This programme is designed to present examples of rare colour films, restored recently by the BFI National Archive and Prestech Film Laboratories. It will feature a range of films which between them offer a variety of different colour processes and different restoration techniques, including the latest digital methods. The programme includes an early example of Kinemacolor from 1906 and an extract from Claude Friese-Greene’s travelogue The Open Road (1924), in a colour system based, like Kinemacolour, on black and white film shot and then projected through alternating red and green filters. In addition we will be presenting new restorations of the French company Pathé’s beautiful stencil colour process and two very different examples of tinting and toning, restored by different means, one a fragment of ‘the other version’ of L’Inferno (1911) and Prekrasnaya Lyukanida (1912), one of the Starewich’s first animated insect romances from pre-revolutionary Russia.

Bryony Dixon