Either in Colour or Not At All!

“Technologically speaking, the invention of film is an interesting trend, but I don’t think it has much of a future (1897); sound movies are a passing fad that won’t stand the test of time, after all, film is a visual medium (1928); colour film is too expensive and, above all, it is financially unrewarding on account of the heavy cameras and painstaking development process (1926).”

These are only a few knowledgeable forecasts which the history of cinema has proven inaccurate; some of these were disproven by cinematic innovators, and others by end users or those funding the production of the artistic form that is predestined to become the most prominent medium or artistic practice of the twentieth century. Other predictions followed, for example the opposition to 3-D technique which in mid 1950s experienced an inglorious decline, resurfaced momentarily in the 1980s, but vanished again only to eventually triumph at the threshold of the century and the advent of digitalisation, and resolve to stay for good. In other words, indefinitely, at the very least to serve the needs of spectacle film, a form of cinema that nowadays tends to be the most powerful magnet attracting spectators to traditional movie theatres.

Within this context, the Ljubljana International Film Festival is one such small, but passion-driven miniature showcase that attracts spectators to cinemas by screening ‘different’ films. The films we show used to be on film reel, but today arrive mostly on digital carriers. It is also digital film that was greeted with scepticism by some; the picture was considered too irritating, lacking graininess, true contrast and depth (let’s recall the Dogma 95 filmmaking movement), but it withstood the test of time. Digital cinema became a reality that’s here to stay… until someone has invented a new carrier in fifty years’ time or so.

Liffe has been placing cinema in its historical context for quite some time now, mainly through theme and national retrospectives. This year, our Technicolor 100! retrospective is paying tribute to the technical innovation that in 1915 introduced the method of colour motion picture, and it was Technicolor, the trademark of colour film production from Massachusetts, that was the most reliable and efficient system of colour superimposition during the pioneering days of colour cinema and also further on. Problems did occur, though: during the silent era, colour film was considered artificial, surreal, overly aestheticised, and met with the claim that cinematic reality is intrinsically black-and-white! Ironically, today the same applies to (equally scarce) black-and-white production that has grown to become an aesthetic statement; reality simply cannot be portrayed using the monochromatic technique!

This year, our theme retrospective will include only colour films, which doesn’t mean that the festival programme won’t feature some specimens of contemporary black-and-white cinema. They are well worth seeking out, at the very least for the simple reason of determining whether the present-day reality truly is ‘visually artificial’.

Simon Popek