E.P. 188,329. Comstock, D. F. and Technicolor, 1921.
“Describes the exposure of two films through the celluloid and the superposition of the two films by cementing them back to back before development. Technicolor used double-width film at this period, and after printing it was folded with the images outwards. It is stated that the developer is to be pyro, subsequently bleaching with potassium ferrocyanide, fixing with hypo, etching away the soft gelatine, and staining the relief images so obtained.”

(Cornwell-Clyne, Adrian (1951): Colour Cinematography. London: Chapman & Hall, p. 478.)

“As early as 1918 Technicolor had in mind two principal methods of attacking the color problem. Dr. Leonard T. Troland, who, at the time of his death, was Director of Research of Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation, had done some important pioneer work on the Monopack process. Some of his inventions were embodied in numerous patent claims which have been issued and which were intended broadly to cover the multi-layer method both for taking and printing. The other Technicolor attack was by the imbibition method. Both Monopack and imbibition were obviously capable of ultimate development into multi-component processes, but since imbibition seemed to load more of the problems on the laboratory and relatively less on the emulsion maker, we pursued it with the greater vigor.

A first approximation to the Technicolor imbibition method consisted of two gelatin reliefs produced upon thin celluloid which were glued or welded together back to back and dyed in complementary colors. Combined with the Technicolor two-component cameras, this method provided an immediately available system (1919-21) capable of yielding two-component subtractive prints. A small laboratory or pilot plant was built in the basement of the building occupied by the Technicolor engineers, Kalmus, Comstock & Wescott, Inc., on Brookline Avenue, Boston, Mass.

In 1920 Judge William Travers Jerome first became interested in Technicolor; he brought as associates the late Marcus Loew, Nicholas M. Schenck, now President of Loew’s, Inc., and Joseph M. Schenck, now Chairman of the Board of Twentieth Century Fox, Inc. Both Joseph and Nicholas Schenck have on many occasions been most helpful to Technicolor by giving practical advice to Judge Jerome and to me, but at no time more so than when it was decided to produce the photoplay which was later called The Toll of the Sea. This was the first Technicolor production by the subtractive method. It was photographed in Hollywood under the general supervision of Mr. Joseph M. Schenck, Chester Franklin, Director, Anna May Wong, lead, and J. A. Ball, Technicolor cameraman.

Mr. Nicholas Schenck arranged for the release of The Toll of the Sea by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The first showing was given at the Rialto Theater in New York, the week of November 25, 1922. Letters of praise were received from Maxfield Parrish, Charles Dana Gibson, and other artists. But because of insufficient laboratory capacity we were not able to supply prints fast enough to follow this up immediately and not until 1923 was the picture generally released in the United States. It grossed more than $250,000, of which Technicolor received approximately $165,000.

The prints of The Toll of the Sea were manufactured in the original pilot plant on Brookline Avenue, at a manufacturing cost of about 27 cents per foot.

Every step of the Technicolor work in The Toll of the Sea was carefully watched by the executives of the industry. Rex Ingram, who was in the midst of producing Prisoner of Zenda, wired Mr. Loew for permission to scrap everything he had done in black and white on that picture and start over again in color. D. W. Griffith wanted to produce Faust and Douglas Fairbanks telephoned about producing a feature.

Our first adventure in Hollywood seemed successful! We were told that with prints as good as we were manufacturing if offered at 8 cents per foot the industry would rush to color. But, thus far we had made only inserts and one feature production, The Toll of the Sea, of which Technicolor was itself the producer. We had no adequate means of giving rush print service in Hollywood, and we were charging 20 cents a foot for release prints. It was another matter to convince a producer to employ the Technicolor company to photograph and make prints of a production at his expense and risk and under the conditions which prevailed in the motion picture industry.

Meanwhile Technicolor Plant No. 2 was being built in Boston in a building adjoining the one containing the Pilot Plant. It had a capacity of about one million feet of prints per month and cost approximately $300,000. And in April, 1923, the late C. A. Willat, in charge, J. A. Ball, Technical Director, G. A. Cave, Assistant Technical Director, were sent from Boston to establish a small Technicolor laboratory and a photographic unit in Hollywood. This was established in a building in Hollywood rented for the purpose.

In November, 1923, Mr. Jesse L. Lasky and I finally agreed upon the terms of a contract between Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation and Famous Players Lasky Corporation for the production of The Wanderer of the Wasteland. We were told by Mr. Lasky that they had appropriated not more for this picture than they would have for the same picture in black and white. Also that the time schedule allowed for photographing was identical with what it would have been in black and white. The photography was to be done by our cameras in the hands of our technical staff, but following a budget and a time schedule laid out for them by Famous Players! Rush prints and the quality of negative were to be checked by them each day. During the six weeks of photography our entire staff worked from early morning to late at night, including Sundays and holidays. At one time we were accumulating negative which we did not dare to develop because of inadequate facilities in our rented laboratory. A few of us in Technicolor carried the terrorizing thought that there was no positive assurance that we would finally obtain commercial negative, and that the entire Famous Players investment might be lost. However, Mr. Lasky was not permitted to share that doubt. His confidence and help during the darkest hours were really marvelous and finally the cut negative emerged satisfactorily. We delivered approximately 175 prints which were shown in several thousand theaters over the country. These prints were billed at 15 cents a foot, for which Technicolor received approximately $135,000. Some of these prints were made in the pilot plant, but more of them were made in Plant No. 2 which was now being run by operators we had trained.

