The War in Colour

[carllooper]

In Australia we have a national holiday called Anzac Day which is a day for remembering Australians and New Zealanders who died in war. Anyway typically there are war documentarys shown on TV. And yesterday was no exception.

Now to put this in context I recall in the seventies, with the advent of colour TV, a brilliant series called The World At War. The irony was that all the footage from the war was black and white. Interviews with survivors were in colour.

But many years later there appeared a documentary in which colour film from World War 2 was screened which was heavily promoted in terms of the fact that the footage was in colour.

The publicity made it sound as if some hitherto unknown technology had been used during World War 2 and the results of such only recently discovered.

But of course colour film had been available to the home movie maker since at least 1936. And it was in fact home movies that were being shown as part of this War in Colour documentary. It was just that until then, home movies were not shown on TV. And so called professional war film was shot in black and white.

Anyway, yesterday was screened a new documentary using the same idea: retelling the story of War using 'home movies'. But instead of calling the footage such it was called "colour film". The opening titles went something like:

WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE HAS NOT BEEN COLOURISED. IT IS ACTUAL COLOUR FILM.

A great marketing device. I had to laugh every time Russell Crowe (the narrator) reminded us.

Carl

[Nicholas Kovats]

War time color footage is very intriguing, Carl.

Some American general requested personal 16mm Kodachrome documentation of the campaign to retake Italy, I believe. I couldn't find it just now but I did locate some 16mm Kodachrome footage of the 1944 liberation of Paris, i.e.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=b84_1260 ... comments=1

[Nicholas Kovats]

This is an outstanding example of an excellent transfer of wartime 16mm Kodachrome footage celebrating VJ day in Honolulu in August, 1945, i.e.

"65 Years Ago my Dad shot this film along Kalakaua Ave. in Waikiki capturing spontaneous celebrations that broke out upon first hearing news of the Japanese surrender. Kodachrome 16mm film: God Bless Kodachrome, right? I was able to find an outfit (mymovietransfer.com) to do a much superior scan of this footage to what I had previously posted, so I re-did this film and replaced the older version There are more still images from this amazing day, in color, at discoveringhawaii.com"

http://vimeo.com/5645171

Apparently this transfer facility utilizes Rank-Cintel for 1080p at an uncompressed rate = 270Mb/s (claimed).