Color is a very important and widely underestimated creative tool for filmmakers.

It can drive a narrative, so as a storytelling tool, it can create atmosphere, it can evoke a certain effect in audiences.

The history of colors in film is not a field that has been researched that much.

There's only a few people in the world that look at that history.

One of the goals of our exhibition is truly to show how complicated and how hard the evolution of color technologies actually were, so visitors think more about color, understand color as an artistic expression for film, and how well and thought through and intentional it is.

[music] What you see here is the result of this multispectral scanning.

It's based on capturing all the color information that is present in those color films and then applying a model based on measurements in the cinema of the projection lights.

Because when we do digitizations, what we aim to do is to reconstruct this color impression as people would have seen in the cinema.

We were allowed to go to four different archives and to scan very precious, very rare, early color films for this monochrome installation.

The desire to add color to film is as old as film itself.

The first technologies to do that were done in post-production.

There were different attempts to bring colors into film, and one of them were applied colors.

Applied colors is that you are shooting the film in black and white, and then you apply the colors only to the print.

These were created by a process called tinting, where the film strip is exposed into a dye bath, and the whole strip is colored.

Viewers got to see vibrant colors, bright hues, from really intense reds, to blues and greens, and yellows.

Those colors also had an enormous psychological impact on viewers because they were so intense and so bright, they created almost like a hallucinatory experience.

We put some film in there.

We loaded the Technicolor three with some film and decided to show it open just to make it clear that there's actually three film strips running through, and this Panavision is a special Panavision camera because it shot 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Very important color film, which we also see at the end of this exhibition.

I love that camera.

One of the early approaches to bring color to film was to cut out stencils from the tiny frames and then send this through this machine here.

This was then printed through the stencil onto the film, and, usually, they applied six to eight different dyes to one frame to give a color impression that was more close to the natural type of color rendition.

This stenciling table that we see in here, so if you imagine, at the time, there were hundreds and hundreds of them.

Yes, these were big workshops where 150 women were working.

Women have been associated with color and color production even before the invention of cinema.

They were busy with coloring postcards, photographs, magic lantern slides, which was the predominant narrative visual medium for a long, long time, and that just continued in early film.

The studio run by Élisabeth and Berthe Thuillier, a mother-daughter duo, they hand-painted and later stenciled films, and you can imagine how much labor that was.

One second of film is 24 frames, and each frame had to be painted by hand.

The role of women in color technologies was often overlooked, but it's also underestimated because it looks like a factory, it looks like it's sheer labor.

What people often forget, that it wasn't just labor, they also required tremendous artistic skills.

They had to have a steady hand.

They needed to know how to draw a line, and this was a creative work.

We're trying to show this here and portray these women not only as workers, but also as creative, artistic people.

In this gallery now, you can find several examples of roles that women played in this history starting very early with the American performer Loie Fuller, who developed the very famous serpentine dance, which became a staple of early film.

That dance was originally a stage dance.

It had to do with a lot of flowing textiles and movement, and she put color on her costume.

Walt Disney, he had been looking for color technologies for his animated films for quite a while, but there was nothing really convincing out there yet.

Then, one day, Herbert and Natalie Kalmus from Technicolor came and gave a presentation.

Natalie Kalmus played a very important role at Technicolor as Technicolor's color consultant.

She was running that department.

She was very involved with major Hollywood film productions.

The Technicolor three-strip process, you have three black and white strips running through this big, big camera.

These are exposed through filters, the blue, green, red.

There's a device, the so-called beam splitter.

The light falls into the lens, and the beam splitter divides the colors, and the three strips each record different color.

Then these are translated into printing colors.

Printing process, you bring one color after the other onto the film strip which was an extremely demanding process.

Disney was convinced by Technicolor and took the great risk.

Color was risky at the time.

It was incredibly expensive, and no one knew if people would even want to watch films in color.

He decided to make his short film Flowers and Trees a color film.

That also meant that his whole production would have to change.

He already had a lot of women working in inking and painting, black and white production cells, so they had to switch to color.

All the women working at ink and paint had to come up with a new process, where they inked in color, where they painted in color, and created all the production cells that were needed to create the film.

Technicolor was also an extremely expensive process.

When there was a change or the introduction of the so-called chromogenic stocks, where you had to color the dyes already embedded in the negative in the camera.

“At home or away, whether you take snapshots in black and white or color, this very weekend will be a wonderful time to take pictures you'll always treasure.” [music] This then was the transition to the more recent types of color films that we have, from the early 1940s to basically today.

Filmmakers were much more liberated in using the colors to their liking or according to their individual vision.

This also correlated to new ideas of ownership.

Filmmakers that were working in the studio systems, they were able to express themselves in a very individual and personal way.

You could do many, many different styles of how to express emotions, moods, atmospheres through colors in film.

One of our goals of our exhibition is for visitors to realize how much effort went not only into these color technologies, but then as a artistic tool for filmmakers, like how well thought through and thought out, and how intentional colors were applied to film.

Yes, it's such an immersive experience when you see this in this big, big display here.

It's a really highly sensory experience.