1906 years that the Brighton symposium examined. However, the relative lack of discussion of color in Brighton was not intentional but rather largely archival in nature. If a principle of Brighton was to screen extant films to better examine and revise long-held assumptions about the era, the archival reality of the 1970s was that much of the color material from the earlier period was not available for exhibition. This can in large part be credited to the difficulty of preserving, restoring, and viewing the colors of early cinema. Restoring these...