Rollei Ortho 25 plus - single roll review

Rollei Ortho 25 plus in 35mm

"Although panchromatic films are used for nearly all general photography today, we should avoid prejudice against other emulsions since they may have practical and aesthetic applications. Both orthochromatic and blue-sensitive films are usually capable of higher contrast than panchromatic film. An orthochromatic film can be quite luminous in rendering foliage in the landscape since the foliage green is rendered relatively light, comparable to our visual response; caution must be exercised if the subject contains red-reflecting surfaces such as certain rocks, tree bark, and flowers, since these will be rendered quite dark. It can also be used in portraiture, where it will emphasise skin features such as lips and freckles, and darken (sometimes excessively) a ruddy complexion."

Ansel Adams, The Negative

Orthochromatic film has seen something of an (admittedly niche) increase in popularity in recent years, most notably with Ilford releasing its Ortho Plus in both 35mm and medium format after many years of only being available in sheet film sizes. My experiences with other orthochromatic emulsions, such as Rollei ATO 2.1 Supergraphic and Kodagraph Ortho Negative film has often been one of attempting to tame their inherent high contrast to use the films for pictorial purposes, unlike the graphic arts applications that these were formulated for; other experiences with more general purpose orthochromatic camera films, such as the original Kodak Verichrome, Ilford Selochrome Fast Ortho and various glass plates, all involved using photographic material which was many decades old, where achieving any result in and of itself was far more important a consideration than the aesthetics of an orthochromatic rendering of a scene, thus negating, as Ansel Adams describes, the reasons one might favour orthochromatic over panchromatic film.

In my post on the Lomography Berlin Kino film, nearly six months ago now, I wrote of the #ShittyCameraChallenge prize I'd received (sponsored by David Walster - @196photo on Twitter), four different rolls of 35mm black and white film, none of which I'd used before. I also wrote about how I usually like to test films a little more fully before writing about them, but given the four all very different emulsions, I thought I might post 'single roll' reviews of these particular films. Towards the end of August, I shot the Rollei Ortho 25 plus with my Voigtländer Vito B. I chose this camera as I thought that its lens might be a sympathetic fit to the look of an orthographic emulsion, although this is probably too nuanced to really matter that much. Despite my best intentions, after developing the film languished until such time that I had to scan it and work over the digital images (generally, just spotting and adjusting levels). My previous use of other ortho films (as well as other slow films) gave me some idea of what to expect–or so I thought. I actually loaded the film under red safelight conditions in an attempt to get as many frames as possible from the roll, so as not to expose the start of the roll, pulling out enough film to secure the end to the take-up spool. The data sheet for Rollei Ortho 25 plus does state that "blue-green sensitivity allows the film to be handled under red darkroom lighting" but also under 'Laboratory Lighting': "The film can be processed in absolute darkness and should not be exposed to sunlight or darkroom lighting!" Presumably this refers to amber safelights rather than dark red. In the event, I got 39 frames on the 36-exposure roll, possibly not worth the extra effort.

After I developed the film and scanned the negatives, the results were more grainy than I had anticipated (for a 25 ISO film in comparison to other slow films I've used; clearly its nothing like a typical 400 ISO film). This may have been due to some overdevelopment and possibly some over-exposure (the grain is particularly prominent in the sky). Possibly some of this might be scanner noise, which I do find happens with dense negatives on my desktop scanner. I used Rodinal (as Ars Imago #9) to develop the film; possibly I should have used a higher dilution of 1+50 instead of 1+25 (the data sheet recommends Rollei Supergrain developer, not one I've ever used). Rodinal should work well with a slow film in theory: looking at other examples online, there does seem to be a range in terms of how fine the grain appears. Ideally, I'd like to print from the negatives in the darkroom, but my use of a darkroom for printing has somewhat been curtailed by the pandemic.