Nevertheless there were reasons why we could not obtain a volume of business. Every producer in Hollywood knew that the first important production by the Technicolor process under actual motion picture conditions and not controlled by the Technicolor company, had just been completed by Famous Players Lasky Corporation. A considerable group of producers expressed themselves as interested, but were waiting to see the outcome. Another group believed the process to be practical and might have paid our then price of 15 cents a foot, but considered it impracticable to send the daily work to Boston for rush prints. A small plant, primarily for the purpose of developing negative, making rush prints, and providing a California headquarters was installed at 1006 North Cole Avenue, Hollywood, in a building erected for our purposes. A large part of the equipment was built by our engineers in Boston and shipped to California. The installation was ready for operation about the middle of the year 1924. Neither The Toll of the Sea nor The Wanderer of the Wasteland, nor any of the inserts made until the middle of 1924 had given us experience photographing with artificial light. We were therefore very glad to obtain an order for an insert in a production directed by Mr. George Fitzmaurice, called Cytherea, photographed in the United Studios lot in Hollywood, giving us our first experience in photographing an interior set on a dark stage. Mr. Fitzmaurice was delighted with the results.

In the Fall of 1924 we had six men and four cameras working in Rome on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, Ben Hur. One of the great adventures of Technicolor in Cinemaland and a milestone in its progress was in the photography, print manufacture, and exhibition of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Black Pirate. Mr. Fairbanks had the idea that the screen had never caught and reflected the real spirit of piracy as one finds it in the books of Robert Louis Stevenson, or the paintings of Howard Pyle, and that he could catch it by the use of color. He said, “This ingredient has been tried and rejected countless times. It has always met overwhelming objections. Not only has the process of color motion picture photography never been perfected, but there has been a grave doubt whether, even if properly developed, it could be applied, without detracting more than it added to motion picture technic. The argument has been that it would tire and distract the eye, take attention from acting, and facial expression, blur and confuse the action. In short it has been felt that it would militate against the simplicity and directness which motion pictures derive from the unobtrusive black and white. These conventional doubts have been entertained, I think, because no one has taken the trouble to dissipate them. A similar objection was raised, no doubt, when the innovation of scenery was introduced on the English stage that it would distract attention from the actors. Personally I could not imagine piracy without color. …”

But Mr. Fairbanks’ attorneys pointed out that this production would cost a million dollars, and asked what assurance there was that Technicolor would be able to deliver prints, much less satisfactory prints. This difficulty was finally resolved by making a tripartite agreement in which the engineering firm of Kalmus, Cornstock & Wescott, Inc., which still had the pilot plant in the basement of its building, agreed under certain conditions that it would deliver the prints in case Technicolor company failed. There was great discussion as to the color key in which this picture would be pitched. We made test prints for Mr. Fairbanks at six different color levels, from a level with slightly more color than black and white, to the most garish rendering of which the Technicolor process was then capable. Mr. Fairbanks set to work on the shore of Catalina Island and off that shore on his pirate ship, with four of the seven Technicolor cameras then in existence, to capture moods after the manner of impressionistic painting. The picture was released through United Artists in 1925. So far as audience reaction, press reviews, and box-office receipts were concerned, it was a triumph from the start, but for the Technicolor company it was a terrible headache. Technicolor was still making the double-coated cemented together relief prints, so that the red and green images were not quite in the same plane, and the pictures didn’t project too sharply on the screen. This double-coated film is considerably thicker than ordinary black-and-white film, with emulsion on both sides which tends to make it cup more readily and scratch more noticeably than black-and-white film. And the cupping could occur in either direction, more or less at random. Judging from the complaints, at each such change in the direction of cupping, the picture would jump out of focus. We sent field men to the exchanges. We provided these men with a supply of new prints to replace the cupped ones in the theaters, in order that the latter might be shipped back to our laboratory in Boston for decupping.

The newly decupped prints were temporarily satisfactory; the picture was a great success, but our troubles never ended. It had been clear that this double-coated process was at best but a temporary method, and the work of developing a true imbibition process was being pressed in our research department. But unfortunately the imbibition process was not ready for The Black Pirate, or for The Wanderer of the Wasteland.

Early in 1925 Mr. Sydney R. Kent, then head of distribution of Famous Players Lasky Corporation, said: “We have concluded not to do more Technicolor pictures for the present, for two reasons : first, because we have had a great deal of trouble in our exchanges due to the fact that the film is double-coated and consequently scratches much more readily than black and white, with the necessity of having to order more replacements, and it is an added bother to our operators ; and, second, because the cost is out of all proportion to its added value to us. We paid $146,000 additional for Wanderer prints. We understand that you need volume to get your costs down. At an 8-cent price we would be interested to talk volume.” Evidently Technicolor needed the single-coated imbibition prints and volume to lower the price to meet his conditions. Meanwhile Mr. Nicholas Schenck, then President of Loew’s, Inc., was advising us to produce a picture ourselves, to prove both quality and costs.”

(Kalmus, Herbert T. (1938): Technicolor adventures in cinemaland. In: Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 31,6, 1938, pp. 564-585, on pp. 566-571.)

“This new infusion of cash helped Technicolor, Inc. develop Process Number Two. This specially designed two-color subtractive system incorporated a camera which recorded both the red and green image on a single negative simultaneously. Two frames of the special Panchromatic black and white film were pulled down at a time for this simultaneous exposure. A beam-splitting prism separated the incoming light from the single lens and exposed each pair of frames such that one received the red component, and the adjacent frame received the green component. One of the images was inverted so that the lower edges of each pair of frames touched. During processing, all of the “red” frames were printed to make a relief image on one strip of positive film, and the “green” frames were similarly treated on another strip of positive film. The two positive films were then cemented back-to-back in accurate register and each slide was skimmed over a bath of red or green dye. The complementary dye would then transfer in varying degrees to the relief image portions of the welded film. Drying of the positive print completed the process.

