Technicolor-2015 100th Anniversary

[louie]

TEAL AND ORANGE! WE'VE COME FULL CIRCLE!!!

[s.w.a.c.]

Tried to find a place to post this, and this thread seemed like the best place being the most recent Technicolor-themed thread. Steve at Thunderbean uploaded what he calls a "Cinema Paradiso" type reel of 2- and 3-strip Technicolor clips (animation and live-action) that were compiled by some anonymous projectionist (some of them may have been due to offensive content, but not all), and he took care to make sure they had the proper "look" in the transfer.

[BFlueckiger]

See Technicolor No. II and III on Timeline of Historical Film Colors

http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/timeline-entry/1213/

http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/timeline-entry/1300/

Many more photographs of Technicolor nitrate prints will follow soon, please subscribe to http://filmcolors.org/ to receive a notification when these images from the Library of Congress and from George Eastman House will be posted online.

BTW: Is the frame from The Gulf Between shown above taken from Timeline of Historical Film Colors? Please always ask for permission to use the frames. They might be copyright protected...

[jameslayton]

http://www.eastmanhouse.org/tools/press ... nicolor100

George Eastman House to Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Technicolor

Celebrations to include a major exhibition, multimedia website, landmark book, and international film retrospective

From 1915, the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation and its revolutionary color processes transformed cinema forever. To celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of Technicolor’s incorporation, George Eastman House is curating a blockbuster exhibition, creating an online exhibition, and publishing a landmark book. In addition, an international retrospective of films from the museum’s collection has been jointly curated by Deutsche Kinemathek, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Austrian Film Museum, and will premiere at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival in February.

The exhibition In Glorious Technicolor, opening January 24, 2015, celebrates the vivid history of one of the most widely recognized names in the American film industry—a company whose revolutionary motion picture color process enabled such Hollywood masterpieces as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939), and Singin’ In the Rain (1952). Composed of stunning visual displays, this exhibition features original artifacts and projected video clips to explore Technicolor’s wide-ranging impact on the form and content of cinema, and draws heavily from the vast Technicolor Corporate Archive now held at George Eastman House.

“In Glorious Technicolor is the first major exhibition dedicated to Technicolor’s enduring legacy,” said Paolo Cherchi Usai, Senior Curator of Moving Image, George Eastman House. “George Eastman House is uniquely positioned to examine Technicolor’s history through our unparalleled collections of Technicolor films, equipment, and papers. We have created a truly multimedia exhibition showcasing all of the elements that make Technicolor so influential in the moving image industry.”

Highlights will include the company’s evolving camera technology, from its first handcrafted camera from 1916 to the massive Technirama widescreen system of the 1950s. Original costumes, production designs, posters, and photographs will document how color was used creatively and presented to the public, while the vibrant dyes used to create Technicolor’s incomparable “look” will shed light on the science behind the process. Rare tests from Douglas Fairbanks’s The Black Pirate (1926), behind-the-scenes stills from the Errol Flynn’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), and home movies from the set of The African Queen (1951) will reveal the stars and filmmakers most associated with color. Additionally, the exhibition will honor the achievements of Academy Award–winning cinematographers Ray Rennahan and Jack Cardiff, as well as Technicolor’s often overlooked engineers, whose work remained largely out of the limelight.

To complement In Glorious Technicolor, George Eastman House will present two works by London-based visual artist Aura Satz, whose oeuvre cuts across film, sound, performance, and sculpture. The installation, Eyelids Leaking Light, will feature the US premiere of Satz’s new work, Chromatic Aberration (2014), in which she explores the aesthetics of “color fringing” by using film elements from the Eastman House collection. Chromatic Aberration will be exhibited alongside Doorway for Natalie Kalmus (2013), an audiovisual work that transforms a Bell & Howell color film printer into a grotto of prismatic lights. Eyelids Leaking Light will run concurrently with In Glorious Technicolor through April 26, 2015.

An online version of the exhibition will also be available, made possible in part by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. To be launched in January 2015, the site will allow users to explore Technicolor’s rich history through original artifacts in the museum’s collections. It will also act as a portal for audiences to engage in other Technicolor centennial celebrations occurring throughout 2015 at the museum, including the film series, gallery exhibition, and book launch. The website will facilitate access to highlights from George Eastman House’s unparalleled equipment and documentation collections that have previously been accessible only to on-site researchers. Creative, corporate, and technological milestones in the company’s history will be illustrated with high-quality digital reproductions of historical artifacts, new animated graphics, and interviews with curators and experts. The multimedia website will be live on January 24, 2015, and can be found by visiting http://www.eastmanhouse.org/technicolor100.

George Eastman House’s collection of Technicolor films has inspired a film series dedicated to the various Technicolor processes to celebrate Technicolor’s impressive cinematic legacy. A selection of movie masterpieces for an international tour was put together jointly by Deutsche Kinemathek, the Austrian Film Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. The curated program is entitled, “Glorious Technicolor: From George Eastman House and Beyond” and many of the original prints and modern reprints will come from the extensive collection at George Eastman House. The complete series will debut in Germany at the Retrospective of the 65th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) in February 2015. It will include thirty Technicolor films from the United States and Great Britain. Additional information on the Berlin festival and the Retrospective section can be found at http://www.berlinale.de/en/das_festival ... index.html. Following its premiere at the Berlinale, the film series will be shown at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna, Austria.

