Presentation of the Research Teams

Meanwhile most of the members of the research teams for the two projects ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors and SNF Filmfarben Technologien, Kulturen, Institutionen – an additional project funded by Swiss National Science Foundation – have started their work.

In September 2016, Dr. Giorgio Trumpy, postdoc in Science for Cultural Heritage, will join the ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors team. He is currently at the Scientific Research department, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Five student assistants will complete the team. After one and a half years, a web programmer will start to develop the crowdsourcing interface for film analysis.

Bregt Lameris PhD, postdoc film studies, ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors

MA in Film and Performance Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen (1998). Ph.D. in Film and Media Culture, Utrecht University (2007).

After finishing my MA I worked as a cataloguer and researcher at the Netherlands Filmmuseum (now EYE) in Amsterdam. I left the museum in 2001 to start a dissertation on the history of film archiving and film historiography, which I successfully defended in 2007.

In 2007 I started working as an assistant professor in Film studies at the University of Amsterdam. During this period I was also involved with the MA Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image. In 2010 I went back to Utrecht University where I taught film and television. Two years later, in 2012 I was offered a postdoctoral position at the Leverhulme Trust funded project ‘Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts,’ with Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe. The ERC-funded project FilmColors offers me the opportunity to do another postdoctoral project on a more senior level. I am very much looking forward to the project, which will allow me to be part of a great team of interesting researchers with a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

I am currently on the editorial board of the forthcoming edited volume The Colour Fantastic which will be published by Amsterdam University Press. AUP will also publish my monograph Pas-de-Deux: A History of the Netherlands Filmmuseum (EYE) in interrelationship with Film Historiography, forthcoming in 2016.

Martin Weiss, senior researcher and restorer, ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors

Intermediate Diploma in Social and Business communications, University of Arts, Berlin (1997). Tutor in student TV production. Erasmus exchange semester, European Media Production at Humberside University, Hull, England (1998). Intermediate Diploma in The Art and Technique of Film production, London International Film School (2000). 


After studying film production, I worked as a cameraman in London and Oslo, both for a wide variety of film productions and TV stations (such as MTV, BBC, ABC and ORF). Together with my wife I started a film production company, where I shot and produced several historical documentary films. Thus I got involved in the digitization of film. Pairing my technical interest and keen love of colors, I joined the National Library of Norway in 2011, where I was instrumental in establishing a digitizing workflow for 16mm and 35mm film, including digital restoration.

Starting in February 2016, I will be part Barbara Flückiger’s research project into color film. I am looking forward to delving into colors and their proper restoration.

Joëlle Kost, PhD student, ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors

Bachelor of Arts in Art History, Film Studies and Theory and History of Photography at the University of Zurich (2012). Master of Arts in Art History and Film Studies at the University of Zurich (2015).

The first time I became particularly aware of film colors was while grading videos in my time as the assistant of the Swiss director Simon Jaquemet. The effects only smallshifts with the controllers had on the images fascinated me. The physical terms of photography and cinematography caught my attention already at the age of thirteen when I got my first analog camera. The allure of the chemical processes stayed until today. As an art historian the image itself always formed the center of my researches. During my studies my interest in colors grew stronger and finally lead me to the ERC project “Film Colors. Bridging the Gap Between Technology and Aesthetics“.

The connection between technology and aesthetics offers a scientific framework to embed the flighty character of colors for aesthetic analysis—one fact that made this project attractive for me. Also to be able to provide filmmakers and scientists with a new tool to analyze film colors and therefore enabling saving existing film works or inspiring new films, made me choose this PhD position. My personal aim is to see what a motion picture is able to show us, not only the content but every visual aspect of it.

Michelle Beutler, PhD student, ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors

Bachelor of Arts in Media and Film Studies at the University of Zurich (2011). Master of Arts in Film Studies within the Netzwerk Cinema CH at the University of Zurich, Lausanne and Basel (2016).

It was a course at the Imaging and Media Lab at the University of Basel that first sparked my interest in film technology and its relationship with style and aesthetics; a subject that would accompany me for the rest of my studies and beyond.
During my studies I also assisted Prof. Dr. Barbara Flückiger with the “Timeline of Historical Film Colors”, encoding texts, researching patents and scouring old film and fan magazines for contemporary reviews and opinions. I stood to benefit from this work for my master’s thesis on the style and technology of the two-color process Technicolor No. III.

