New sound and color from Andy Kwietniewski for La Maison Lumière.

At the 2010 Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Thierry Fremaux (the director of the Institut Lumière) lectured alongside eighty Lumière films, many of which were newly restored and never-before-screened.  Among them, an updated Sortie d’usine from 1995 “to celebrate the centennial of cinema’s birth.”  This renovation featured a hundred or so of the “world’s most important directors” streaming out of the factory’s gates in Lyon.  Only a handful of women could be counted among the crowd.

Kwietniewski’s remix importantly draws attention to the gender of the original workers: the hundreds of women in the early film factory.  Just a few years later, they would be the ones doing all the coloring by hand, one frame at a time.