The modified camera necessary for Technicolor Process Number 2 was similar to the standard black and white Bell and Howell Model No. 2709 except for having two frames being pulled down instead of one for each stroke of the shuttle. Naturally the camera film was double the length of ordinary negatives, as each phase of the action was represented by two separate frames. The completed prints could be run through standard projectors which required no special adjustments or modifications.

With the aid of Joseph Schenck (who lent studio facilities, the director, Chester Franklin, and Anna May- Wong, the star of the picture–all at no charge), the company produced their first feature film utilizing the new process.²¹ Entitled The Toll of the Sea, the film was developed and printed in a small laboratory “or pilot plant . . . built in the basement of the building occupied by the Technicolor engineers, Kalmus, Comstock and Wescott, Inc., on Brookline Avenue, Boston, Mass.”²² By this time the converted railway car had been dismantled and scrapped, having been used only once. The feature premiered at the Rialto Theatre in New York City on November 26, 1922, and Moving Picture World noted:

While it is evident that perfection in natural color films has not yet been reached, still the results obtained far out-weigh the defects. . . . The main defect appears to be in the fact that the green of the trees and plants appears as more of a brown, while in some instances there is an over-vividness in the reds and orange, and a sort of massing of color in some of the scenes where- there is a wealth of flowers and foliage.²³

While critical to a certain extent, the Moving Picture World reviewer did note the supremacy of the new process over previous efforts.

In a great many instances the effect is all that could be desired, especially some in which the human characters predominate, they appear like exquisite paintings endowed with life, the effect of the natural colors giving them more of the semblance of reality. There was no fluttering or fringing of colors discernible. . . . Judging from the applause which followed the showing of this picture . . . it is destined to be a big success and its sponsors should feel highly gratified.²⁴

The outlook, indeed, looked good. Boston newspapers had described Comstock as “the inventor of what gives every evidence of developing into a flawless color process for injecting human life into American pictures.”²⁵ Moving Picture World agreed that “this claim is a logical one, for Professor Daniel F. Comstock of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a gentleman who has accomplished wonders for the chemical world, who occupies a prominent place in ‘Who’s Who in America,’ is the inventor of the Technicolor process by which Metro’s beautiful masterpiece, The Toll of the Sea, was made.”²⁶ Further praise came from the New York Times which declared “expert picture men . . . seemed unanimous in their opinion that the problem of the colored motion picture had been solved.”²⁷

As expected, particular attention was afforded the quality of the color and the viability of the system for regular Hollywood use. Regarding the naturalness of the color, one New York reviewer noted that the characters in the picture were so life-like that if one “were to shout ‘fire’ you expect the players to rush off the screen, up the aisles and out onto the street.”²⁸ Early articles also pointed out that no make-up was used in the production, since the Technicolor process was an “identical reproduction of the genuine article” and regular studio cosmetics would only detract from this naturalness.²⁹ Perhaps of greater importance, the initial reactions of numerous Hollywood leaders were excellent.

That the Technicolor process . . . has come to stay is a fact, for it is accepted as such by such experts in motion picture production and photography as Adolph Zukor, Joe and Nick Schenck, Jesse Lasky, the DeMille brothers, Rex Ingram and many others too numerous to mention. True, even the great D. W. Griffith has been so impressed by the naturalness of the process and its tendency to increase dramatic value rather than detract from it as has been the case of other processes, that, it is said, he is seeking to make ‘Faust’ with the Technicolor process.³⁰

By all counts the new color process was a distinct improvement over their initial system, and The Toll of the Sea proved economically successful as well. The picture eventually grossed more than a quarter of a million dollars–of which the Technicolor company pocketed approximately $165,000.³¹ Although the future appeared bright, several problems had yet to be solved. Due to insufficient capacity at the lone Boston laboratory, it was not until mid-1923 when a sufficient number of release prints could be completed to initiate general distribution of the film. Furthermore, the printing cost of 27 cents per foot was considered too high by many of the Hollywood leaders.³² Finally, the company was unable to give rush print service in Hollywood–a fact which decreased the viability of their system.

Each of these problems were addressed promptly by Kalmus. Technicolor Plant Number Two was built in Boston adjoining the pilot plant. Costing approximately $300,000, it provided one million additional feet of printing capability per month.³³ Printing costs were reduced to 20 cents a foot for release prints, then lowered to 15 cents by 1924 when The Wanderer of the Wasteland was readied for distribution.³⁴ Also, temporary laboratory space was rented in Hollywood beginning in April of 1923. This gave way to a permanent structure erected under the direction of Willat, Ball, and G. A. Cave at 1006 North Cole Avenue in Hollywood.³⁵ Containing a small lab for developing negatives and capable of providing rush print service, the installation was ready for operation by mid-1924. By late 1925 eleven Technicolor cameras were in service³⁶ and the company eventually did color work on a total of twenty-eight features and at least six shorts using Process Number 2. (See Appendix S for a complete listing.) Along with increasing industry interest and usage came critical approval from the majority of film reviewers. Certainly not all of their reviews were glowing, but most felt the use of color (and the Technicolor process in particular) often helped enhance the overall effect of a picture. (See Appendix T for a representative sample of these comments.) With “between fifty and sixty patents on steps of the secret process . . . obtained in this country, and similar protection . . . obtained in Great Britain, Canada, France, Italy and the Argentine”³⁷ Technicolor Inc. was assured of court protection should a rival firm begin to infringe on their color process. Finally, the concept of selling a color service to established Hollywood studios (as opposed to entering the production field outright) had met with considerable acceptance. The future appeared most promising.

