[opendtv] NYTimes: Test Pattern Girls...

FYI -- Beats the heck out of a boring test pattern...  BTW, does anyone know 
where "Lena"
is these days?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/movies/30sich.html?oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

January 30, 2005
DIRECTIONS | FROM THE ARCHIVES
Big (Test) Break

By CHOIRE SICHA

Opening on Friday: portraits of 60 female film stars you've never seen.

The women in the exhibition "Girls on Film," at Anthology Film Archives in the 
East Village, belonged to a secret cinematic world. They were put before the 
camera not for the audience's eventual enjoyment, but for brief tests that 
technicians used to adjust the film's color and exposure. These "China Girls," 
as they came to be known (though no one seems to remember why), were sometimes 
actresses but more often lab assistants or secretaries who were roped into 
service. As far as the moviegoing public was concerned, they never existed, but 
they captured the glamour and attitude of the period. And they lived on for 
decades as projection booth pin-ups.

"We're always looking at these old test girls," said Robert David, chief 
executive of the CinemaLab in Englewood, Colo., which specializes in film 
restoration. The test strips are used to gauge absolute black-and-white tones 
but are most useful for skin tones. "In Europe, the test girls are naked - 
they're topless," he said. "Because the more flesh, the more helpful it is." 
Though the film-strip models are useful for restorations, digital technology 
has made them otherwise obsolete: perfect white balance can be achieved with 
the touch of a button, not the squint of an eye.

The exhibition's curators, Julie Buck and Karin Segal, work in conservation at 
the Harvard Film Archive and spent nearly a year restoring scratched and 
damaged snippets of found film for the show, which is made up of photographs. 
"They were used since the silent era, but probably the predominant period when 
they were on everything was mid-60's to mid-80's," Ms. Buck said. She added 
that "Chinese film has Chinese girls, Indian has Indian girls" - "French has 
French girls," Ms. Segal interjected - "but they're always girls," Ms. Buck 
concluded. They had not yet found any tests of topless models.

Karin Kolb, now the program coordinator for film at the Goethe Institute in 
Boston, served as a test-strip girl just once, in Munich in 1992. Her on-screen 
moment hasn't yet been found. "I didn't have to dress up - I just had my 
regular clothes on, I wasn't stripping!" she said. "When you're an intern, I 
think you always do what they tell you to."

 
 
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