As most of the photographs were taken outside, often with a fair bit of sky in the frame, I did shoot a few frames with a yellow filter for comparison against those without (there was probably as much grey sky during the August of 2021 as there was blue). Generally, the sky has a 'soft' look to it, picking up more definition than I might have expected given the excess of blue light, but the use of a yellow filter does improve this: in the images below, the one with the filter really picks out the satellite dish against the darker sky on the distant building; at the same time it also makes some of the foliage lighter, with the tree in the middle of the frame appearing oddly washed out. I may have overcompensated in the exposure when using the yellow filter. I also feel the necessity of having a colour image here to really see exactly how the orthochromatic emulsion renders certain colours into tones.

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus - without filter

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus - with yellow filter

Without a filter, bright summer clouds in a blue sky do begin to blend together,giving the soft look I described as in the example below. I would have liked to have tried more of a range of filters than I did: the data sheet lists yellow, orange, and red filters: to be listed, I imagine that a red filter would still transmit enough of the spectrum that the film is sensitive enough to record.

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus - no filter

Some of the frames with particularly localised areas of strong highlights appear to show some halation, as in the images below. This may be due to the Vito B's lens, although this isn't something I've really noticed before and the Color-Skopar on the camera is coated. This isn't an unpleasant artefact, but worth being aware of when shooting–in so much as it may be an effect to seek out. A comparison with shooting the film in a different camera with a more modern lens might be useful here, but outside the scope of this post. Incidentally, all the photographs I took with the film were handheld, mostly outside on bright days where the 25 ISO speed was not and issue–the interior shot below was quite well lit from the window.

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus

I didn't use the film for any portraits, so I can't specifically relate this use to part of what Ansel Adams writes about as regards portraiture. One subject that the film might be apt for could be architecture perhaps: rendering colour into equivalent tones may not be that necessary, and the slow speed of the film is less of a consideration than any potentially moving subjects. I did take a number of photographs which featured brickwork, and it would have been interesting to see how the ortho film rendered red bricks, but these are all yellow London stock bricks in the images below (in the third image, the wall of the house in the background is red brick though: the mortar stands out quite well against the bricks and just possibly this is enhanced by being rendered by orthographic film). 

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus

Voigtländer Vito B with Rollei Ortho 25 plus

From using a single roll of Rollei Ortho 25 plus, I don't feel as though I've sufficiently tested the films capabilities: it would be useful to compare the results with the same subjects shot with panchromatic film, to try different developers, experiment more with filters, and print from the negatives, rather than simply scanning from them, as is the case with this post. It would be interesting to compare it to Ilford Ortho Plus too, a slightly faster orthographic film. Rollei Ortho 25 plus is also available in both medium format rollfilm and large format sheet film (according to the data sheet, in 4x5, 5x7, and 8x10 inch sizes) and I can imagine that it would be worth trying the film out in other sizes as well as the other approaches outlined above.

Sources/further reading
Rollei Ortho 25 plus data sheet (PDF)
Rollei Ortho 25 plus on Film Photography London
Rollei Ortho 25 plus on Blue Moon Camera Codex
Rollei Ortho 25 plus Alex Luyckx Blog
Ansel Adams, The Camera, Little, Brown and Company, New York 1980, twelfth paperback printing, 2005.

127 Day December 2021

Zeiss Ikon Ikonta 520/18 with Ilford HP5 Plus

I haven't posted very much on this blog for the last few months, for various reasons, but I didn't want to miss observing 127 Day yesterday, and I did also have the time to develop and scan the negatives, not wanting to add to a backlog of half-written blog posts or unresolved tests of films and cameras. I shot one whole roll of cut-down Ilford HP5 Plus, and a couple of short rolls of off-cuts from having previously cut down medium format HP5 to 127. I chose the Baby Ikonta in order to get as many shots from the film as possible, with the nominal 3x4.5cm negative format (and, with a little care, on a whole roll of 127 film with the Baby Ikonta one can get 17 pictures rather than the 16 numbered frames). I revisited a number of the shots that I'd taken in this summer's 127 Day in July (although not using the Vest Pocket Kodak due to its light leaks); the weather condition were less conducive than the overcast July day then, with very flat and dull light and increasing rain. I did consider pushing the film one stop in development to increase contrast, but went with the standard time for box speed as I'd taken quite a few shots with the sky featuring rather prominently, and I thought that this might make any definition in the sky even more difficult to pull out. The results were very much as I would have expected given the lighting conditions, and even with a 400-speed film I did shoot with wider apertures than I might have liked for the Baby Ikonta's Novar lens, but for a ninety-year-old triplet lens, it performs well enough.

