Disorderly Order | Colours in Silent Film - The 1995 Amsterdam Workshop

The silent era witnessed innumerable attempts, applying widely varying levels of technical sophistication, to show films in colors. Such attempts fall into two major categories: natural or photographic methods depending on the mechanical combination of differently colored but otherwise identical monochrome images, and applied color methods in which a black and white print was treated in some way with dyes, including hand painting, stenciling, toning and tinting. We wanted to demonstrate to participants of the Workshop that any process of preserving colored film has specific advantages and disadvantages. Two members of the workshop have attempted to revive the early processes used with promising results. Working from a transcript of the taped discussions, we have sought here to present a record of the proceedings in readable form.