On the Restoration History of Colored Silent Films in Germany: An Interview with Martin Koerber

Blot-Wellens, “The Colors of Phantom,” trans. Debra Lyn Christie, in the DVD booklet for Phantom: The Authorized Restored Edition (Los Angeles: Flicker Alley, 2006). 5. Variety wrote of the scene: “At one place in the story the philosophical Tchernoff, holding to view an apple, has a speech to the effect it was well chosen as the ‘forbidden fruit,’ but that, stripped of its brilliant covering, it is like a woman’s soul which, stripped of its cloak of virtue, is an ugly thing to behold. Rex Ingram probably spent many weary hours getting the proper light on the apple so as to make it, in spite of its relative tininess, the biggest thing on the screen. But someone thought it needed verisimilitude and colored it. With the result it stuck out in technically perfect production like a sore thumb.” From “Inside Stuff Pictures,” Variety, February 25, 1921, 44. 6. Ibid. 7. During 1920, Prizma produced a series of prologues for monochrome features, and it would appear it was one of the services they specifically marketed to producers. Other films with Prizma prologues include the US distribution of Madame Du Barry, retitled Passion (Lubitsch, 1919); Kismet (Gasnier, 1920); and The Gilded Lady (Leonard, 1921). See Carroll H. Dunning, “Color Photography in 1922,” Film Year Book (1923), 171. 8. E.g., tints convey a shift in mood when the opulent interiors of a grand house are first seen in amber tints but we subsequently see the same sets infused with a violet tint for a fireside scene to introduce a romantic theme. In addition, a violet-tinted fantasy sequence from the heroine’s perspective of a romantic cruise with her would-be lover is inserted into the scene before the return to normality is signaled by amber. Later, when the heroine starts to lose confidence in holding on to her younger husband, a dancing scene is unusually tinted red. on the Restoration history of Colored Silent Films in germany An Interview with Martin Koerber