'Thumb Cinema'

The subject of this post is, perhaps, just outside the self-declared remit of this blog. It is however, about a hybrid constructed with analogue means. While studying fine art in the mid-nineties, I was interested in film, interested in the moving image as a medium, but struggled to find ideas which would be best conveyed in the form, something in essence which I felt with the work I was making in general for most of my degree, but easier perhaps to disguise beneath technique and process in the prints that made up the bulk of my work then. I did however make a number of short video pieces, which I described at the time as animations, which isn't the best description for what they really were. These were all made with Adobe Photoshop 2.5 and Apple MoviePlayer, the forerunner to QuickTime Player, and originated with 8mm or Hi8 video footage, videoed projections of Super 8 film, or scanned photographs and drawings–such as the work I made using Muybridge's chronophotography, referenced in The Hand Inside the Frame.

One piece I made with this method was simply titled after when it was filmed: April 1996. This combined footage taken from a train on the main line railway into London Liverpool Street, some shots around Stratford, both on and off trains, then the actual approach to Liverpool Street itself, the Tate Gallery as it was then known, a street in Barking and a view on Wanstead Flats. A number of the static locations were also videoed in a plastic mirror to distort them. If there was any ostensible subject to the piece, it was a record of my journeys around London over Easter 1996, and, by implication, the transport network: the shots from Barking and Wanstead Flats both show distant trains (around the same time I made a set of screenprints collaging photographs taken on the London Underground, overlaid with typography and graphic design with elements of trompe l'oeil in the form of torn posters). If there was to be a soundtrack to this silent piece, it would be St Etienne's 'Railway Jam'.

Adobe Photoshop 2.5 was the release before Layers, and using it to make frame-by-frame animations was a challenge. Without Layers one could copy and paste from one image onto another, and, in the process of pasting, the floating selection could be blended with the image below, using blending options very much like those in the Layers panel, but once deselected, the floating selection and the image below were then became a single image. In addition, one could only Undo/Redo to the previous state; together, these forced both a definite and linear way of working. I mostly used this method to create transitions between different shots, and in other video pieces, combined these with text, copying and pasting frame by frame from short MoviePlayer files, low resolution (320x240 pixels), low frame rate (around 6 fps). The resulting MoviePlayer files were transferred to VHS, and the originals saved in sections over numerous floppy disks initially, before I invested in a 100mb Zip disk. In 1996 these methods were primitive and perverse at the time–much of the effects could have been achieved rather more easily in the college's conventional video editing suite, but I think I enjoyed working on my own, often on Saturday mornings in the college's small Mac suite (a couple of LC IIs and a Performa with the all-important video card; the college's digital studio was all PC), hidden in a room at the bottom of the old library, figuring out how to make this method work.

A strand that runs through a number of the works I've made in recent years is that of the particularity of location. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin describes the revolution that stems from the reproducibility of photography and film: no longer dependent on an original artefact being located in a particular time and place, every photographic print or print of a film being theoretically indistinguishable from the last, everyone can experience the work of art on a flat, democratic level. The loss of what Benjamin terms the original work of art's 'aura' is not to be something to be mourned: from a political perspective, it is a liberation. The footage from my journeys around London over Easter 1996, made into a low resolution, low frame rate video, was only ever shown to fellow students and staff at college, its ability to transport the viewers then to these locations was incredibly limited, about as far from an immersive experience as it's possible to be, even when experienced as a video projected onto a wall in a seminar room. Twenty-five years after I made April 1996, as a small performative gesture, I decided to return it to the specific location that it had originated from. There are a number of reasons for wanting to do this (the general principle of not leaving old work alone–even primitive juvenilia–being one), but the main reason was the simple fact of finding myself living not far from one of the locations used in the film. 