In summer 2015 I spent a couple of months following the digital restoration of the two Agfacolor films OPFERGANG (Veit Harlan, Germany 1944) and IMMENSEE (Veit Harlan, Germany 1943). Among other things, I was able to compare and log various prints of the films at the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung in Wiesbaden, as well as assist in the scanning and retouching of OPFERGANG at ARRI in Munich.

The project “ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors” offers a valuable opportunity to be at the forefront of current research into film colors and color films and I am looking forward to deepening my knowledge in this field within the framework of a truly interdisciplinary approach.

Olivia Stutz, prospective PhD student, ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors

Bachelor of Arts in Art History, Film Studies, and Theatre and Dance Studies at the Universities of Zurich and Bern (2013). Former Film History Tutor for Experimental Cinema (2015). Pendant Master of Arts in Film Studies within Netzwerk Cinema CH at the Universities of Zurich, Lausanne, and Zurich University of the Arts (2017).

Growing up in the Swiss film and commercial business, I worked as an assistant runner for several Swiss film production companies, including the major Swiss TV-Series Tag und Nacht (2008). I have a specific interest in the interplay between film/art technology and film aesthetics, especially in CGI and the historical avant-garde. In my free time, I have a passion for painting with oil.

Due to an early acceptance into the phD program of the ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors, I am about to write my master thesis within this project, focusing on color harmony and the analysis of historical film colors with a computer-assistant tool. For my research, early cinema and its emergence of film colors, and the contemporary discourse in art theory are significant.

The ERC project combined with the SNF Filmfarben. Technologien, Kulturen, Institutionen not only allows for the experience and analysis of the raw beauty of historical film colors as well as their transitory materials, but also shows the disciplinary approach of combining art history and film studies on a new level of technical and aesthetic achievement, where art history makes film history and vice versa.

Noemi Daugaard, PhD student, SNF Filmfarben

Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Literature and Linguistics, Film Studies and Art History at the University of Zurich (2013). Master of Arts Degree in Film Studies within the Netzwerk Cinema CH at the Universities of Zurich, Lausanne and Lugano (2015).

In my Master thesis „Gruesome Atmospheres. Sound Design and Color Scheme as Affective and Subjectifying Stylistic Devices in The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, USA 1991)“ I focused my research on the non-narrative, but no less fundamental, qualities of film colors and sound, coming to the conclusion that both of these instruments can strongly influence the viewer’s perception and understanding of filmic content, even – or especially – when they are not aware of it.

During my studies I began to develop a specific interest in the early decades of film and, especially, in the ways color was then used and applied. After my graduation in the summer of 2015, I spent several months as an intern at the Lichtspiel archive in Bern, where I came into contact with various film materials, amongst which beautiful stencil colored and tinted nitrate copies, which only strengthened my fascination for early film, its material qualities and colors.

The SNF Project „Filmfarben. Technologien, Kulturen, Institutionen“ is of particular interest to me due to its interdisciplinary approach to film colors, which combines historical, cultural, institutional and technological aspects in order to achieve a new understanding of film color and technology. This multi perspective approach will allow me to deepen and broaden my knowledge of film color and the history of cinema, also permitting me to come into contact with various sources, approaches, institutions and original materials.

Josephine Diecke, PhD student, SNF Filmfarben

Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies and French Philology at the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz (2013). Master of Arts in Audiovisual and Cinema Studies at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main (2016).

A job as temporary employee in an art-house oriented cinema accompanied my studies and taught me a lot about the relationship between film as a technical medium and film as an art form, especially since the conversion from analog to digital projection. While spending two semesters abroad in Belgium (Liège) and Italy (Udine) I also discovered my great enthusiasm for film preservation and restoration. This particular interest took me to OMNIMAGO, an enterprise specialized in post production and digital film restoration, where I came into close contact with old and modern film colors in their original analog and in their reproduced digital manifestations. The result of this fruitful collaboration was my Master thesis OPIUM von Robert Reinert: Skizzierung eines Restaurierungsvorhabens for which I examined a tinted and toned nitrate copy under theoretical, practical and ethical aspects of film restoration.

For me, the SNF Project Filmfarben. Technologien, Kulturen, Institutionen is important in order to help continue the work as mediator between science and practice. The analysis of the role of film colors in certain cultural, political and technological contexts, alongside the description of their aesthetic appearance, shall provide a useful contribution to the current academic research but also to the work of professionals in film archives and other institutions. What attracts me the most is the unique opportunity to extensively study something that is as concrete and at the same time delusive as (film) colors are and to be able to do so in an interdisciplinary team.