When Douglas Fairbanks announced in 1925 that he would produce his forthcoming film, The Black Pirate, entirely in Technicolor, Kalmus and his colleagues felt their problem days were finally over. Little did they realize that new problems were only beginning.

References

²¹ Taylor, “Mr. Technicolor,” p. 131.

²² Kalmus, p. 567.

²³ Moving Picture World, December 9, 1922, p. 573.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Moving Picture World, December 9, 1922, p. 515.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ New York Times, September 22, 1922, p. 9.

²⁸ Moving Picture World, December 9, 1922, p. 515.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Kalmus, p. 567.

³² Ibid.

³³ Ibid., p. 568

³⁴ Ibid., p. 569.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ Color in the Motion Picture, p. 166.

³⁷ New York Times, September 21 , 1922, p. 1.”

(Nowotny, Robert A. (1983): The Way of All Flesh Tones. A History of Color Motion Picture Processes, 1895-1929. New York: Garland Pub., pp. 210-217.)

“Although Technicolor Process Number Two had received critical acclaim from a number of film industry executives following the premier of The Toll of the Sea, Hollywood remained reluctant to utilize the new, improved color system. Furthermore, Cecil B. DeMille, writing in the January, 1923, issue of American Photography, had observed that “color movies diverted interest from narrative and action, offended the color-sensitivities of many, and cost too much.”¹ This negative position could not go unchallenged, and shortly afterward DeMille was offered a proposition from Technicolor which he immediately accepted.

As he later recounted in his autobiography:

. . . the Technicolor Company approached me with a proposition both interesting and fair. For the big scenes of the Biblical prologue [in The Ten Commandments], would I let them set up a camera alongside mine, to shoot the scenes in color? If I liked the results, I could buy it. If I did not like it, the experiment could cost us nothing and they would give me the film to burn. I agreed.²

Working independently of the DeMille organization, Technicolor’s Ray Rennahan captured the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their pursuit by the Egyptians in natural color.³ These scenes proved highly successful and gave the new process a much needed boost. As a result, Famous Players-Lasky decided to shoot Wanderer of the Wasteland entirely in Technicolor. Released in 1924, the film became the first full-length Technicolor feature sponsored by a major studio. Writing years later, Jesse L. Lasky proudly recalled

. . . the dramatic use we made of color in one scene where the hero, tracking down the wounded villain . . . notices a trickle of muddy water flowing from the mill sluiceway slowly turning red–and is thus led to the hideout of his quarry.⁴

The Wanderer of the Wasteland was “the first important production by the Technicolor process under actual motion picture conditions and not controlled by the Technicolor Company . . . [and] a considerable group of producers expressed themselves as interested, but were waiting to see the outcome.”⁵ Unfortunately, several major difficulties surfaced at this time. Although 175 prints were eventually distributed to several thousand theaters across the country, it had taken the Technicolor plants almost one full year to complete the order.⁶ Furthermore, the prints had to be replaced frequently. Having emulsion on both sides, the color film tended to scratch not only easily, but more noticeably than ordinary black and white release prints. Finally, projectionists also experienced considerable buckling of the cemented film which caused recurrent focusing and registration problems. With these experiences in mind, Sidney R. Kent, head of distribution for Famous Players-Lasky, wrote Kalmus in 1925 stating:

We have concluded not to do more Technicolor pictures for the present, for two reasons: first, because we have had a great deal of trouble in our exchanges due to the fact that the film is double-coated and consequently scratches much more readily than black and white, with the necessity of having to order more replacements, and it is an added bother to our operators; and second, because the cost is out of all proportion to its added value to us. We paid $146,000 additional for Wanderer prints. We understand that you need volume to get your costs down. At an 8-cent price we would be interested to talk volume.⁷

Not many producers were willing to risk the added expense of producing an entire film in Process Number Two, so color sequences became the rage.⁸ A notable exception was Douglas Fairbanks. With a far more optimistic view than his Hollywood counterparts, Fairbanks proceeded to shoot The Black Pirate entirely in Technicolor. Convinced that the screen had never captured the real spirit of the sea (as found in the books of Robert Louis Stevenson or the paintings of Howard Pyle), Fairbanks stated: “Personally I could not imagine piracy without color.”⁹ Utilizing four of the seven Technicolor cameras then in existence, the production succeeded in “making a special effort to subdue hues and tones to escape the bold garishness which has characterized most color film products.”¹⁰ The public and film critics alike were ecstatic in their praise of this action-packed drama. For example, the New York Times noted:

The unrivalled beauty of the different episodes is mindful of the paintings of old masters. . . .
Three other important film features were previously produced wholly in natural colors. They were The Glorious Adventure, The Toll of the Sea, and The Wanderer of the Wasteland. The later was by all odds the best of the trio, but even that Western subject could not be included in the same class with this marvelous current offering.
Mr. Fairbanks realized that color must be subordinated to the action of the episodes, and therefore, although the telling prismatic effects occasionally reap their full reward, they are put forth with deliberation and restraint. . . . For the most part modulated shades are employed, such as sepia, the dominating tone which is far more effective than a lavish scattering of reds and greens. In fact, decisive red is only depicted to show the blood on the hands of a man or on his sword.¹¹

Although an artistic triumph, The Black Pirate proved to be a headache to both Kalmus and the Technicolor Corporation. “Cupping” of the release prints was the principal problem. The capping could occur in either direction, and each change would cause the picture to jump out of focus. Technicolor sent men out into the field “with a supply of new prints to replace the cupped ones in the theaters, in order that the latter might be shipped back to . . . Boston for decupping. The newly decupped prints were temporarily satisfactory”¹² but, as Kalmus noted, the problems with exhibitor prints never ended. Clearly the cemented process was at best a temporary method, and research was “being pursued in Boston to find a more satisfactory system of bringing color to the screen. While this research was proceeding, Technicolor continued to utilize Process Number Two. In addition to a number of feature films which incorporated color sequences, a series of two-reel shorts were released through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Most were based on either famous paintings or historical subjects of interest, with average negative costs for these shorts being $20,000 each.¹³ The income generated by these shorts proved extremely important, and helped keep the Technicolor Corporation financially solvent during the 3-year period ending in 1928.

