Mordants, Microscopy, Spectroscopy: Studying and Identifying Early Color Systems
Sreya Chatterjee, Caroline Figueroa Fuentes, Ulrich Ruedel HTW - University of Applied Sciences, Berlin
Subtractive bi-pack two-colour systems employing both metal and dye toning were widely experimented with in 1930s in the quest of simulating natural colour tones in films. Despite the obvious limitations, these two-colour systems were able to create a semblance of skin tones as well as a curious gamut of colous on the screen, which was employed, for instance, in a number of animated films from that era. Selected two-colour systems, which were prevalent between 1920s and 1940s, namely Ufacolor, Sirius, Multicolor and Cinecolor have been studied microscopically and through instrumental-analytical chemistry with the aim of scrutinising their visual characteristics and chemical makeup in terms of their mordant constituents. In this presentation, the results of these comparative investigations of these samples will be presented, observed macroscopically as well as through transmission microscopy, alongside their chemical characteristics as revealed through Fourier-transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) analysis.
