# A Brief History of Cinematic Colour



## Guest (Aug 20, 2021)

Most of the great movies of cinema's so-called golden age were made in black and white, but from the very beginning film technicians had experimented with the use of colour. In some of the earliest silent movies, colours were hand painted onto the film itself, frame by frame - a painstaking process. Another method was to dip stretches of the film into coloured dyes, using colours that changed according to the mood of the scene - yellow for happy, pink for romance, green for danger, blue for night and so on.

In the mid-teens of the 20th century Herbert T. Kalmus and Daniel F. Comstock devised a colour system they called Technicolor. It was composed of red and green images and the colour range was very restricted. Nevertheless, the pair successfully produced a feature, The Gulf Between (1917), a drama about an orphaned child which is sadly lost today having been destroyed in a fire in 1961. Five years later they made The Toll of the Sea, a drama in which an American sailor marries a Chinese woman; it was filmed by Technicolor using a somewhat improved process and was released by Metro.

In 1923 Cecil B. DeMille used Technicolor for a spectacular sequence for his epic The Ten Commandments, filming the flight from Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea in colour. Other filmmakers followed: the prologue to Buster Keaton's comedy Seven Chances (1925) used Technicolor; there was a colour sequence in the Lon Chaney thriller The Phantom of the Opera (1925), another in Ben-Hur made the same year, and in 1926 Douglas Fairbanks - the era's superstar - made the swashbuckling The Black Pirate in the system.

With the coming of sound in 1928-9, musical films became popular and many of these incorporated colour sequences while some, like On with the Show (1929) and King of Jazz (1930), were entirely filmed in colour. The last feature films made in the original "two-strip" Technicolor were thrillers: Doctor X (1932) and The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933); both were directed by Michael Curtiz, who would go on to make Casablanca in 1943 - Wax Museum was eventually re-made in 3D as House of Wax (1953).

By this time Technicolor had made considerable advances in technical quality and the company's "three-colour" system was launched in 1932, successfully marrying negatives individually sensitive to red, green and - for the first time - blue. Walt Disney, always an innovator, used this new process for the first time for an animated short film, Flowers and Trees (1932), and it was used in sequences in the musicals The Cat and the Fiddle, Hollywood Party and Kid Millions (all 1934). The first feature made in what became the standard Technicolor was made by another cinematic innovator, **Rouben Mamoulian*. Becky Sharp (1935) was a lavish adaptation of Thackery's Vanity Fair, and though the film itself was not one of the director's best, his utilisation of richly textured colour in the ballroom scenes and the sequence of Napoleon's return from Waterloo remain impressive today.

*The new Technicolor was expensive and the camera that filmed it cumbersome*, so there was no great rush to make films in the new system. In 1936 The Trail of the Lonesome Pine became the first Technicolor feature filmed largely on outdoor locations. The following year Disney produced the trailblazing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, his first animated feature film, in colour.
In 1937 the original version of A Star is Born was made in Technicolor and the first British film was made in the system - Wings of the Morning, an innocuous film in which the red London buses were greatly admired. From then on a handful of Technicolor films was produced each year: The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), the most popular of Australian Errol Flynn's romantic swashbucklers; John Ford's first western in colour, Drums Along the Mohawk (1939); and, in Britain, a spectacular adaptation of A.E.W. Mason's novel, The Four Feathers (also 1939). 1939 was also the year of the two great Technicolor blockbusters, both directed by Victor Fleming: The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind.

While the majority of films - thrillers, war movies, melodramas - would still be made in black and white, almost every western and musical from here on would be in colour.
Technicolor was not the only colour system in use. A less expensive process, Cinecolor, was adopted by some of the smaller studios.

By the early 1950s some of the film studios dabbled with other systems. 20th Century-Fox released their prints in De Luxe colour and MGM in Ansco Color. Unfortunately, these proved less stable than Technicolor and the prints faded. Vincente Minnelli made some great Technicolor musicals - Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris (1951) and Gigi (1958). Lust for Life (1957), his visually innovative film about Vincent van Gogh, had been processed in Asco Color. But eventually the rich colours had completely disappeared, to be replaced by a sickly yellow. Minnelli was, by the early 1970s, understandably inconsolable. Fortunately, the original camera negative was not affected so that fresh prints on a more stable format could be made.

From the mid-1950s onwards various colour systems were used in different parts of the world: Sovcolor in the USSR, Orwo colour in East Germany, Gevacolor in Belgium and West Germany among them. The latter was used by director Charles Chauvel to film Australia's first feature film in colour, Jedda, in 1955.

The arrival of colour television in America in the 1950s increased the demand for colour films. By 1966, all prime-time TV shows in the US were in colour, a landmark that coincided with the virtual end of black and white film production in Hollywood, though black and white films continued to be made in other parts of the world for another 10 years or so. From now on, to make an American film in black and white represented an artistic statement, a challenge embraced by Peter Bogdanovich with The Last Picture Show (1971) and Paper Moon (1973), by Woody Allen with Manhattan (1979) and Shadows and Fog (1991), by Martin Scorsese with Raging Bull (1980) and by Steven Spielberg with Schindler's List (1993).

In the early 1980s the Hal Roach studios decided to colorise its black and white library of films using a computerised system. Media mogul Ted Turner elaborated on this by colorising hundreds of old black and white features thus, theoretically, giving them a new lease of life on television. _The process was described as vandalism by, among others, US critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, and the colorisation fad didn't last_. More recently, Peter Jackson's They Shall Grow Not Old (2018) used newsreel footage from World War I and added colour and sound effects, with surprisingly satisfying results.

Even today an occasional film is made in black and white. Three of the outstanding achievements of recent years - Alexander Payne's deeply touching road movie Nebraska, the Coen Brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There and Alfonso Cuaron's nostalgic, award-winning Roma - were all made in black and white. British cinematographer Roger Deakins is a specialist in monochrome.

(*I had the chance to meet *Rouben Mamoulian* at my workplace in television in the early 1970s (he was sitting in the office next to mine), but I passed it up as, at the time, I hadn't heard about him and didn't know of his real importance. Some few short years passed before I realized what a big mistake I'd made.)


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## Guest (Aug 21, 2021)

Victor Fleming standing beside a 3-strip Technicolor camera circa 1939:


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