Martin Roux, AFC, reflects on the visual work done on Bérenger Thouin’s "L’Âge d’or"

Born at the turn of the century in a village’s butcher shop, Jeanne Lavaur dreams of becoming a countess. Inspired by the fearless Céleste and guided by her love for Guillaume de Barante, Jeanne’s journey carries her from the vibrant Paris of the Golden Twenties through the turmoil of two world wars. As her life intertwines with the great upheavals of the 20th century, she rises as a fiercely free woman, determined to never let anyone else define who she is meant to be.
With Souheila Yaacoub, Vassili Schneider, Yile Yara Vianello, Pierre-Antoine Billon.

The beginning of the story
This is the story of a friendship between Martin Roux and Bérenger Thouin that began in 2012 at the Louis-Lumière School and, over the course of ten years, blossomed into an artistic collaboration on several projects, including L’Âge d’or. Martin tells us : “I started working with Bérenger on his short films. He really loves archival footage and amateur footage—"found" images”.
He has directed several short films using these images, Guillaume le désespéré and La Lettre de Carthagène. They are quite romantic fables. Bérenger draws a great deal of inspiration from those grand literary narratives that span 50 or 100 years”.
Ten years ago, Bérenger Thouin began conceptualizing L’Âge d’or . To do so, he went to Gaumont-Pathé Archives (GPA) to watch hours and hours of archival footage and write a feature film based on that footage. “He chose a sequence of a celebration, a sequence of an election, a sequence of a flood, and many others, then began to flesh out his screenplay.”

Narrative and the archive/fiction framework
Once all the archival footage had been selected, the groundwork was laid. Martin Roux explains : “The rough cut of the film was edited over a period of six to nine months, in the year leading up to shooting. This editing phase also served as the final writing phase (and Rémi Langlade, the film’s brilliant editor, is also a co-writer).
The archival footage was definitively selected. We then watched a 1 hour and 50-minute edit consisting entirely of archival footage, with gaps throughout. In the gaps, there were drawings or cards indicating the actions of the characters. Bérenger had recorded a voice-over and added music ; it really formed the skeleton of a film.
The question of how to handle the archival footage was a constant topic of discussion throughout the film’s development : could it be seamlessly integrated into our footage, or should it remain separate ?
He dreamed of a film where everything would be completely blended together, but we sometimes doubted our ability to achieve that, right up until the first days of shooting.
We also had to visualize what the restored archive footage would look like in the final cut, even though some of it was in very poor condition.
Rémi Langlade took over the editing as soon as the first footage came in : he began filling in the gaps, and the editing feedback we received throughout the shoot was crucial in helping us understand how to integrate the archival footage”.

A somewhat dogmatic shooting
Filming techniques from the early 20th century are a far cry from today’s cinema. Martin Roux had to rethink his filming habits : “Newsreel cameramen were on their own with a camera ; they had no follow focus or reflex viewfinder. So, in a somewhat theoretical sense, a shot had to be shot alone, in a very understated way, without tracking focus, and without using any mechanical devices that would affect the shot. As for focal lengths, we limited ourselves to using medium focal lengths, almost exclusively 50mm, which is overwhelmingly predominant in the archives.
News cameramen also lacked fluid heads, so we had to limit the use of pans or reframing, at least at the beginning of the film. Little by little, the grammar becomes richer and more relaxed : we find handheld shots, tracking shots, in short, an aesthetic of cinéma vérité.
To push this concept further and ensure I stayed true to it, I decided to do away with the grip crew altogether, based on a simple idea : if a shot requires grip equipment, it doesn’t belong in the film. It was completely dogmatic, but I needed it because I had essentially given everyone a blank check, saying it would work”.
But bright situations did exist in the archival footage, so it was necessary to create them in the fictional images and be able to connect them. Martin continues : "There is a constant pragmatism with light in the archives : the low sensitivity pushes the operators to get closer to the windows, the lack of additional light forces them to accept strong contrasts, so that we find many shots that are ultimately very committed in terms of image."