The shot from Wanstead Flats shows a train passing on the Barking to Gospel Oak line, then part of the North London Line, now combined into the Overground, seen from the Harrow Road playing fields, looking in the direction of Acacia Road, E11. At the time, this particular branch line felt like one of the most unloved parts of the whole London transport system: old two-carriage, slam-door diesel trains in the old livery of Network SouthEast, which ran at a frequency of twice an hour, if I remember correctly. If one wants to get a feel for London in the mid-1990s, Patrick Keiller's London represents it best; much of the infrastructure felt underfunded, broken, uncared for. The GLC had been abolished a decade earlier, British Rail had been privatised, and London had to wait until New Labour to regain a distinct political authority–with oversight for public transport–once more.

Rather than through editing, a juxtaposition with contemporary footage that brought both together in a digital space, to return this shot of the film to its location, I wanted a physical artefact that I could take there and document it replaying. This could have been on some form of monitor, a projection perhaps, but in finding an appropriate form to do this, a flip book seemed to be ideal. Its simplicity mirrored that of the original video, as well as its poor resolution and low frame rate, but also its place in the prehistory of film. The flip book's origins are located in the period in the mid-nineteenth century to which numerous devices (the phenakisticope and zoetrope, notably) designed to produce the illusion of movement date: it was patented as the Kineograph by John Barnes Linnett in 1868. Unlike those other devices, the flip book is linear, not circular, in its sequencing of motion, and, in that particular fact, foreshadowed the form that cinema would take–and indeed was a form that some of its pioneers–such as Max Skladanowsky–utilised, and, through the Mutoscope, also evaded Edison's patents. Although predating cinema, the German term for flip book is Daumenkino, literally and descriptively 'thumb cinema'. That the motion in this particular sequence in my video features a train is a fortuitous association, unintended at the time, with the birth of cinema, and the Lumières' famous train; the close-up, too, emerges with the invention of cinema (the single, short static shot that I used for this documentation is also similar to the duration of the Lumières' first films; there is also, intriguingly, a wisp of smoke alongside the bridge, no doubt from from the kind of business that inhabits a railway arch, smoke, along with water, was the kind of evanescent and ephemeral incidental subject that fascinated the Lumières). Even at its very low frame rate, it was impractical to turn the whole of April 1996 into a flip book. I took the original .mov file, imported this into a rather more recent version of Photoshop, and exported the frames from layers into individual files to print. From the start of the film, through the transition into the section shot on Wanstead Flats, then its transition into its distorting mirror image, made eighty-something pages.

It might have been more exact to have made this over Easter this year, a neat twenty-five years on, but as my life is still shaped by the academic calendar, October half-term would do. The two tower blocks in the original footage were demolished many years ago gone. These stood on Cathall Road, once overlooking over St Patrick's Catholic cemetery and the Central Line in Leyton. There is now a small park on their footprint. In the original footage, the angle of view–and also the image's aspect ratio–crop out the nearby John Walsh tower, seen on the right above, although its edge intrudes into the distorted mirror image footage in the original video. The sports pavilion on the left has also been rebuilt in the intervening years. The trees, still in leaf, obscure the railway line more than they once did. 

I recorded the short sequence with my Olympus Pen EPL1, using a manual focus Canon 28mm FD lens and a close up filter to achieve the close focus on the flip book. This meant some compromises: the angle of view is different from the original, taken from much further back, but along roughly the same axis; more importantly, I wanted to make this in one single shot, observing some notion of dramatic unity or fidelity to the event: operating the camera myself, and 'operating' the flip book too, I couldn't easily refocus the lens before and after holding the flip book in front of the lens. However, the 'real' shot of the scene is not sufficiently out of focus so as to be unintelligible–and one can discern both the moving figures in the distance and the train crossing the bridge. I did multiple takes: getting the the flip book right in the frame, in focus, then flipping through it sufficiently well wasn't always easy to achieve. The flip book itself really required tighter binding as well as a deeper spine to make the pages flip with greater regularity. As it exists, some of the pages bunch together, and the animation as a result is insufficiently smooth to achieve the illusion of motion, but in the take I used as 'Thumb Cinema', the middle section with the train passing is legible–and is followed shortly after by the contemporary train, travelling in the opposite direction, now electrified, four carriages long, four trains an hour during the day.

