Barbara Flueckiger

Light source criteria for digitizing color films

The poor stability of film dyes and the decline of film photography require the development of digitization techniques designed to acquire the full amount of color information carried by photographic film. The spectral characteristics of the light source used during the image acquisition extremely influence the quality of the final digital reproduction of color films; this paper thoroughly discusses the criteria to be adopted to properly choose the light source. A method is described to infer the analytical densities of a color film from a set of measurements of the integral density; this provides the necessary spectroscopic information for the choice of the light source. The experimental part reports the analysis of two photographic samples from archival material: a Technicolor and an Agfacolor from the 1940s. The experiments highlighted the peculiar spectroscopic characteristics of the analyzed samples. The attention was drawn on the historical aesthetics of color film and the ethical issues related to its preservation.

Chromatic Callier Effect and its Repercussions on the Digitization of Early Film Colors

The projection on screen has always been the supreme result of cinematography. Thus the digitization of a motion picture should seek to recreate the visual impression in the cinema. The image-forming particles contained in early color films can generate remarkable differences between a film directly observed with diffuse backlighting and its image projected on screen. In the recent decades this discrepancy has been largely overlooked by the film preservation community (film curators, scanner manufacturers, colorists, etc.). This paper re-establishes the importance of referring to the visual impression in the cinema, and describes the spectral variation of the Callier effect that can significantly alter early film colors when digitized. We have introduced the term “chromatic Callier effect” and described its repercussions on film digitization reporting case studies of tinted and toned film prints. The experimental results highlight that important changes are required in the optical design of film scanners to improve the digitization of motion pictures.

Soundscapes in American mainstream films

The question of how films establish an acoustic environment was studied in the course of a research project on sound design in American mainstream film. The study was supported by the Swiss National Foundation. The corpus of this research project consisted of 96 films, their production years ranging from 1926 to 1995. Most of these films received an Academy Award for Best Sound. They were closely examined regarding their strategies to establish fictional, yet natural‐seeming, soundscapes. It was discovered that the film industry developed a rather restricted vocabulary to display certain types of geographically, socially, and/or culturally defined places. The cause of the restriction can be found in technical and historical reasons as well as psychological considerations. Film soundscapes have a clear communicative function in contrary to natural soundscapes, which contain random noises. According to an unwritten Hollywood rule of the so‐called classic era of the thirties and forties, any distraction from...