The choice of medium establishes the foundations of the filming process
The various film formats were very different : 16mm, 35mm, negatives or positives, and from different eras. A common shooting platform was therefore needed, one that would allow the images to be processed in different ways. A crucial choice had to be made. “Shooting on film was ruled out from the start : its sharpness and dynamic range are nothing like those of early 20th-century film ; it would have represented a considerable additional cost without solving any real textural problems.
I chose to shoot with a RED Komodo, a very simple camera, because I didn’t need performance, sensitivity, dynamic range, or good color since I was going to shoot everything in black and white.
Combined with old Zeiss Standard lenses, I had a sufficiently flat and easy-to-work-with image, with a texture that already approached the cleanest of our 35mm archives.”

Digital filming
Once these devices were chosen, filming could begin. Martin recalls : “It was a very simple shoot, like a kind of costume documentary. Our grammar was limited enough that within it we could allow ourselves to improvise, to add scenes. We ultimately had a lot of freedom”.

To build the structure to the very end, one stone at a time
As the narrative progresses, the visual style evolves. The film’s grammar becomes more fluid ; the archival footage is more vibrant but not always well-lit. For a cinematographer, it’s not always easy to adapt to an aesthetic they didn’t choose.
"The shots in the post-election party sequence at the castle are mostly archival footage. We shot a few dance scenes, and we had to light them the way they did back then : directly, with open-face torches. It was truly heartbreaking for me and Rémi Pigeard, the gaffer, to light them that way. But the lighting matches are perfect. Paradoxically, there’s a kind of modernity to this less-than-polished style of filming.
Moreover, the archive footage of this party comes from an evening hosted by a group of film crew members, who filmed their own party, much like we do today with smartphones. There’s a disturbing kind of mise en abyme at play !”.

The Brazilian getaway, the romantic and the epic
The Brazilian section contributes to this literary and romantic narrative, that of a character who traverses the 20th century. A sense of euphoria and great freedom emanates from this exotic interlude. Martin Roux describes a shoot that unfolded like a somewhat wild road movie.
“Brazil had been cut from the script. But Bérenger was deeply attached to that part, and as soon as he finished a first cut, he went to see his producer to tell her how much it was missing. So, six of us went to Brazil, sometimes driving five hours a day in a van to get from location to location.
I was alone on camera, the two actors dressed themselves, and we were sometimes in costume too, so we could walk into the shot at any moment and act as extras.”

Another piece of the puzzle : restoration
Restoring the archive footage was essential for the overall flow, in order to find a point of convergence between the filmed footage and the "found" footage. This involved a very long and meticulous post-production process, which could only be carried out in parallel with the editing.
“We didn’t want to delegate this step to an external restoration company ; we didn’t want to send the shots back to us in a closed and final state. So we had a restorer, Louis Midavaine, in a room next to the editing suite, with whom we could discuss each shot, each sequence. He had the same role as an editor or a colorist, because we felt that restoration consisted of adjusting the image’s position within the narrative.We had all sorts of materials, in all formats, from negatives in very good condition to very damaged positives. Restoring film inevitably damages the image, deteriorates the material, because you’re stripping it a bit ; so we were very careful about that. But sometimes, quite a lot of work was needed to find the right join. In fact, every join was a struggle.”

Yet another stone : color grading
The digitally shot image was color-graded against the restored archival footage it was superimposed onto, creating a continuous black and white image with a texture that evolves throughout the film. This was, once again, a lengthy process, which the director of photography explains : “I knew I was going to be demanding a lot at this stage ; so I worked in several sessions spread over six weeks with two colorists who helped each other. We added layer upon layer of effects and went back and forth a lot between the archival footage and our shot footage”.

