I was browsing through my YouTube feed this weekend, when I saw a 1967 educational short film called 'Farm Family in Winter". I had first become familiar with the short through the RiffTrax guys (Mike and the two guys who played the robots on the incarnation of MST3K after Joel- and after MST3K, they started ‘Rifftrax’ where they mock movies and shorts without the comedy interstitials featuring silly characters and skits). I find the educational shorts that they dig up to be fascinating little time capsules, so I was interested to watch this one without the riffing over the narration and dialogue.
For some reason I kept watching after the credits rolled, and for a split second, just a frame or two, an image appeared of a woman wearing what must have been the height of late 60s fashion. She looked like she could’ve been a guest on an episode of ‘Bewitched’ or something. It was such an incongruous image in a video short about a farm family it got me curious (it appears at about 14:53 of the video at the link above). So I froze the video at the exact moment of the image (took a few tries since it appears so briefly-- even using the slider to go second-by-second) and did an image search. I tried TinEye at first, and got no hits, but got lucky with Google Image Search and found this web page about an exhibition called ‘Girls on Film’. The woman I found is the brunette with a green headband and multicolored top with a Nehru-style collar in the image carousel. Mystery solved. From the web page:
Girls on Film is a series about images that existed only on the fringes of celluloid—originally used by colorists to match color density and skin tone between different reels of film—the images existed in the countdowns, never meant to be seen by the public. The frames were abused, damaged and forgotten, even before the world of motion pictures turned digital—and this show attempted to give those women a brief moment of recognition.
I wasn’t completely surprised to find out that the image was used as a film sample test shot, since I was familiar with the story of Lena Söderberg, a Swedish model who posed for Playboy, and in the male-dominated world of video tech, part of her centerfold pic became a standard film stock testing image for many years, before feminist outcry and advances in digital film technology finally caused her image to be retired. In a 2019 documentary short called ‘Losing Lena’, Lena herself was asked about her image being retired and she said "… I retired from modeling a long time ago. It’s time I retired from tech, too.”
Anyway, I thought this was an interesting, slightly sad story of women who hoped at one time to become famous, but only ended up as obscure footnotes of film history.
I still don’t understand why they only used images of young women for this purpose, but I also wonder if the Duran Duran song “Girls On Film” had something to do with it.
Well, I didn’t mean to ask if the song was the inspiration for the practice, but rather the other way around. It also was a little tongue in cheek, because it was the first thing I thought about when I read “Girls on film”.
And in a similar vein, notice how farmer has the latest tech to help with the chores (and a snowmobile!), but getting a dishwasher so his wife and daughter don’t have to hand wash is “too much”?
For those who click on and watch the ‘Farm Family in Winter’ video linked in the OP, and find it to be an interesting time capsule like I do, here is the much-anticipated sequel
Cool! The woman I discovered in the ‘Farm Family’ video is the first one shown in the ‘Death Proof’ credits. Yes, clearly Tarantino was paying homage, if not to the specific ‘Girls on Film’ art exhibition I linked to, then to the ‘girls’ themselves who became obscure film test clips. He could have been paying homage to, or have gotten the footage from, the ‘Girls on Film’ exhibition specifically though-- the timing works out: ‘GoF’ the exhibition ran from 2004-05, and ‘Death Proof’ came out in 2007.
Farming’s always been a business with tight margins, and farm equipment has always been expensive. I have no problem believing that a farm family would pass up a new dishwasher (1967 price, starting at $119.50 - equivalent to $1,166.00 today) when they were getting about $82.40 per acre for their corn crop – and the average farm size was only 360 acres.
Color film has always been an exercise in managing tradeoffs, because the dyes in photographic emulsions can’t reproduce the full range of colors equally well. You can see the same thing even in early black-and-white: orthochromatic film was insensitive to red, which meant a bright red flag could appear almost black. Manufacturers simply optimized for the kinds of photographs they expected people to shoot.
Color film made the balancing act even more visible. Engineers could only push the emulsions so far, so different films ended up with different personalities. Kodachrome, for example, is wonderful for bold, saturated slides of landscapes, birds, and flowers, but it’s not great for subtle tonal transitions. Portraiture was its own challenge — no one wants wedding photos on Fuji Velvia — so portrait films of the ’50s and ’60s were tuned specifically to render “natural” skin tones, often at the cost of less-accurate colors elsewhere.
Labs also needed a consistent way to set up and calibrate their equipment, and film manufacturers supplied standard portrait images for this purpose. These became known as Shirley Cards.
The issue was that these calibration photos almost always featured a white woman. As a result, the baseline for color balance ended up centered on Caucasian skin, with the predictable downside for anyone with darker skin tones.
Fortunately, we’ve moved well past that era. Modern digital cameras handle a wide range of skin tones very well. There are still tradeoffs — sensors aren’t perfect, and certain clothing dyes can still shift color — but it’s far less tied to the baked-in limitations of older film materials.
Great contribution to the thread, and really interesting info on the history of color film, thanks! As a former graphic artist, I’ve had (often frustrating) experience with the vagaries and inconsistencies of color reproduction, though only with photography and artwork-- I never worked with film stock.
Must be some sort of serial number. The 54th shot in the 5200 series of test images, something like that?