References

¹ Rudy Behlmer, “Technicolor,” Films in Review, June-July 1964, p. 339.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ James L. Limbacher, Four Aspects of the Film (New York: Brussel and Brussel, Inc., 1969), p. 28.

⁵ H. T. Kalmus, “Technicolor Adventures in Cinemaland,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, December 1938, p. 569.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Limbacher, p. 28.

⁹ Kalmus, p. 570.

¹⁰ Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 3d ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), p. 572.

¹¹ New York Times, March 9, 1926, p. 21.

¹² Kalmus, p. 571.”

(Nowotny, Robert A. (1983): The Way of All Flesh Tones. A History of Color Motion Picture Processes, 1895-1929. New York: Garland Pub., pp. 220-224.)

“TECHNICOLOR PROCESS NUMBER TWO:

TWO STRIP CEMENTED POSITIVE

In the basement of the building occupied by Kalmus, Comstock and Wescott in Boston, another pilot plant was opened to develop Technicolor Process Number Two. This two color method was subtractive rather than additive; the hues were contained on the release copy rather than added by filters on the projector. Principal photography was done with a new camera that exposed the dual red and green filtered black and white negative images simultaneously. A new prism was used in this unit which exposed the green record upside down (fig. 3). The technique was developed under the direction of Leonard T. Troland, Comstock’s former pupil, who later became Technicolor’s research director. This kind of negative was used for both cement positive and dye transfer two strip films (fig. 4).

To make release prints, a special film stock was used which was known as a matrix. A matrix was a black and white positive stock that contained silver halides (which generated the latent image) and a gelatin that hardened during development and replicated the latent silver image in “relief.” (Matrix manufacture will be described in greater detail in the next chapter.)

This special kind of matrix stock was half the thickness of conventional 35mm film. The negative was exposed through the base of the thin matrix stock to generate the appropriate color record on a step printer. First, the black and white silver record of the red layer was exposed onto the matrix stock. The negative was then flipped upside down so the green silver record could be exposed onto another roll of the thin matrix stock.

The two matrices (each half the thickness of normal stock) were cemented together and then dyed by flotation with the appropriate red-orange and blue-green dyes to make a two color release print with normal thickness that could be projected conventionally (fig. 5). This technique was actually an early variation of the dye transfer process with an important difference: the matrices were used for direct screening rather than for simply transferring dyes onto a release print.

With the improved two color technique, Technicolor made a deal with Joseph Schenck (who produced many of the Buster Keaton silents) to supervise the first production in this process as well as secure distribution through the Metro Film Company (which later merged to become Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). The feature was Toll of the Sea, a Chinese version of Madame Butterfly, which starred Anna May Wong.

The premiere was held at the Rialto Theater in New York on November 26, 1922, with a general release following in 1923. The film grossed more than $250,000, of which the Technicolor company received approximately $165,000. It was the first time the hard work of Kalmus, Comstock and Wescott had shown a return.

Plant number two was built in Boston in a building adjoining the pilot plant (the basement of the Kalmus, Comstock and Wescott offices). Shortly afterward, a small laboratory was set up in Hollywood in a rented building that served as West Coast headquarters. (Technicolor later developed their West Coast operation into the landmark facility located at Cole and Romaine in Hollywood.) The next feature to use the cement positive process was Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, although this time the color was limited to special sequences. Wanderer of the Wasteland, an outdoors Western from Paramount, was the next all color feature.

Samuel Goldwyn’s Cytherea marked the first time artificial lighting was used. The black and white negative stock that was used in the Technicolor cameras was slow and required extensive lighting for an exposure. As a result, the actors practically baked under the hot klieg lights. Still, color film was an exploitable entity, and in 1925 six studio releases containing Technicolor scenes and one all color independent short, Marionettes, featured the cement positive process. The big break came in 1926 when Douglas Fairbanks made a deal to shoot his million dollar epic (a huge sum for the era) The Black Pirate in the process. Although the picture was a financial success, inherent flaws in the cement positive method plagued the release. The first flaw was the difficulty in color correcting each shot to match precisely or make a usable set of dyed matrices. A great deal of film was wasted before an acceptable release copy was made. The second flaw was in the tendency for the film to “cup” in the extended runs. Prints had to be sent back to Technicolor for “decupping” after each theatrical date.

The most serious problem was when the cemented films started to come apart. The standard illumination for projectors at the time was the carbon arc lamp house. A burning carbon filament generated the high intensity white light, which proved to be too extreme for the cement to hold. Considering the flammability of pre-1950 nitrate film, this was also a fire hazard. A long-term problem with the dyes was poor stability. Cement positive Technicolor prints eventually faded to orange.

During the year 1927, the research department started to work on an improved release printing method, while five more films were made using the cement positive system for sequences or the entire feature.”

(Haines, Richard W. (1993): Technicolor Movies. The History of Dye Transfer Printing. Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland, pp. 4-7.)

