A Day in 1920s Paris (1927): Restored to Life in 4K Colour & Sound

An evening at the Moulin Rouge, a morning at the Café de la Paix, a quiet view of Notre-Dame from the Eiffel Tower. Paris in 1927, restored in 4K colour with added soundscape. This is a new version of my 2021 film A Day in 1920s Paris: • A Day in 1920s Paris | 1927 Enhanced Film ...
The new restoration uses deep exemplar-based colourisation, which references real photographic colour data rather than estimating hue from context alone. The improvement over the 2021 version is most visible in the warmer skin tones, the architecture, and the textures of the period clothing. An ambient soundscape has been added throughout, which changes the experience of watching considerably.
This is the Paris of the Lost Generation. Hemingway was here, Joyce was here, the Fitzgeralds and Coco Chanel moved through these same streets and cafés. The film offers a quiet window into the city they knew, two years before the crash that would close the decade.
A journey through the day
The film opens at the Café de la Paix on the Place de l'Opéra, which had already been the centre of Parisian social life for over half a century by the time this footage was shot.
The afternoon takes us to Les Guinguettes de Robinson, an open-air dance venue on the outskirts of the city. Only the façade survives today. The footage includes a rare glimpse of silent film star Pola Negri among the dancers.
Notre-Dame appears next, captured from the Eiffel Tower restaurant. The spire visible in the footage is the one designed by Viollet-le-Duc in the nineteenth century, which stood until the 2019 fire.
The evening sequence covers the Moulin Rouge and dinner at Au Caneton, both fixtures of the city's nightlife in this period.
How silent footage is colourised and brought to life
I take early fragments of silent 16fps footage and restore them by combining manual frame-by-frame colourisation with deep exemplar-based video colourisation techniques. Frames are researched for historical accuracy in fashion and architecture before the colour pass. The footage is then upscaled and the frames interpolated to a higher frame rate, in most cases 60 frames per second. Finally I produce a soundtrack which helps build a new immersive experience for the viewer.
Together, these processes revive old fragments of footage, offering audiences a more vivid and engaging glimpse of lives long since lived in the distant past.