Colours in Silent Films(RTRI 2020)

Movie Name: Les Parisiennes
Language: No Dialogue
Category: --
Duration: 36 Seconds
Director: Unknown
Story: --

Movie Name: The Six Sisters Dainef
Language: No Dialogue
Category: --
Duration: 3 mins
Director: Unknown
Story:--

Movie Name: Het Tovertoneel (a.k.a. Les Tulipes or El Iris Fantastico)
Language: No Dialogue
Category: --
Duration: 5 mins
Director: Segundo de Chomon
Story:--

Movie Name: Mills in Joy and Sorrow
Language: No Dialogue
Category: --
Duration: 7 mins
Director: Alfred Machin
Cast: Germaine Dury, Maurice Mathieu, Germaine Lecuyer
Story: Les Parisiennes was an American Mutoscope Company production in which a chorus line of young female dancers in charming light gowns performed the then popular cancan; The Six Sisters Dainef was a French production by Pathe Freres, with agile acrobats going all out in front of the backdrop of a classical-styled interior. Besides realistic narratives, early films branched into a variety of vignettes in which various editing techniques were widely used to create magical and vibrant scenes; Het Tovertoneel, also a production of Pathe Freres, was a prominent example of such a feast for the eyes: in the garden where the fairies frolicked, a giant and a rainbow-hued fountain coloured by hand and stencilling appeared. Filmed on location in Volendam, The Mills in Joy and Shadow told a tale of revenge as a tramp torched the miller's wooden mill as he refused the tramp any alms. Dusk scenes tinted alternatively in crimson and purple added despair to this bleak tale.

Segundo de Chomon (1871–1929)
A director known for innovative special effects and animation techniques. He directed special effects for notable films, including Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914) and Abel Gance’s Napoleon(1927) .

Alfred Machin (1877–1929)
Alfred Machin was a film director, producer and photographer, whose works experimented the earliest colouring techniques on films.

Movie Name: A Trip to the Moon
Language: No Dialogue
Category: --
Duration: 16 mins
Director: Georges Melies
Story: --

Movie Name: The Extraordinary Voyage
Language: French, English(Chinese, English Subtitles)
Category: --
Duration: 65 mins
Director: Serge Brombergn, Eric Lange
Story: Just a few years after the invention of cinema, master filmmaker and magician Georges Melies created the visually mesmerising A Trip to the Moon, his best remembered work and the world’s first ever sci-fi film, with magic tricks and film editing, processing, and hand colouring techniques. Six astronomers set off to the moon in a rocket created by themselves and met a range of strange inhabitants, with encounters in turn hair-raising and side-splitting. While Melies made over 400 films in his career, most of them have been lost, including the colour version of A Trip to the Moon—until it was rediscovered among the collection of the Filmoteca de Catalunya. As the print was too fragile to undergo regular scanning, the fragments of 13,375 frames were captured via digital camera frame by frame over a period of 10 years, before the images were individually restored digitally, with missing parts coloured and colour graded referencing the black-and-white version. In The Extraordinary Voyage, directors Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange (Lobster Films) chronicle this restoration journey and interview recognised filmmakers on Melies’ cinematic legacy.

Georges Melies (1861–1938)
A magician and an influential filmmaker who pioneered special effects in motion pictures in the early cinema period. His films A Trip to the Moon (1902) and Le voyage a travers l'impossible (1904) are considered among the most important early science fiction films.

Serge Bromberg & Eric Lange
Directors and film historians. They founded Lobster Films in 1985, a company dedicated to film restoration and preservation.

*Post-screening talk by Dr Giovanna Fossati (In English)