When you step into the Musée Albert-Kahn, one of the most beautiful and extraordinary places in the whole of Paris, a notice on the wall speaks out to you in French and English: Je ne vous demande qu’une chose, c’est d’avoir les yeux grands ouverts I only ask one thing of you: keep your eyesRead More
The past did not take place in black-and-white, but many of the technologies for documenting that past when it was present operated in that way. But in our age of never-ending marvels we can right the egregious errors of such out-moded systems. So it is that the colourisation of black-and-white actuality films and photographs hasRead More
Next in these reviews of the year is things seen on screen. Now that the boundaries between film, television and Netflix have blurred so utterly, it seems foolish to think of the various forms of screen entertainment or instruction as being separate from one another. We separate them only out of habit. Anyway, here areRead More
Earlier this year I wrote a blog post about the director Peter Jackson’s plans to produce documentary featuring colourised footage from the First World War. Though nothing was available of the film bar a single still, I was alarmed by the rationale behind it. The argument seemed to be that digital technology now allowed usRead More
A new film, as yet untitled, made by Peter Jackson (of Lord of the Rings fame) and his company WingNut Films has just been announced. Commissioned by the UK World War I centenary art organisation 14-18 NOW, and scheduled to be premiered at the London Film Festival in November 2018, with cinema and school showingsRead More
Kinemacolor was the world’s first successful natural colour motion picture system. It was preceded by some trial colour systems that did not work in practice, and it competed against artificial systems which painted colours onto film stock. Kinemacolor was the first system successfully to achieve one of the primary goals of the pioneers of motionRead More
I’ve been adding more images to my Flickr pages reflecting the works of Charles Urban. Having started with pictures from his 1903 catalogue We put the World Before You, I’ve turned to another treasure among his catalogues, the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects (1912). Copies of this catalogue are rarer than hen’s teeth, and I’mRead More
A recent post by John Wyver on his very fine Illuminations blog covered the history of Mobilux, a system for projecting abstract images onto a screen which was used for some television broadcasts in 1950s. It’s a fascinating insight into the ways in which television was viewed, and used as a vehicle for experimentation, inRead More
Few railway stations can offer a grander view of the town that they serve than Margate. As you step out of the station, the full sweep of the bay opens up before you: the low waves ebbing over flat sands, a great line of amusement parlours, shops and hotels following the leftward curve of theRead More
On 1 August University of Exeter Press is publishing my book, Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897-1925. It is based on my PhD thesis, which I completed in 2003, but it has been updated with reference to new research in the field, though equally the word-length has been cut downRead More