[ecrea] The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema Conference

The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema
Conference

Twenty years on from the groundbreaking Amsterdam workshop Disorderly 
Order: Colours in Silent Film, this conference will celebrate this 
milestone anniversary by providing a new forum to explore contemporary 
archival and academic debates around colour in the silent era.

The conference will explore a diverse range of archival and academic 
topics and provide a stimulating environment for specialists from across 
different disciplines. It will also include screenings of restored 
and/or rarely seen films.

The keynote speakers will be filmmaker and writer Peter Delpeut (Lyrical 
Nitrate and Diva Dolorosa), Tom Gunning (University of Chicago) and 
Vanessa Toulmin (National Fairground Archive/University of Sheffield).


In addition the event will also include screenings of restored and/or 
rarely seen films including:
MAUDITE SOIT LA GUERRE (Alfred Machin, Belgium, 1914)

New digital restoration of the pacifist film Maudite soit la 
guerre(1914) undertaken in 2014 by Cinematheque Royale de Belgique, in 
collaboration with EYE. This new version is mainly based on the coloured 
nitrate print held by EYE, including various colour techniques to great 
dramatic effect. A few additional black and white scenes that were 
discovered in Belgium and France are also edited in to make the story 
more complete.
LYRICAL NITRATE (Peter Delpeut, NL, 1990)

This found footage film is a tribute to the pre-1915 filmmaking and to 
the nitrate film stock. Delpeut compiled many scenes of dramatic nitrate 
decay, mainly from the Desmet Collection. EYE has now digitized the film 
and a DVD will be released in December 2014 (in conjunction with the 
Desmet Collection exhibition in EYE)
WHEN THE EARTH TREMBLED (USA, Lubin, 1913)

Premiere Screening on March 28th

This three reel fiction film, based on the real life San Francisco 
earthquake of 1906, is part of the Desmet Collection. The new 
restoration combines the best available images from 3 different sources: 
The duplicate negatives of the Desmet print held at the MoMA, an English 
version held by the BFI (in both cases the nitrate print is destroyed 
due to decay) and a tinted nitrate print with Dutch intertitles that has 
recently arrived to EYE. The new restoration (partly sponsored by the SF 
Silent Film Festival) aims to create the most complete version (since 
all the versions are lacking some footage) and to restore the original 
tints.

The conference is co-organised by EYE, Giovanna Fossati (University of 
Amsterdam/ASCA), and the Leverhulme Trust research project Colour in the 
1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts, run by Sarah Street 
(University of Bristol) and Joshua Yumibe (University of St Andrews / 
Michigan State University).

In conjunction with the conference, a new book on silent film colour, 
Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema by Tom Gunning, Giovanna Fossati, 
Joshua Yumibe and Jonathon Rosen will be published by Amsterdam 
University Press and presented at EYE.

Dr Vicky Jackson
Research Assistant
Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts
Department of Film and Television
University of Bristol
Cantocks Close
Woodland Road
Bristol
BS8 1UP



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