The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915–1935 is the first detailed history of Technicolor’s formative years. The lavishly illustrated book draws on a wealth of previously untapped internal documentation, studio production files, and firsthand accounts. Written by James Layton and David Pierce and edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai and Catherine A. Surowiec, The Dawn of Technicolor includes the first comprehensive filmography of two-color Technicolor titles. The book will have its official launch during the 65th Berlin International Film Festival within the framework of the Retrospective “Glorious Technicolor.” The 448 page book is available now for pre-order ($65/$58.50 Eastman House members) and will ship by February 1, 2015. To purchase, visit http://www.eastmanhouse.org/dawnoftechnicolor. We invite you to follow and join the online conversations related to all of the Technicolor centennial events at #Technicolor100.

“The publishing of The Dawn of Technicolor was a true collaborative undertaking at George Eastman House,” said Bruce Barnes, Ron and Donna Fielding Director, George Eastman House. “I am beyond proud of the work that was put into it by its authors and editors and by our staff, and the final result is a remarkable work of scholarship that we are excited to share with the world.”

About George Eastman House

George Eastman House is located on the estate of George Eastman, the father of popular photography and motion picture film. Eastman House comprises world-class collections of photographs, motion pictures, photographic and cinematic technology, and photographically illustrated books. Established as an independent non-profit institution in 1947, it is the world’s oldest photography museum and one of the earliest film archives. The archive houses 28,000 film titles and 4 million film-related publicity stills, posters, scores, scripts, and pre-cinema artifacts. The Technicolor Collection—incorporating documents, photographs, films, dyes, and equipment—is by far the largest set of materials on the company, its history, and its pioneering technology. Eastman House also holds the world’s largest collection of camera technology. Learn more at http://www.eastmanhouse.org.

[All Darc]

Nice gallery :

https://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/timeline-entry/1300/

[35MM]

A great deal of how a picture looks has to do with what the film makers want it to look like. Today's color film (and even more so, digital capture) have a tremendous amount of latitude. If a picture looks washed out it is probably because that is what it always looked like, and not the fault of the process. Faded prints don't usually look washed out. They change color because of dye fading, usually turning toward magenta. A faded Eastman negative often has a yellow look.
The Technicolor process was unique, and not related to later types of color photography.

That's fascinating Richard; but do you agree with me that something seemed to have "happened" in the 70's in the film industry as a whole to {either} the film stock they were using, or the camera's? Or maybe even the way the film was printed?

Examples:
Now look at this from "The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three" in 1974. It's brown, its dull and it's murky. There is not one colour in it that is vivid or saturated.

Exactly how I remember riding on the subway.

[Jack Theakston]

You've got a few things going on here. One is that we're mostly looking at video representations of these films that aren't really based on anything in reality of how the films looked in their original run, with the curves that are an effect of the print stock.

At best, a colorist today should be shooting for what was common back then: neutral grays, good flesh tones, etc. Some graders, however, have been introducing "looks" into films that were never there. There's a color grader at a certain New York lab that has been doing work on certain studio films, giving them that hideous teal/orange look, but no one has been QCing or rejecting the masters, so they end up looking like that on Blu-Ray. Pathetic.

Before the '70s, it was always common to shoot a thick, well-exposed negative in color, because those stocks were pretty slow, so it meant lots of light, which can also translate into flat lighting, unless you break it up with color.
So if you watch a color film from the studio era, while the lighting tends to be flat, a good set designer and DP could use color to break things up. Also, with a dense negative, especially in the Eastman Color era, heavy printing lights and especially the dye transfer process at Technicolor could juice up the color, because of the added contrast inherent to the printing technique (Technicolor matrices were always optically printed.)

Up until the mid-'70s, almost all prints came off the camera negative. Starting in the mid-'70s, intermediate stocks became the norm. The good part of this is that the camera negs no longer suffered a lot of wear—the bad part was a couple of generations later, the prints being yielded looked mediocre at best, but they were passable. Also, the 1970s were probably some of the worst years in lab work, and many labs' quality standards dropped during this period. This is especially obvious in B&W work during the '70s, where bad gamma was a constant issue.

In 1968, Kodak introduced their first ASA 100 color film stock, which meant having to pump a lot of light onto the scene wasn't necessary anymore. It also meant that you could push stocks in processing even further, which means heavier grain and some sacrifice of color in the process. A lot of DPs during that period really embraced this, and with New Wave Hollywood film directors taking productions out of the studio and onto locations, having this fast film stock meant less light and less color.

So as far as the "look" of many '70s color films go, it was more artistic choice over technical limitations. Certainly this is the case with PELHAM, which had to work with low-light conditions (ever try shooting even 400 ASA on a New York subway? It's very difficult at 1/25), but it also adds to the grittiness that you remember being there.

[All Darc]

Why lab work drop in quality in the 70's ???

