Searching for the color of film, as this section’s title suggests, is an attempt at the impossible. It is impossible to repeat or hold on to a film’s color. It is a fact that film printing labs know well, each print of the same work being different from the next. It is a fact that projectionists know well, each screening betraying the one before it and the one after, with too many variables, theaters, projectors, lamps, bulbs, lenses and, now, digital equipment. Today we know that our memory is the only thing left, and it changes: it never gives us back a perfect copy of what we experienced, just an updated one. I am convinced that, of all the elements of a film, color is what we perceive more physically, what creates deeper, physical and unconscious emotions that feel indelible to us.

The colors of silent film, the baffling realistic illusions of pochoir, the two color printing of Kinemacolor, Ava Gardner’s lips, the silk fabrics worn by Valli, the scorched faces in Leone’s films, Anna Karina’s T- shirts, are these not a kind of primary information, a chromatic com- pass that stays with us for the rest of our lives?

We are surrounded by a state of confusion while the media world feeble-mindedly forces large visual formats into a cell phone’s display. But our memory of the colors we have seen enables us to pin-point the decade in which a film or photo was made; it allows us to perceive the extent of deception, when too many colors do not correspond with our primary compass. Even if this is an era of deceit, today, for the first time, in just a few days we can see perfect prints not only of films from the silent era but also impossible dreams, films that we never believed we would see in their entirety, in the brilliance of their own chromatic system. The Red Shoes, Senso, Pierrot le fou, these films alone are like a festival of dreams come true.

Even still, despite being intoxicated by the colors of this weeklong event, in some hidden corner of our mind, in a dark fold of our gut, something will tell us that the colors we saw were different; they were purer, closer to their creators’ vision. With this in mind we will be ready to face the second part of our search next year.

(Gian Luca Farinelli)

Programme curated by Gian Luca Farinelli and Peter von Bagh