Sources/further reading

Flipbook.info

Rudolf Arnheim, ‘The Thoughts that Made the Picture Move’, in Film as Art, Faber, London 1958

Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', 1935

Patrick Keiller, London, 1994 BFI Screenonline

25 years in the making: the evolution of Photoshop

https://architectsforsocialhousing.co.uk/2016/08/10/what-are-the-options-fred-wigg-john-walsh-towers/

127 Day July 2021

Vest Pocket Kodak Autographic with Ilford Selochrome

127 Day is one of the film-themed calendar days which I endeavour to observe, especially in its July iteration. This year I had two rolls of Ilford Selochrome 127 film, both dated September 1970, and I chose to use the Vest Pocket Kodak Autographic camera, having not used this for a few years (had I thought about it, perhaps I should have used it last year, to mark a hundred years since my particular model had been made). I'd previously realised that the camera didn't quite focus on infinity (the camera itself is fixed-focus, but the lens seemed to be set much closer than infinity), and prior to using it last Monday, I had thought to attempt to work out how far from the film plane the lens should be positioned to achieve infinity focus. As the lens is erected on scissor struts, it might be possible to not fully pull out the lens and achieve this. I roughly calculated this to be around 4-5mm. I cut a piece of card to the length of the distance between the camera body and the front standard, so that, in theory, I could pull the lens board out from the body, then push it back in to the piece of card as a guide.

127 format Ilford Selochrome

In practice, this wasn't so easy. It was difficult to push the lens board back in toward the body equally on both sides and keep it parallel to the film plane; it also had a tendency to work itself back towards being closer to fully pulled out, due, I imagine, to the spring of the struts. Nevertheless, I persevered with this approach. The Ilford Selochrome film was originally rated 160 ASA; I generally shot it at 1/25th 'wide' open at f11, or used it for longer exposures stopped down to f22 balancing on walls or railings where I could. Conditions on Monday were heavily overcast, not ideal for using such an old film in a camera with a slow lens. The weather had been a little brighter earlier in the day, but by the time I left the house a mass of dark clouds was looming, and this was the weather front that caused flash flooding later that day in London, the same weather system which caused catastrophic floods in Europe a few days later.

Vest Pocket Kodak Autographic with Ilford Selochrome

I shot both rolls and semi-stand developed these in Ars Imago #9 for an hour at a dilution of 1+100. When I took the films out of the wash, it was immediately evident that on top of the focus issues, the negatives clearly showed that the bellows had light leaks. When I first used the Vest Pocket Kodak I had more or less repaired these with applications of acrylic ink to the rather worn corners of the bellows. Although I'd hardly used the camera since then, clearly this hadn't been a permanent fix and had deteriorated over the years. The length of time the bellows were extended was the main factor as to how intrusive these light leaks were, the image below being the worst; obviously, the time taken with fiddling around with the distance of the extension of the struts to try to get the lens in focus meant that this longer than using the camera 'normally'. Only a couple of frames seemed to largely escape the light leaks. Some frames also had a few losses of emulsion (seen in the image above), not entirely surprising given the age of the film, and the negatives had a pronounced curl, making scanning less easy than it might be, as well as an added difficulty in loading the tank for developing.

Vest Pocket Kodak Autographic with Ilford Selochrome

Once scanned, it was clear that my attempts correct the focus with the Vest Pocket Kodak had not been that successful. In the image below, a stray tip of grass at the bottom of the frame is the only part of the image in focus. I think this was where the lens board had worked itself back towards being more or less fully extended; I probably would not have been able to get this result if I'd tried, and despite the light leaks in the frame, the result wasn't entirely unsatisfactory.

Vest Pocket Kodak Autographic with Ilford Selochrome

Overall, the best frames were those where I stopped the lens down, and used the B or T settings, placing the camera on a wall or railing for exposures ranging from 1 second to something like 12 seconds for the image at the top of the post, probably the best from the two rolls of film, which has just a hint of shake given how difficult it was to keep the camera completely still. Using the Vest Pocket Kodak meant that I got eight frames on a roll, and I did try two or three frames for a couple of the subjects, given all the problems with the camera. In retrospect, perhaps I should have used the films in a different 127 camera, such as the Baby Ikonta, which would have given me twice as many shots; the film itself was an unknown quantity, I had no idea how this had been stored in the decades since it had been manufactured, but the near-pristine condition of the boxes was a hint that the Selochrome might still give good results, as it did, despite all the problems with the Vest Pocket Kodak.

