After filming on locations of „The Cold Heart“ in Berlin 2020, we digitalised the developed negatives at the Lichtspiel / Cinematheque of Berne and are finally able to compare our recordings with Karl Ulrich Schnabels film.

It seems that time stood still for over 80 years. On closer inspections, you can see new buildings, modifications or modern cars and clothes. But the film look is quite similar. By comparing, you have to consider that the film positives by Karl Ulrich Schnabel are a copy of a copy. For editing, he copied his camera negatives to an intermediate positive. But most of the found footage is another generation of copy. For the restoration work on „The Cold Heart“, we had only a few meters of original camera negatives available that we can compare with the final screening print:

If you have this quality loss in mind, you can understand the image details that differ between the footage of 1932 and our recordings in 2020. We can assume that Karl Ulrich Schnabels camera negatives might had almost the same detail level and quality as our 16mm negatives.