“The merits of Technicolor Process No. 2, the first subtractive system designed by the company, are hardly easier to appraise. A single negative was exposed to light separated by a prism as the negative was drawn intermittently through the mechanism, exposing two frames at a time. Following the principle of Arturo Hernandez- Mejia’s Colorgraph (patented in 1916 but conceived five years earlier), every other image was reversed with the bottom edges of the two frames in contact (Plate 28). The latent red frames were then printed on one roll of film, the latent green ones on another. The two positives were glued together and tinted, respectively, red and green.

The Toll of the Sea, directed by Chester M. Franklin for Metro Pictures, was officially premiered in New York on 26 November 1922. The judgment of contemporary critics and the wisdom of hindsight agree: the copy restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive shows a tidy and stable image, with brilliant red and orange tones, but with a certain tendency towards brown in the greenery of outdoor scenes, and a blurring of the finest details and distant objects. Despite this, Technicolor No. 2 was superior to all two-colour subtractive systems of the time, and the advantage of not requiring special projection apparatus ensured it such immediate success that the company was at first unable to keep up with the demand for release prints. Twenty-eight feature films and at least six shorts were made with this system. At least one third of them survive, often visible only in black and white prints. In the others, printed by more recent methods that barely approximate the originals, the colour has so deteriorated that (at least until a more adequate restoration methodology is found) it is impossible to pass judgement, other than to state that the colour sequences have more of a decorative than a dramatic effect, and are to be found in those spectacular scenes that could most benefit from the ‘luxury’ of colour, like the episode of the masked ball in The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925) and the fashion parade in Irene (Alfred E. Green, 1926).

The trouble with the second Technicolor process became apparent soon after the release of The Black Pirate (Albert Parker, 1926). The adhesiveness and shrinkage of the two lengths of film glued to each other would cause the base to curve, making it difficult to keep the film in focus.”

(Cherchi Usai, Paolo (2000): Silent Cinema. London: BFI, p. 38.)

“As a consequence, Technicolor moved ahead to a subtractive process. Note that the early, two-colour Kodachrome process (not to be confused with the later reversal system of the same name) had already been introduced for motion pictures in 1915, the same year as the formation of Technicolor. Kodachrome was a subtractive system employing so called tanning development, where the hardness of the gelatine increased in the areas of image density, thus changing its affinity for dyes. In order to unite two colour records (captured via a beam-splitter), the process required the dyeing of two separate emulsion layers carried on one double-coated (duplitized) strip of film. It shared remarkable similarities with Technicolor’s next effort, a subtractive process known as Technicolor II. In an attempt to produce its own two-colour subtractive system, Technicolor introduced the technique of matrix stock printing.

Printed from the colour separations (on monochrome negative) obtained through the beam splitter, gelatine relief images were obtained by tanning (hardening) development and a subsequent ‘etch’ process, where unhardened gelatine was removed by hot water.¹⁰ Two such matrices were cemented together, base-to-base, and dyed in the respective complementary blue-green and red-orange colours. The more gelatine there was on the matrix film, the more dye was soaked up by the film. Such two-colour cemented positives with two relief emulsions made up the prints of the Technicolor II system. While Technicolor II marked a significant achievement, it was not free of problems due to the nature of the cemented positive. Irregularities associated with cupping (bending and curving of the film which interfered with proper focusing) and emulsion scratching marred the process and motivated Technicolor to introduce a third core technology, the imbibition process (covered in a notebook of the same name). Imbibition (IB), or dye transfer, aimed to unite two colour records on a single layer of emulsion in order to overcome the problems of the cemented positives.

Reference

Roscoe H. Gerke and Russell W. Conant, ‘The Chemistry of the Matrix’ (alternate title: ‘Reports of Mr. Conant & Dr. Gerke’), 17 September 1923, George Eastman House, Motion Picture Department, Stills, Posters and Paper Collection, Accession No.:2001:0258:0001.”

(Ruedel, Ulrich (2009): The Technicolor Notebooks at the George Eastman House. In: Film History, Vol. 21, No. 1, 2009, pp. 47-60, on p. 49.)

“This additive system was soon discarded in favour of a two-colour subtractive process. Negatives from the Technicolor camera were printed simultaneously onto two separate positive films made by the Eastman Kodak Company on specially thin film base. The exposed prints were processed so as to form relief images in the gelatin layer and the silver was removed. The two relief films were cemented back to back and the two gelatin layers were dyed red-orange and green to produce the final print. The first production in the new Technicolor process was Toll of the Sea, starring Anna May Wong. It was given its premiere at the Rialto Theatre on 26 November 1922 and was highly successful, grossing more than $250,000. The ‘cemented positive’ Technicolor process was used for colour sequences in several important films, including The Ten Commandments (1923), Ben Hur (1924) and Cytherea (1924). The next Technicolor feature film was The Wanderer of the Wasteland in 1924; this was also very successful, 175 copies being made for distribution throughout America. The biggest success of all for the early Technicolor process was Douglas Fairbanks’ The Black Pirate, released in 1925.”

(Coe, Brian (1981): The History of Movie Photography. Westfield, N.J.: Eastview Editions, p. 132.)