Then, an unexpected stone : the coloring
The filming and archival footage were shot in black and white, and the film was edited entirely in black and white, but ultimately the sequences are rendered in a subtle, pastel color, like an "unbleached" effect.
"Bérenger Thouin always envisioned creating a grand, full-color epic, which is somewhat audacious given the source material. So we implemented a colorization process combining AI and a great deal of manual correction, always carried out by Louis Midavaine. The color allowed us to project the archival footage even further into the fictional narrative and to blend the two even more seamlessly.
On the other hand, I campaigned quite quickly for the entire film not to be coloured for two reasons : it seemed to me too cumbersome a process and, in addition, we found the black and white very beautiful ; it would have been a shame to forget it completely.
Then it became clear to us that the black and white/color (or vice versa) passages allowed us to mark chapters, to build a visual rhythm that helped the narrative.
There were sequences we sometimes wanted to see in black and white—the 1960s at the end, almost like shots from Chris Marker’s La Jetée—and others in color—the First World War, whose archival footage is more overused. From this, we constructed a score of alternating between the two, ultimately resulting in a 50/50 split, but still 500 shots to colorize.
We colorized the archival footage and our shots in the same way, so that in the end, in the film’s color, almost no trace of reality remains : everything is painted.”

One final layer : special effects
Finally, there is another method of manipulating the images : special effects. But paradoxically, the film contains relatively few of them. Martin Roux explains : “The special effects were created at MPC and supervised by Hugues Namur, for about thirty shots in total out of a film that has over a thousand. For a period film, it’s actually a film with very few special effects.
The visual effects employ both very traditional 2D compositing methods and much more sophisticated face-swap techniques. Creating these few genuinely manipulated shots was a very enriching and enjoyable collaboration. But paradoxically, the film remains very "natural" in its relationship to the image. While there are certainly a great many post-production stages, they are all driven by a desire to remain faithful to the source material”.

A craftsmanship of film at all levels
The film’s greatest achievement is its bold and inspiring approach ; one cannot imagine the complexity of its production. Martin tells us : "And yet, a certain craftsmanship runs throughout the entire film, from the set to post-production. The shoot was done with a very small crew, in a light and mobile style already mentioned above, but this artisanal approach is also reflected in the very tools used to create the image".
Martin Roux is part of HAL Picture, the company that develops the Diachromie and Diaphanie image processing tools, which were used extensively throughout the film’s post-production.
"Diachromie was used, in particular, to produce contrast curves that very precisely mimic what we could see in the archives. But the tool also served to contain and refine the colorized images, which sometimes had slightly unusual saturations, still unfinished in their cinematic rendering. Diaphanie, on the other hand, plays an extremely important role in the textural transitions between shots.
We had to create this rendering of modeling, sometimes very indistinct, sometimes quite defined, always with great precision. Diaphanie allowed us to construct these texture transitions between the archival footage and the filmed images.
But the tool was also used for a grain overlay that covers the entire film. We weren’t able to preserve the original grain from the archives, which had been altered by the restoration process, and we needed to lay down a new grain – or rather, new grains, since they evolve according to the different periods the film goes through. This allowed us to unify the shots while also reflecting the historical transformations of the “arrative.”
The development of the tools itself continued during the making of the film. "There are even certain Diaphanie functions that were developed specifically for L’Âge d’or, because the perception of grain on these very pure archives had become absolutely critical.

The end of the story, since we must conclude…
Ultimately, it’s a film with an extraordinary production. A year of editing in total, filming in three countries, 150 days of restoration and colorization, all within a budget that was far from ideal for a film like this, but thanks to the unwavering perseverance of the producer, Carine Ruzsnieski (GoGoGo Films). And then there was the collaboration of the crew and the various department heads, which Martin describes as extremely close and supportive : "We needed a great deal of understanding and attention to each other’s work, as we felt quite overwhelmed by the film’s highly unconventional nature, but everything always proceeded smoothly and with excellent communication".

(Interview conducted and written by Brigitte Barbier for the AFC)