#5 - Catwalk Cinema

In 2019, Eye Filmmuseum received a collection of 300 cans of nitrate films. Among these, there were four reels of stencilled French fashion newsreels from the 1910s and 1920s, with meticulous details and amazingly vibrant colours. Eye restored one reel each year, and the films premiered at Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna every summer.

This session, curator Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi and restorer Annike Kross will discuss the restoration and specifically the colour grading process of these stencil-coloured films. They will explain how the nitrate prints were directly scanned, followed by a digital clean-up with a careful attention to detail, particularly considering the glitter and sparkles on the dresses. A major advantage of going digital for the preservation of stencil-coloured films is that during colour grading each stencil colours can be handled individually while maintaining the neutrality of the black-and-white base. In contrast, a purely photochemical preservation would always bring a certain colour hue to the neutral black-and-white parts, and the colours could only be adjusted simultaneously, resulting in less brilliant and accurate results.

The conversation will be moderated by Marie-Aude Baronian, Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Amsterdam, and accompanied by a screening of the recently restored fashion films from Eye’s Collection.

Guests

Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi is curator at Eye Filmmuseum specialising in Silent Cinema. Since 1999 she has worked on the discovery, preservation and presentation of many forgotten or presumed-lost films. She is directly involved with the festivals Il Cinema Ritrovato, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto and co-curator of the travelling archival project Views of the Ottoman Empire, and Cinema's First Nasty Women, a DVD-box with 99 films, released in 2022.

Annike Kross studied restoration of Moving Image and Photography at the University of Applied Science in Berlin, where she finished her studies in 2006, graduating cum laude with a final thesis on ‘The Simulation Of Tinting And Toning Using The So-called Desmet Method’. Since 2007, she has been working at Eye Filmmuseum as a film restorer, preparing, carrying out and supervising the analog and digital preservations and restorations with a specialisation on the preservation of tinted, toned and stencilled nitrate films.