AI-driven colourisation is transforming historical film footage, but could digitally adding colour risk distorting how we see the past and what we take to be authentic?
When asked in an interview whether she dreamed in colour, Jane Birkin replied, “No, I think I dream in black and white”. Exposed to the endless stream of glittering reels on our phones, most of us today will dream in colour. But what about our memories? Do we see the past in shades of grey? In Geschichte der Gegenwart, David Lange explores such questions through the case of digitally colourised historical film footage.
With recent advances in AI, film colourisation is undergoing a true renaissance. Lange argues that the desire to recreate a more tangible past is fraught with problems and misconceptions. It all boils down to patterns of perception and our habitual ways of looking at images, whether gaudy or black-and-white. On one hand, old films strike us with the “liveliness” of a bygone era; on the other, they are too grainy, shaky and monochrome for today’s taste, so filmmakers tend to add colour.
One striking example is Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), which uses colourised footage of the First World War held by the British Imperial War Museum. On top of adding colour, the director had lip readers dub their mute protagonists. As Jackson put it: “What was it like to be a British soldier on the Western Front?” This is precisely where the central question arises for Lange: can retrospectively colouring footage really bring us closer to the past?
There are now countless YouTube channels sharing coloured non-fiction footage enhanced with AI tools. Whether those reels really convey a more “authentic” past is questionable. Digital modification glosses over visual flaws while simultaneously creating a new layer of “historicity” (in German, “geschichtlichkeit”, echoing “schicht”, or “layer”). Colour doesn’t erase the history of an image, it creates its own.
From Technicolor in the 1910s to computer colourisation in the 1980s, filmmakers have long chased new ways to bring colour to the screen. Already in the very early days of cinema, when technology still lagged behind, artists were obsessed with colouring images. Digital colourisation techniques, increasingly adopted by directors in the 2010s for documentaries and non-fiction footage, are now accessible to practically anyone.
In the 1900s, celluloid film was hand-coloured frame by frame. An iconic example is The Impossible Voyage (1904) by Georges Méliès which includes 374 metres of film material manually coloured by Élisabeth Thullier and her daughter Marie-Berthe. The dazzling colour intensified the viewing experience, but the whole process was painstakingly laborious.
“We had 100 hours of original footage sent to us by the Imperial War Museum,” Jackson says, explaining the work behind They Shall Not Grow Old. “Part of what I wanted to do… was restore everything.” But what, Lange asks, is actually being restored? Can retroactive colouring even count as restoration? He argues that colouring a film is nothing like rebuilding Notre-Dame de Paris after it was damaged by fire.
There’s more: colour deeply affects how we perceive and visualise time. The colour image corresponds to a deeply ingrained expectation of normality. In today’s flood of images, reality is defined by what Lange calls “chromatic visuality”. Of course, black-and-white film has never disappeared from cinema; as a narrative device, monochromy is used for flashbacks to past events.
Colouring film footage reverses the relationship between colour and time. The black-and-white flashback, once a marker of history, now becomes an obstacle to the experience of authenticity (naturally, the Germans have a word for it: “echtheitsempfinden”). What feels real exists only on screen, not outside the cinema.
In the end, it remains open whether historical film should be reconstructed at all. Lange urges us to see digital manipulation of historical footage as a complex process reshaping how we engage with the past. Colourised images aren’t real representations of the past. They’re fake.
Original article (“Ist es nun „echter“? Wie die digitale Kolorierung historischer Filmaufnahmen falsche Versprechungen erzeugt”) by David Lange was first published in German on 13 July 2025.
It is available here.
Geschichte der Gegenwart is a Swiss online magazine publishing historically informed essays on current issues.