I remamber Robert A. Harris comment about film duplication quality. Fine film duplication stocks for B&W film was already available in the 40's, and very good B&W film duplication stocks in the 50's an 60's. From 2000's to today B&W film duplication stocks, if well processed (great step contact film printer and prime lab work) can jump two generations without noticeable quality drop (unless for very skilled eyes).
But color film duplication stocks only reached good quality in the 90's. So color film duplication was a huge problem.

And step contact printer took a lot of time to copy films, compared to Continuous contact printer (fast and not so sharp) . But we may think : "If they could just create a internegative very close to the quality of the original negative, using the best film stock and printers, we could be able to strikes quality prints from it with conventional printers, we would just need step contact printer to only produce the interpositive and then the internegatives, for exportation to mass production of prints in each country. But even so appears that many films producers and labs do not have such care even for the creation of internegatives, so print quality was still a problem in most cases.
From 16 years ago to today print stock (for projection) it's also quite better than in the past. But do you think they will spent more money using the best (and more expensible) film stock for print? I don't think so.
Newsreels for example, even during 40's, made interpositives and internegatives, since there was a giant number of prints required for newsreels, but they used cheap print stocks instead of film duplication stocks, as it was more affordable this way. That's why newsreels in general looks so bad.

In the last 15 years they can create a quality internegative by scanning the film in 4K and printing it direct as a negative image on quality polyester film with very fine grain. Polyester it's so strong that can handle hundreds film copies before get worn. But this was expansible. And now that 4k scanning and film recording machines became more affordable, the theater are getting digital projectors.

[s.w.a.c.]

There's a color grader at a certain New York lab that has been doing work on certain studio films, giving them that hideous teal/orange look, but no one has been QCing or rejecting the masters, so they end up looking like that on Blu-Ray. Pathetic.

Hmmm....I wonder if this explains the look of certain recent Criterion releases? I've had to skip a few of their titles in favour of UK releases (some Cronenberg & DePalma films, for example) which seem to look the way the films did when first released.

[Bob Furmanek]

Not Technicolor but here's an example of this horrible new look. The European Blu-ray release is on top.

How can anyone think that's an improvement?!


Courtesy of Thad Komorowski.

[All Darc]

In old movies someone could presume: "Ohnn, in old days they hadn't many reliable color reference, since prints would fade (exeption for technicolor dye transfer) from film prints to color photographic paper etc... so we can forgive them"

But on DVD Beaver we see a lot of films after videotape era, in digital era, with a lot of differences from one release to another, even film s from just 10 years ago. This is a vadalism...

[earlytalkiebuffRob]

Ok - whilst we are talking about colour on this thread over the past 100 years; I want to ask a question. I was watching "Prizzi's Honor" today on HD television, and I was surprised at how dull and lifeless and non-vivid the colour was. It was just lifeless and boring and muddy and dull. The film was made in 1985 and I've noticed that a LOT of films made in the 70's to the late 80's are the same! Compared to the colours of the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's there seemed to be a change in colour film stock in the 70's. Colour seemed to become a lot more muddy and dull and just plain boring sometime in the early 70's as if they were using cheap film or something? In the end I was so bored with "Prizzi's Honor" I just deleted it. The film was going nowhere and was boring me to death. But why was it that colour seemed to take a nosedive in the 70's??

I can give examples of two films from the late 60's that STILL had that VIVID highly saturated "look" with lovely colours; and they are "Rosemary's Baby" (1968) and "Funny Girl" (1968). Both of these film had that classic Technicolor "look".

But then a couple of example of shoddy, nasty, muddy coloured films are obviously "Prizzi's Honor" and something like "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" in 1974. That one also springs to mind as being colourless.

But then leap ahead to the present day and we have lovely colour films again such as "Oz The Great And Powerful" and yet I tend to think of "The Wiz" (1978) and "Return To Oz" (1985) as being colourless and grainy and cheap looking.

Glad I'm not in so much of a minority over PRIZZI. I spotted a copy of it the other day and was reminded of how disappointed I was in it compared to other views. Even the blurb on the case went on about 'masterpiece' and Oscar-nominations, but my reaction when it came out was one of indifference. The only reason I paid any note to the DVD was because a friend is into Mafia stuff...

[earlytalkiebuffRob]

A great deal of how a picture looks has to do with what the film makers want it to look like. Today's color film (and even more so, digital capture) have a tremendous amount of latitude. If a picture looks washed out it is probably because that is what it always looked like, and not the fault of the process. Faded prints don't usually look washed out. They change color because of dye fading, usually turning toward magenta. A faded Eastman negative often has a yellow look.
The Technicolor process was unique, and not related to later types of color photography.

That's fascinating Richard; but do you agree with me that something seemed to have "happened" in the 70's in the film industry as a whole to {either} the film stock they were using, or the camera's? Or maybe even the way the film was printed?

Examples:
Now look at this from "The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three" in 1974. It's brown, its dull and it's murky. There is not one colour in it that is vivid or saturated.

Exactly how I remember riding on the subway.

Yes, travelling by 'tube' is not exactly a glamorous experience so that sort of treatment is more in keeping...