“The next Technicolor system tried was a two-color subtractive process. At first the same beam-splitter cameras used for the additive system were used for the subtractive process. However, since the frame separation was not required for projecting the new subtractive prints the use of a simpler beam-splitter with a corresponding reduction in light loss was now possible. The new camera was similar to the Bell & Howell Standard in basic design although it differed in several details. Through the use of a beam-splitter prism two standard size frames were exposed simultaneously, one through a red filter and one through a green filter. The film was advanced two frames at a time so that at normal camera speed twice as much film was used as for black and white photography. The two corresponding frames were adjacent to each other on the film, one inverted in respect to the other. The registration relationships were symmetrical around the center line between two such adjacent frames and were controlled by the position of the pictures with respect to the sprocket holes. Registration was determined in the beginning by the accurate adjustment of the optical system on the camera and from then on it was automatic. Each camera came with two sets of prism and filter combinations, one for tungsten illumination, the other for daylight or arc illumination. The previous additive system had used conventional black and white prints introducing the color during projection, this new subtractive system employed dyed prints and normal projection.

Using a special printer separate prints were made from the red and green filter negatives on relief print film that was one-half the thickness of ordinary motion picture positive film. After printing, the two films were cemented together with sprocket holes in perfect registration and with the emulsion sides out. The cemented prints were then processed in a tanning developer, which tanned the image bearing portions of the gelatin leaving the remainder unaffected. The film was then washed and immersed in a ferricyanide solution which converted the developed silver to halide. This was followed by a hot water etch which removed the non-image bearing gelatin leaving a relief image on both sides of the film. The thickness of the relief varied with the density of the image which produced it. The silver image that had been converted by the bleach was then removed in a fixing bath and the film washed and dried. The side printed from the red filter negative was dyed blue-green and the side printed from the green filter dyed red-orange.³⁰

Reference

GREGORY, C. L., Motion Picture Photography, New York: Falk Publishing Co., Inc., 1927, p. 341.”

(Ryan, Roderick T. (1977): A History of Motion Picture Color Technology. London: Focal Press, pp. 78-79.)

“During this period Technicolor had been developing a two-colour positive print process which did not employ dupletised stock. Their earlier beam-splitting camera, described previously, had been improved with a very much more compact prism system (Figure 5) which produced one strip of negative on which the two separation frames were adjacent but with one inverted relative to the other. From these frames two separate positive prints were made by optical step printing on to a special stock with an exceptionally thin base. The prints were processed to give a relief image in which the light and shade of the picture was represented by varying thicknesses of emulsion (Figure 6) when the silver had been removed. This relief could absorb dye in proportion to its thickness, so as to appear as a positive image in any required colour. The two prints from the negatives were therefore cemented together in register, base to base, and their emulsion surfaces dyed blue-green and orange-red respectively, giving a subtractive colour positive for projection. (Figure 7)

This process was used for the feature Toll of the Sea in 1922 and in the following years several feature sequences and full-length productions were undertaken, including Douglas Fairbanks’ famous “The Black Pirate” of 1926. But cemented prints were troublesome in projection, since the thicker film sandwich buckled and cupped in an irregular fashion, giving unsteady focus, while, like dupletised stock, the two emulsion surfaces were much more liable to scratching than conventional black and white copies.”

(Happé, Bernard (1984): 80 Years of Colour Cinematography. London: British Kinematograph Sound & Television Society, p. 8.)

“Inzwischen hatte Technicolor aber bereits mit der Suche nach einem neuen Verfahren begonnen, das die Nachteile des additiven Verfahrens umgehen sollte. Nach vierjährigen Arbeiten konnte vor nunmehr 70 Jahren, am 26.11.1922, im »Rialto-Theater«, New York, der erste Spielfilm nach dem zweiten, nunmehr subtraktiven Technicolor-Verfahren, The Toll of the Sea (Der Tribut der See), mit Anna May Wong uraufgeführt werden. Die Kamera blieb zunächst dieselbe, doch wurden die Farbauszugsbilder jetzt auf zwei dünne Spezialfilme kopiert, die mit ihren Rückseiten aufeinandergeklebt wurden, um dann beidseitig zu Reliefbildern entwickelt zu werden, die blaugrün beziehungsweise rotorange angefärbt wurden. Damit hatte die Kopie eine gewisse Ähnlichkeit mit den farbfotografischen Pigmentverfahren wie zum Beispiel Duxochrom, bei denen auch eingefärbte Auswaschreliefs übereinandermontiert wurden.

Inzwischen war auch Hollywood auf Technicolor aufmerksam geworden, und der bekannte Produzent und Schauspieler Douglas Fairbanks drehte 1925 The Black Pirate (Der schwarze Pirat) als besten Zweifarbenfilm seiner Zeit. Die Famous Players Lasky Corp., die spätere Paramount, produzierte The Wanderer of the Wasteland, doch bremste die mechanische Anfälligkeit der cementierten Kopien weitere Pläne. So wurde auch die aufwendige Produktion von Ben Hur 1924/25 nur in einigen Szenen in zweifarbigem Technicolor fertiggestellt und im übrigen —wie seinerzeit die meisten wichtigen Stummfilme — nur einfarbig viragiert.”

(Koshofer (1993): Seit 75 Jahren Technicolor-Filme. In: Film & TV Kameramann 42,1, 1993, pp. 24-34, on p. 24.)

“Technicolor (1917-55)

Two-colour additive process/two-colour subtractive process/three-colour subtractive process

Founded in the USA as the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation in 1915 by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Comstock and W. Burton Westcott, in the 1930s Technicolor swept aside all the competition to become the most commercially successful colour film company and process. Most often the name is associated with three-strip Technicolor – used for such key 1930s colour films as Becky Sharp (1935), Gone with the Wind (1939) and The Wizard of Oz (1939) – which is officially known as Technicolor Process No. 4. The name gives testament to the fact that the rapid success of Technicolor was in fact the result of years of painstaking trial and error in the area of research, coupled with an aggressive campaign of commercial exploitation.

