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I found this video on Youtube entitled "Lillian Russell Film in Colour (1913)":

and the description says it's from a 1913 lost Kinemacolor film entitled "How to Live 100 Years". Do any parts of this film besides this still exist? If not, some info on this film would be appreciated.

How to Live 100 Years was a physical culture film which the actress Lillian Russell included in a lecture tour in 1913. Eileen Bowser writes about the film in The Transfomation of Cinema 1907-1915, which includes a a still of Russell at the Kinemacolor studios in Los Angeles in February 1913, with director Gaston Bell. She says that filming took place over two weeks, after which Russell launched her lecture tour on 24 February with the film included, starting in Chicago then moving to New York.

How the fragment has survived is unclear, but it must have had something to do with Russell's fame. The clip survives in the UCLA film archive and copies can be found on some footage library databases.

As I recall, it was thanks to Castle Films that the clip survived. They bought it as part of stock footage for their "old tyme movies" newsreels, inadvertently inserting the clip as black and white footage.

Is that slight flicker (it looks almost like 3-D if you're not wearing the glasses) due to the way Kinemacolor was filmed? That has been discussed previously. Or has this clip been adjusted for that?

The flicker and the fringing you're describing are both side effects of the process. The camera looked like so:



The filter wheel in front of the lens has two different colored filters—red and green. It spins in sync with the shutter in the camera, so that when the first frame is shot, it's through a red filter. When the shutter fully revolves and the second frame is exposed, it's through the green filter. In essence, no two color records are exposed at exactly the same time—the system is out of sync by default/design.

So when the film was printed and then played back through the projector, if you were to watch the proceedings in slo-motion, it would be literally each frame being played back red-green-red-green-red-green, etc. But since the film runs so fast (about 32 fps vs. the sound standard speed of 24 fps), your persistence of vision kicks in and the two records blend together to a natural color image.

The fringing, however, remains, because even though your persistence of vision is bringing the red and green frames together, you're seeing the slight differences between the first and second frame—remember, the red and green records are not shot in sync, but in succession.

As for the general flicker, I would guess that has more to do with the condition of the surviving print and probably the rack and tank processing that was used during that era, which in general gave somewhat uneven processing.

The 'flicker' is caused by the different tonal values of the red and green records. Kinemacolor was first shot and then projected with a rotating filter wheel in sync with the shutter, as said. The resultant film looks to be black-and-white, but with alternate frames shot through a red or a green filter, the tonal balance is different. When shown through a standard projector, at 16fps or even 24fps,and without the filter wheel, the film appear to be sluggishly slow (the recommended projection speed was 30fps) and black-and-white - with a pronounced flickering effect.

This is easily spotted in the several Kinemacolor films that have survived in footage libraries and the like. When Urban Motion Picture Industries (the parent copany of Kinemacolor founder Charles Urban) went bust in 1924, the receivers disposed of a lot of the Kinemacolor film that was in his collection to a variety of companies, who reused the footage as black-and-white - indeed may not have realised it was ever colour. A notable example of this is the John E. Allen Archives, which took in the Kinograms newsreel library (at one time co-managed by Urban) and had a number of films they categorised as 'flickers'. These were Kinemacolor films, not discovered as such until just a few years ago. The collection is now with the Library of Congress.

100 Years Ago was a Kinemacolor Company of America production, however, and Urban had little connection with the American off-shoot of his Kinemacolor business. So this paticular clip probably made its way to Castle Films by another, mysterious route.

urbanora wrote:The 'flicker' is caused by the different tonal values of the red and green records. Kinemacolor was first shot and then projected with a rotating filter wheel in sync with the shutter, as said. The resultant film looks to be black-and-white, but with alternate frames shot through a red or a green filter, the tonal balance is different. When shown through a standard projector, at 16fps or even 24fps,and without the filter wheel, the film appear to be sluggishly slow (the recommended projection speed was 30fps) and black-and-white - with a pronounced flickering effect.

Thanks to both of you.

urbanora wrote:When Urban Motion Picture Industries (the parent copany of Kinemacolor founder Charles Urban) went bust in 1924, the receivers disposed of a lot of the Kinemacolor film that was in his collection to a variety of companies, who reused the footage as black-and-white - indeed may not have realised it was ever colour. A notable example of this is the John E. Allen Archives, which took in the Kinograms newsreel library (at one time co-managed by Urban) and had a number of films they categorised as 'flickers'. These were Kinemacolor films, not discovered as such until just a few years ago. The collection is now with the Library of Congress.

100 Years Ago was a Kinemacolor Company of America production, however, and Urban had little connection with the American off-shoot of his Kinemacolor business. So this paticular clip probably made its way to Castle Films by another, mysterious route.

Thanks Urbanora. This answers, in part, a longstanding question that I had. I understand that Urban had plans to establish, in upstate New York, an institute which would present the world as his cameras had seen it, a place where researchers could access footage for purposes of research. I know of no similar plan going quite so far back, though in recorded sound the Berlin-Phonogrammarchiv had already been established for two decades. I figured that in laying the ground for such a plan that Urban would have to collect or concentrate footage in a single place, and certainly by 1920 or so his films were in a number of places, so that in itself would have been a challenge. My question was whether the concentration, or some part of it, might still exist somewhere. But if it was dispersed by receivers then not; I am interested in standard monochrome footage in addition to the Kinemacolor films.

One additional thought was that the 12 or so subjects that James A. FitzPatrick directed for Kineto were around when there was extensive redistribution of educational titles on safety film. By chance have any of these been recovered?

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