Historians upset over upscaling of old footage
Oct 5, 2020
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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Recently, we’ve seen a bunch of upscaled and colorized historic footage: from 1911 New York to 1972 Apollo 16 Lunar Rover ride. Even videos as old as the iconic 1896 The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station are possible to upscale to 4K and get a splash of color. While many of us find them inspiring and exciting, historians don’t seem to share the opinion. In fact, they argue that the whole process is “nonsense” and they’d like YouTubers to stop doing it.
We saw most of the aforementioned videos on Denis Shiryaev’s YouTube channel. Judging from the comments on his page and our blog, people seem to like this kind of videos. I like them, too. I enjoy watching the original black and white footage, of course, but these upscaled and colorized ones give a new dimension to the experience. They’re fun. They make the past seem closer. “That is something that our clients and even the commenters on YouTube have pointed out consistently,” Elizabeth Peck of Neural Love told Wired. “It brings you more into that real-life feeling of, ‘I’m here watching someone do this’, whereas before you’re looking more at something more artistic or cinematic.”
However, historians don’t seem to share the broad audience’s enthusiasm. Luke McKernan, lead curator of news and moving images at the British Library, gave an example of Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. It’s a World War I documentary in which you’ll see upscaled and colorized footage from the Great War. But McKernan told Wired that this process is “a nonsense” that undermines the original footage. “Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates [a] difference,” he argues.
Emily Mark-FitzGerald, Associate Professor at University College Dublin’s School of Art History and Cultural Policy says: “The problem with colourisation is it leads people to just think about photographs as a kind of uncomplicated window onto the past, and that’s not what photographs are.” After all, all these colors and details that we see in the enhanced videos never were there in the first place. They were never recorded, they were added later, and that’s a part of the problem. So to say, these additional frames and colors don’t really make them a part of history. Especially if the footage doesn’t get colorized accurately.
I understand the historians’ viewpoint and what can be problematic about these upscaled and colorized videos. Still, as an average consumer, I still find them interesting to watch and they make me feel like I’m a bit closer to historic moments. What’s your stance on this?
Dunja Đuđić
Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, concerts, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.
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11 responses to “Historians upset over upscaling of old footage”
No. Because Black&White photography is racist.
Lol
Colourised/upscaled footage and images can be useful reminders that the world was not at one time lived in low, res black and white. But there’s such an inherent degree of interpretation in the processes of creating it that the altered footage must not be seen as the historic record.
Upscaling is great. I’m not generally a fan of colorization, especially as it’s almost never done well and B&W is beautiful in its own right.
Agreed. I don’t have a problem with upscaling. Technology let’s them enhance the quality. I feel the same way about color.
McKernan’s and Mark-FitzGerald’s arguments sound more of petulance than analysis. The enhanced product provides an additional experience. The original product remains the record. They can coexist.
Yeah, how dare they make a historical record more historically accurate!
As long as it’s correctly labelled as such, no problem.
As long as it’s not passed off as the original then I’m 100% ok with it. Their argument against it reeks of “I’m a stuffy historian that’s set in my ways and I will not tolerate anything that may be different from what I’m used to.”
Short of high res scans of the original film stock, which may be impossible for much of these films/photos, I don’t know of any way to improve the clarity. If we all still consumed our vids via SD CRTs then none of this would help much. But we don’t, and in a world of 4k+ TVs not upscaling can sometimes be a hindrance. Some of these old films were digitized at relatively low resolution, and again short of scanning the original film stock, were not going to increase the clarity unless we upscale.
Colorizations on the other hand are highly influenced by the imagination of the editor and should only be seen as an artistic enhancement. Short of some kind of scientific analysis of the original film (which has been shown, in rare situations depending on the type of film, to retain some color information in it’s chemical composition), we are never getting that color info back. Luckily I have yet to see a colorization that didn’t look like the kind of color palette you would see in early color comic books, so I’m not really worried about being fooled into thinking we took all our ww1 photos in color.
White marble Roman statues used to be painted – yet historians, that run museums, wouldn’t dream of doing that to their artifacts despite that being more a more accurate depiction. And these images were not made by Orson Wells – they were the selfies and polaroids of their day. I’ll go on record that if anyone wants to take my work and blow it up to 3656K, turn it 3D and sell it a collection of “Retro-streams from 2020” a hundred years from now, all the power to them.
It depends. Sir Peter Jackson’s work on “They Shall Not Grow Old” was excellent because he strived for authenticity, even using lip readers to determine what the people in the films were saying and having actors voice it, as well as using the proper color palette. It’s people who just add color for the sake of color who are the problem.