The colors of “Toute Une Nuit”: A study on color restoration in film

“Toute Une Nuit” (1982) is a Belgian-French drama written and directed by Chantal Akerman. The film takes place during a whole summer night in Brussels, where different characters go out in the city, have chance encounters and romantic contacts. The restoration of this film presented different challenges concerning the color correction. While it was essential to restore the original film colors preserving the color cast of the night scenes but removing the effect of film aging and decay. To this purpose, we tested two different approaches: the traditional manual color correction and the color enhancement through Spatial Color Algorithms (SCAs). The first approach follows the standard movie restoration workflow, which employs video editing software to make standard operations like white balancing or contrast and saturation enhancement. On the other hand, the restoration through SCAs, allows to enhance every pixel in the image in a controlled and objective way. In particular, SCAs enhance colors with a local and global approach, simulating some specific characteristics of the Human Visual System. Thus, SCAs permit an alternative approach to color restoration, re-creating the original color appearance. In this work, we present the restoration of some frames and scenes from the film “Toute une nuit” using the two different approaches. The limits and potentials of each method are analyzed and discussed, with a particular focus on the problems that restorers must face when trying to preserve and restore a film from the unavoidable damage of time.