HISTORY AS WE’VE NEVER SEEN IT

Australian - Wednesday, 10 Mar 2021 

Film colourisation is much more than mere aesthetics. Based on painstaking historical research, it adds key details to the visual record of Australia’s past

A farmer operating a Sunshine Harvester works his way through a crop of wheat in the late 1930s — an ordinary scene in photographic monochrome, but brought vividly to life when the switch is flicked to colour. The sun-ripened wheat looks exactly as it should — a field of shimmering gold, not a sea of flat, featureless grey.

Or look at another scene from the new series of Australia in Colour : a group of young women in the Miss Australia Quest, arriving by boat at Manly Beach. There’s not a cloud in the big blue sky. The women are wearing swimsuits, naturally enough, but here the original black-and-white footage has been given a makeover. The swimming costumes are pink, yellow , red, lilac and bright green.

The premise of Australia in Colour is as simple as it is eyecatching . Screening on SBS from Wednesday night (March 10), the series revisits vintage film footage that is held in the nation’s libraries, museums and archives — the historic visual records of Australian agriculture, industry and culture, our cities and towns, and the people who lived and worked in them.

Some of the material is familiar from similar programs that have drawn on historic documentary sources. The difference here is that the producers, working with restoration and colourisation experts, have given old black-and-white film a digital makeover. What was once flat, dull and showing its age has been given a fresh lick of digital colour.

It isn’t just a cosmetic exercise. Paris-based art director Samuel Francois-Steininger , who has worked on dozens of colourisation projects, says the addition of colour has the effect of deepening viewers’ connection with the past.

“It’s a simple explanation,” he says. “When you see all that footage in black and white, with a lot of scratches, and not the right frame rate, it brings a kind of distance to the narration, to the storytelling — it’s harder to time-travel , in a way.

“Bringing everything into colour — and making all these people and objects and places closer to what people have in their mind — also brings an additional layer of emotional connection to the period , even if it was 100 years ago.

“If it’s in black and white, you do not feel as connected and immersed in the story as if you watch it in colour.”

The four episodes follow an earlier series of Australia in Colour that was among the top 10 shows for SBS when it screened in 2019. The series is essentially a social history of Australia, foregrounding the experiences of ordinary Australians against the backdrop of major changes and upheavals, through two world wars, the Depression and family law changes in the 1970s.

Episode two, Australia at Play, is of interest for the workplace reforms that gave Australians more leisure time and allowed them to participate more fully in sport and cultural interests. The episode charts the early development of Australia’s feature film industry — with hits including Raymond Longford’s The Sentimental Bloke and Charles Chauvel’s Forty Thousand Horsemen — and the popularity of live entertainment, seen in the Tivoli circuit of vaudeville theatres and the famous tour by the Ballets Russes in the 1930s.

In the depths of the Depression, Australia lost two figures of immense cultural importance. Dame Nellie Melba, at the height of her powers one of the most famous people in the world, died in 1931, leading to the biggest crowd of mourners ever seen in Melbourne. Then Phar Lap, the big-hearted thoroughbred that had carried the hopes of a nation, died in California the next year.

Most of the footage is from the National Film and Sound Archive, a vast storehouse of historic newsreels , feature films, commercials and other material. There is also footage from the ABC and Seven Network, and collecting institutions such as state libraries and archives . The South Australian Museum provided a lot of the footage of First Nations people.

The series is written and directed by Lisa Matthews and Rose Hesp, and Hugo Weaving brings his authoritative baritone to the voiceover.

Working from the Paris studio of his company Composite Films, Francois-Steininger combines his expertise in digital colourisation with his love for Australia. He spent a year living in Melbourne in 2012 — he made a road trip with his wife to Kangaroo Island, and saw the Cathy Freeman Foundation’s work at Palm Island — and returned to work on the first series of Australia in Colour in 2019.

Local knowledge has given him vital information that assists him in his choices when he adds colour to old film.

“Social history is very interesting in terms of colourisation, because this is something that is lacking in history books,” he says. “Historians don’t ask, ‘What was the colour of the dress that this woman was wearing?’. It’s not their work, it’s not important for their writing. That is what we do, by doing extensive research, and trying to find the exact colour match or by making a deduction — it’s like an investigation, in a way.”

His research led him to several Australian institutions: the Australian War Memorial in Canberra , which provided so much information about military uniforms and insignia; and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, for examples of vintage clothing, trains, planes, cars and other objects . He also visited a private bus museum in Sydney, and he saw the historic Yirrkala Bark Petitions at the National Museum of Australia.

His aim is to identify, through research, the actual colours of places and objects, which may not be easily deduced from the original black-and-white film. Francois-Steininger says it is difficult to name colours that are unique to Australia; more important, he says, is to determine the effect that Australian sunlight has on colour.

“For Australia, it’s more related to the specificity of the light,” he says. “In fiction films, you know when the action is happening in Sydney, or in Los Angeles, or in Paris, because there is some particularity about the light, and the way the light is in the morning, or in the evening.

“In colourisation, it is quite similar — it’s the effect of light on the landscape and on the buildings . For example, at Bondi, it’s all about the contrasts, the sky and the sea, two shades of blue, and some shades of yellow. It could seem very simple, but the difficulty is to not make it look flat, and to bring as much realism as possible to the scene.”

Francois-Steininger first became involved in colourisation in 2008 when he was working on a documentary about World War I for France 2 television. Since then, he has worked on 100 films that have involved colourisation of black-and-white footage, including the series America in Colour for the Smithsonian Channel.

“Painstaking” is a word he uses often. The footage for Australia in Colour is provided to him in digital format from the NFSA, to which he then applies the colour, based on historical research. The process is more complicated than, say, the job of hand-painting colour on old photographs. To add colour to moving images involves a form of digital animation.

Francois-Steininger says he also has started using artificial intelligence to add background colour to footage of well-known locations and landscapes. This allows him to give more attention to precise details of people’s clothing and other elements.

Another aspect of colourisation — and this is where Francois-Steininger’s judgment as an art director comes into play — is the range and tone of the colours he applies to historic footage. Colours in the early 1900s, for example, appear less vibrant than those in the 1960s. This is because Francois-Steininger tries to match colour tone in the series with the available colour technology of a given era. For example, in the early 20th century he uses colours that were typical of Autochrome, an early form of colour photography developed by French pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumiere in 1903. For the 1950s, he uses richly saturated colours typical of Technicolor and Kodachrome film stock.

The trick is to make the footage in each of the episodes appear consistent , even though it is compiled from many different sources of varying quality. “For a fiction film you have one director, the lighting design is the same through the whole film,” Francois-Steininger says. “Here we have maybe 50 different directors, different operators and different cameras. We try to make it look as if it was shot by the same person … so that visually it looks like it was filmed in colour by the person who was there at the time. It’s a big challenge.”

Francois-Steininger says colourisation adds information about the appearance of people, places and objects to the historical record.

“If you are living in Sydney, and you see a sequence of the streets in Sydney in black and white, it won’t have the same impact on you. In colour, you can imagine more easily where people were living, what people were wearing, what was the atmosphere. It brings an additional layer of reality that is missing in black and white.”

Australia in Colour screens on SBS from tonight (March 10).