Colorful Lucency

In the 1920s and 1930s, motion pictures enjoyed a great popularity. To guarantee cinema’s visibility beyond the sphere of projection though, the help of its elder brother, photography, was called for. Color Lucency is the first book to explore a rare medium of film photography indebted to its day and, like film, relying on celluloid: brightly hand-colored stills owing their lucency to backlight illumination. Taken on the set, these mostly anonymous pictures were aimed at arousing the public’s visual curiosity in the lobbies of Vienna’s movie palaces and at encouraging them to purchase a ticket. Following the supposedly sharp dividing lines—between color and black and white, moving image and still, incident light and backlight—Roland Fischer-Briand’s text enters hitherto unexplored terrain. Fischer-Briand (b. 1975) is an art historian and senior curator of the Stills Collection of the Austrian Film Museum, Vienna.