An Edwardian Color Film Hiding In Plain Sight
A couple months ago, I made a post about a little bit of film history hiding in plain sight in a documentary… and much to my surprise, it happened again!
I was watching a documentary on the Hope Diamond and this little clip caught my eye:
Notice the localized flickering, and the slow motion. I did some contrast correction, and then tinted the frames in alternating red-cyan, and then this happened -
Another bit of Kinemacolor film hiding in a documentary! The way this worked was that the camera had an alternating red-green filter, and shot at twice the usual speed of 16 frames per second. The filtered black and white film was screened with an identical filter in the projector, also at twice the regular speed, creating a color picture… albeit with some rather nasty flickering. Technicolor this ain’t, but it gives an idea of the what the scene really looked like.
Given the history of the company, this clip dates back to at least 1914. I gotta watch more documentaries about the era.