 

Lomography Berlin Kino 400 - single roll review

Lomography Berlin Kino 400 - Formula 2019

For some time now, when using a film stock that's new–to me at least–I like to test a few rolls, starting by rating a number of frames both under and over its box speed, then giving this normal development for a test of the film's latitude. This often provides some indication whether the film might be sympathetic to both push (and pull) development. I'll typically shoot it in a few different cameras, sometimes in different formats if available. I also like to try at least a couple of different developers, dilutions, and sometimes different temperatures. Usually the manufacturers' recommendations for exposure and development give perfectly good results; however, for some film and developer combinations, there's not much information available online, particularly with new stocks, and it's always worth being attuned to what one wants to get from a film stock if not using a lab: having that degree of control is the main reason for developing black and white film myself, as much as, if not more than, the economy. The Massive Dev Chart is also a fantastic resource, but I have found a few stocks for which I've specifically established my own exposure/development practices through testing - most notably Ferrania P30, but also Rollei RPX 25 and Agfa/Rollei Superpan 200. This is all a preamble just to state that, in normal circumstances, I prefer to live with a film for a while before committing to write about it; this post goes against that preference.

Earlier this year I received a prize for my efforts in the #ShittyCameraChallenge, four different rolls of 35mm black and white film, none of which I'd used before: Rollei Ortho 25 Plus; Film Washi D; and two Lomography films, Fantome 8 and Berlin Kino 400. This carefully-curated prize, sponsored by David Walster (@196photo on Twitter), was an invitation for me to try some films I might not ordinarily use; due to the pandemic, lockdown, work and other circumstances, I hadn't shot any of them until earlier this month. An impromptu road trip to Cornwall was the occasion: I took my Kodak Retina IIa (a German-made Kodak, although from Stuttgart, not Berlin). This was already loaded with Kentmere Pan 100, but I put the roll of Lomography Berlin Kino in my bag as I thought I'd probably finish the part-used Kentmere film. In the event, I only loaded the Berlin Kino 400 for the return trip; having a 400-speed film was at least appropriate for taking photographs from a moving vehicle–from the passenger side–and not all of these were that successful. I finished the roll in the succeeding few days over the week, partly at the same time as I shot the 12-exposure cartridge of FP4 for June's '126 Day'.

Kodak Retina IIa with Lomography Berlin Kino 400

Most of the frames were shot using the 'sunny-16' rule, although I did meter some with my Weston Master II; most shots were made at box speed, or as near as. I did shoot a couple of frames just to compare the use of a yellow filter; unsurprisingly these did give better definition in the cloudy sky in the examples below. Quite possibly a number of the other frames would be better for the use of a yellow filter, as a general rule with most black and white panchromatic emulsions. I didn't try other filters, as I rarely use anything except a yellow, mostly a light yellow filter, sometimes a deep yellow.

Kodak Retina IIa with Lomography Berlin Kino 400-no filter

Kodak Retina IIa with Lomography Berlin Kino 400-yellow filter

For developing the film, I went straight to the Massive Dev Chart. At the time of writing, this has just one entry for Berlin Kino in Rodinal: 13 and a half minutes at a dilution of 1+50. Only after I'd developed the film did I come across Lomography's recommendation of 17m30s with Rodinal 1+50, which seems rather long. When I pulled the film from the wash, to my eye, the negative roll looked more than a little reminiscent of Foma Retropan 320 Soft: very low contrast on a noticeably grey base (initially, I did think it might be under-fixed, but I'd developed other films at the same time with clearer bases in the same fixer that I could compare to the Berlin film, and these looked properly fixed). When I scanned the negatives, my feeling of the comparison was that it was more than apt: the frames showed very prominent grain, and with a very irregular pattern, something that Foma films tend to show. Where the comparison seems to falls down is the lack of halation around the highlights: with Retropan, very bright highlights have a 'glow'. This doesn't seem to be the case with Lomography Berlin Kino 400: the image below would be a good subject to test this out, and it doesn't obviously appear around the bright sunlit barriers and the lintel over the underpass entrance.

