Some Colors Cannot Be Guessed

Some old films need their colors to return, because fading can say the wrong things on their behalf. Yet some colors cannot return; beauty can deceive too. The sharper difficulty is not only whether color should be filled back in: earlier materials, cleaner images, light closer to the source, may also move a little farther away from that viewing in its own time.

Color is not lost property in an archive, not something locked in the dark, waiting for later people to open the door. A black-and-white positive lies under the lamp, and a brush sends dye into the gelatin. That is not retrieving a piece of color from the past, but a highly specific action: the wrist pauses, the brush tip presses down, the red may pass slightly beyond a sleeve, and the edge of the flame may not stop exactly where the flame does. Different prints of the same film will not have exactly the same colors either. What later people face is not a stable layer of red, blue, and yellow resting safely in the past.

Some colors were never meant to cling to objects. Blue is night, red is fire, yellow is candlelight; at times color is not explaining what color a thing originally was, but how night descends, how fire suddenly enters. It makes danger quicken, makes a lamp warmer, and draws the eye in a certain direction. We think we are asking what color a piece of clothing should be; what we may be asking is how an entire stretch of scene ought to be felt.

That layer of dusty violet is very good at passing itself off as a sense of period. Once an old film shifts that way, it seems to grow a soft oldness automatically, as though time itself had lowered the image’s voice. Often, cyan and yellow have exited first, and the colors left behind speak for the whole reel. Taking this residual color as the face of the past is no more secure than adding a layer of vividness; doing nothing may simply let damage go on speaking for the past.

But making the image brighter and clearer does not automatically bring it closer. Clarity can sometimes rescue gradations from the dark, letting a face separate itself from shadow again; it can also push edges to the front. An overly sharp negative will reveal wires, seams, and the edges of sets. Those things were there at the time too, but in ordinary prints and at projection distance, they did not enter the eye in this way. They are not things that appeared later; they were simply not seen like this then.

The film spectators once saw was not only what was on the negative, but also which things were left aside by grain, distance, and insufficiently clear boundaries. A line, a wire, a seam may be very early on the negative, yet very late in the viewer’s experience, or may never have arrived there at all.

And so there is still one place where color cannot return. The image stays gray. Gray has not won; that layer of temperature is missing from the screen. Longing cannot grade it back.