A few addenda to the data and metadata about Three American Beauties.
The Kino-MoMA Edison DVD says that this film was “mastered at 14 frame per second,” while the earlier Treasures from American Film Archives DVD indicates the transfer was done at 16 frames per second. Both sources used the MoMA color print. When these two digital copies run on a web platform the speeds yield running times of roughly 45 seconds (16 fps) and 50 seconds (14 fps).
Here’s a comparison.
The video on the left is from the NFPF website; on the right is a copy of the the film hacked from the Kino DVD and posted on YouTube. (To download the file 3ABx2x.mov, go to the Internet Archive.)
Color: hand-applied dye, stenciling, and tinting.
The sources we reviewed ascribed three different processes to this film. The only copy that has been studied or digitized is the Museum of Modern Art’s 35mm nitrate print.
The original Edison descriptions said that Three American Beauties was “handcolored.” The Timeline of Historical Film Colors identifies “Hand coloring” as one category: “Coloring of individual frames by the use of very fine brushes. The process was previously applied to lantern slides. Any water-based translucent dye was suited . . . most often acid dyes.” The Timeline gallery offers 4 photographs taken from the MoMA print. “In contrast to stencilled films, hand-colored ones often have soft outlines and the application of color varies from frame to frame.”
When inspecting the print before photographing frames for her Timeline, Barbara Flueckiger reports (in a February 14 Facebook response to the previous blog post) that MoMA film archivist James Layton thought that Three American Beauties appear to have both hand-coloring and stencil color.
The Timeline continues: “Stencil colored films can be identified by the sharp outlines that define the colored areas. Color hues were most often soft pastels. The stencil colored images have a painterly quality.” Also: “Stencil coloring required the manual cutting, frame by frame, of the area which was to be tinted onto another identical print, one for each color.”
Adding colors to black-and-white film prints in the first two decades of cinema was invariably done by teams of women doing the tedious work. In France, the Pathé company employed up to 200 women colorists to work on stencil color prints. In the United States, the hand coloring of kinetoscope films was “contracted out to the wives of Edison employees” as early as 1894-95 (Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 21).
Finally, the head title card created for Three American Beauties on the Kino-MoMA DVD calls the film “Hand Tinted.” However, the term tinting for film laboratories refers to putting positive prints through dye baths to add a single color.
As copies and “instantiations” multiply, note one other alteration to what you see above in the YouTube stream. Once uploaded, YouTube (speaking as “we”) asked me (the uploader) if they should “enhance” the “video’s lighting.” I allowed it, just to see what it would produce.
As Paolo Cherchi Usai’s useful dictum puts it “Every print of a film is a unique object. . . .”†
Paraphrasing, we might say there are no films, only prints of films. With a broader media archaeology approach we must expand that to say copies (digital, video, film, paper) of a motion-picture work are seldom if ever exact clones. In this case, an automated YouTube technology created a new and unique digital file, an “enhanced” “copy” of a QuickTime movie I created on February 15, 2017, and first saved as a file named “3ABx2x480.mov” with these properties: dimensions of 1284 × 460 pixels; with an H.264 codec; color profile HD (1-1-1); duration 50 seconds. Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, the Internet Archive generated three variations on the MOV file, there named ThreeAmerBeautiesx2 : MP4 and OGV video files and a torrent file.
The metadata details here are not inherently significant; what matters is understanding that any time you study a “film” you are analyzing but one iteration of a work. Media archaeology is the practice of digging for other iterations and assessing their relationships. The humanities methodology of “close reading” of a work is arguably more relevant than ever, since meaningful differences appear across objects. In the case of the various items called Three American Beauties, we have seen differences in color, speed, length, duration, added sound, titles, and more — all without ever seeing or touching an actual film object.
† Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: An Introduction (London: BFI, 2000; 2nd ed., 2010), chapter 3, “The Ethics of Film Preservation.” Previously published as Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema, tr. Emma Sansone Rittle (BFI, 1994), and Una passione infiammabile: guida allo studio del cinema muto (Turin: UTET, 1991).