Kodak Retina IIa with Lomography Berlin Kino 400

Whenever a 'new' film appears on the market there's always a fair amount of online speculation over what it 'really' is: there are only a few manufacturers of photographic material. Some new film is genuinely new, newly formulated emulsions; some 'new' film depends on specialist emulsions which would not have been previously available to consumers in any convenient format (for example, until relatively recently, a still photographer wanting to use Eastman Double-X would have had to purchase a 400ft roll as a minimum, then somehow get this into 35mm cartridges for use). Some apparently new films are simply existing emulsions rebranded and repackaged. When Lomography first brought Berlin Kino to market, it was pretty quickly established that it was Orwo N74–not a film I've used–and apparently had the same edge markings. However, the roll of Berlin Kino that I shot was clearly marked on the box 'Formula 2019' (intriguingly, Orwo also updated their fast negative emulsion in 2019, now named N75, but with a speed rating of 320, rather than 400 ISO). Having not tried neither the first iteration of Berlin Kino, nor either versions of Orwo N74 or N75, I can't comment on how the Formula 2019 compares. Interestingly, the negatives had no edge markings whatsoever once developed, not even frame numbers (as was the case with Retropan), but I did note it does have standard 35mm still film perforations, and not the more rounded Bell & Howell perforations for motion picture negative stock, which suggests it is not simply or no longer repackaged Orwo N74; the 2019 formula is also available in medium format, but as a one-roll review, I can't comment on what it's like. Perhaps entirely coincidentally, Foma Retropan 320 Soft has been widely reported as discontinued, although still listed on Foma's website (which doesn't have much information in general).

Kodak Retina IIa with Lomography Berlin Kino 400

Lomography's marketing on their website does hint at the origins of the first iteration of Berlin Kino film:

A Refined Formula for True Film Lovers
Inspired by the New German Cinema sweeping through Berlin in the 1960s, our original Berlin Kino Film emulsion was an utter blockbuster. However, as German cinema evolved through time, adapting to meet the innovatory spirit of its founding fathers, so did our film formula. Refined and brimming with greater artistic control, the Berlin Kino B&W 400 2019 Formula will allow you to capture moments of your life in an eternalized enchanting monochrome.

As a West German phenomenon, the film makers of the New German Cinema quite possibly would not have used Orwo, an East German film stock, as speculated on in the Casual Photophile's review. Having researched a little into New German Cinema myself, and into the films of Wim Wenders in particular, the only film for which I've found that specific information is Wenders' Im Lauf der Zeit/Kings of the Road (1975): this was shot on Eastman Plus-X and 4-X negative stocks (one could also quibble about the name: Munich might be as–if not more–resonant to New German Cinema than Berlin; maybe they should have called the film Oberhausen, but perhaps that's too obscure for the casual film photographer). Nevertheless, the association is there, and one Lomography has kept with the Formula 2019 version. Again, I'd have liked to have shot a roll of the initial Berlin Kino for a comparison.

Kodak Retina IIa with Lomography Berlin Kino 400

My impressions from shooting a single roll of the film are that Berlin Kino 400 does at least have quite a distinctive look, which comes from two factors: its very low contrast, and its prominent (and irregular) grain. These qualities do feel like they would suggest the film's use for specific subjects, although such ideas–that a particular film stock is necessarily good for a particular subject–should never go unexamined. It certainly wouldn't be replacing my 400-speed film of choice in 35mm (Ilford HP5 Plus), but would be a clear replacement for Foma Retropan 320 Soft–if the latter film has indeed been discontinued. I'd be interested to see how it prints in the darkroom (all images on this post are scanned from the negatives), how it performs in medium format and what it's like in different developers, how it stands up to push-processing, but as a one-roll review, these are outside the remit of this post.

Sources/further reading:
Lomography's page on Berlin Kino 400
The Casual Photophile's review
Random Camera Blog on Lomography Berlin and Potsdam films
Alex Luyckx on the original Berlin Kino 400