An ERC BodyCapital working day presentation.
On the 19 November 2019 ERC BodyCapital working day, the project members had the pleasure of hearing Bregt Lameris speak about her ongoing research at the University of Zurich.
Most people think of Kodachrome as the amateur film material that Paul Simon payed homage to in his song Kodachrome. However, after its introduction to the market in 1935, Kodachrome color reversal film almost immediately was adopted by (semi-)professional filmmakers producing films for non-theatrical distribution. As a result, Eastman Kodak started to bring duplication reversal film material to the market as early as 1938.
In her presentation she zoomed in on the work of the French filmmaker Eric Duvivier, who made medical films in collaboration with several pharmaceutical laboratories as well as the French government from the 1950s until the 1980s. During the 1960s he made a series of films on the theme hallucinations. One of these films Images du monde visionnaire (1963) has color as its major component. As a result, questions on differences in color rendition and quality as a consequence of duplication practice in the case of Kodachrome are extremely relevant for this film.
Within the interdisciplinary team of the ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors they closely investigated three prints of this film: the camera material, an Eastman reversal duplication print from the 1960s, and a Gevachrome reversal print from the 1984. This resulted in a combination of film historical, aesthetic, colorimetric and archival studies of which she presented some of the results. On February 26, 2019, she will present new findings on Duvivier and colour at the Colour in Film Conference in London that will take place at the British Film Institute.
** In the image, on the left is a picture taken from the film Images du monde visionnaire and on the right, the visualisation of a computer generated colorimetric analysis of it.