The first Technicolor process, unveiled in 1917, was an additive system which used a beam splitter in the camera to record two frames simultaneously through red and green filters. The two images were registered successively on the negative and processed into a positive. In projection the successive images were projected through the corresponding filters and through a prism which could be adjusted to bring the successive frames into precise register.

Technicolor’s two-colour subtractive process was actually two processes, the second one being a refinement of the first, which was developed in 1922. Technicolor’s first subtractive process – known as Technicolor Process No. 2 – used a beam splitter to create two separate colour record negatives, as the additive system had done, but with significant variations. The camera exposed the red and green images simultaneously through filters, but a new prism was included that exposed the green record upside down.

From the two negatives two dyed positive relief images were made using special stock known as the matrix (see Dye transfer/Dye imbibition). The two relief images were cemented back to back and then dyed red-orange on the green side and green on the red side, making a subtractive print that was the normal thickness and could be used on any conventional projector. The system was successful but had problems, notably that in time one of the two cemented images would frequently break away from the other, causing the print to go out of focus.

In 1928 the processing was improved by virtue of a dye-transfer process, which became known as Technicolor Process No. 3. The two relief images were produced as they had been in Process No. 2 and two matrices were created but instead of being cemented together they remained separate. Still in relief, and dyed with the correct colours, the matrices were then pressed using pressured rollers against a blank film coated with gelatine to which the dyed images were transferred by embossing the relief images onto the blank film with the dye, the dyes being locked by the use of a mordant. By this method multiple layers could be registered on a single film strip.

Even as Process No. 3 was being rolled out commercially, Kalmus continued his research to figure out a way to use three colours, thus making possible the rendering of the full colour spectrum. The dye-transfer process had effectively solved one of the problems of three-colour cinematography, which was that even by using double-sided film there was still the challenge of how to register the third colour on the print. Imbibition allowed two or more colour images to be transferred via the matrices onto the print, provided that the images were in precise register. Kalmus therefore focused on producing a working three-colour camera. Initial experiments with a successive-frame system were abandoned in favour of a camera which used a beam splitter to split the light from the source through filters, the green record passing straight through a green filter onto a film strip, while the red and blue records were captured on a bipack film through a magenta filter. The camera therefore produced three negatives, one red, one blue, one green. As with the two-colour process, gelatine relief matrices were made which were then dyed complementary subtractive colours and pressed one after the other against a blank film which absorbed the dye.

The success of Technicolor has as much to do with the way in which Kalmus ran the business as the quality of the process itself. As stated, Technicolor Process No. 2 suffered from a number of problems – not only the cement joining the two thin emulsions coming apart, but also cupping, where the heat from repeated projections would cause one emulsion to shrink slightly and throw the images out of register. While not sharing the same problems in projection, three-strip Technicolor was expensive and involved the use of a large, cumbersome camera, making location shooting difficult. Similar issues had led to the demise of other processes, but despite the fact that for years the company lost money, Kalmus managed to keep finding investors to back his work and film directors willing to experiment. From the first feature using the original two-colour additive system – The Gulf Between (1917) – Technicolor in all its incarnations appeared in some of the biggest Hollywood films of the day, albeit often only in short sequences. Thus, after being used for the first time to make The Toll of the Sea (1922), the cemented positive process was used for significant scenes in films including The Ten Commandments (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Ben Hur (1926). Also in 1926 the commercial exploitation of Technicolor received a boost when Douglas Fairbanks decided to make The Black Pirate entirely in Technicolor, but the success of the film only proved how unworkable the cemented positive system was as Technicolor struggled to cope with the large number of prints required and the increased number of problems which consequentially arose. Technicolor was making losses and enjoying only very moderate success, yet Kalmus continued to develop his ideas even after the conversion to sound was followed by the Great Depression, which saw a shift in aesthetics in Hollywood towards black and white and away from colour.

Three-strip Technicolor led to the company becoming the industry leader. In 1932 Kalmus approached Walt Disney, who used three-strip Technicolor for a number of his Silly Symphony shorts. Shortly afterwards, in 1934, the first live-action Technicolor short was released, La Cucaracha, followed by the first feature film, Becky Sharp (1935). It was the global success of this film which propelled three-strip Technicolor forward, and it was the impact of Becky Sharp in the UK, as well as the quality of the image, which first attracted Alexander Korda to the process and encouraged him to abandon his plans to use Hillman colour, thus bringing the Technicolor brand to the UK. The first British film made using the process was Wings of the Morning (1937), and Technicolor would ultimately be used for some of the most respected British films of the 1940s, including Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948).

Further reading

Basten, Fred E., Glorious Technicolor: The Movies Magic Rainbow (New Jersey: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1980).

Coe, Brian, The History of Movie Photography (London: Ash & Grant, 1981), pp. 132-5.

Cornwell-Clyne, Adrian, Colour Cinematography (London: Chapman & Hall, 3rd edn, 1951), pp. 451-507.

Haines, Richard W., Technicolor Movies; The History of Dye Transfer Printing (London: McFarland and Co., 1993).

Higgins, Scott, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow; Colour Design in the 1930s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007).

Huntley, John, British Technicolor Films (London: Skelton Robinson, 1949).”

(Brown, Simon (2012): Technical Appendix. In: Sarah Street: Colour Films in Britain. The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-55. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 259-287, on pp. 284-286.)

“WANDERER OF THE WASTELAND – Paramount

THIS visualization of Zane Grey’s romance, filmed in natural colors in and about Death Valley, is of unusual significance. Not that the making of photoplays in colors has arrived – yet. But Wanderer of the Wasteland is the most interesting step away from the black-and-white.

This film, done by the Technicolor process, catches the remarkable natural colorings of the arid American desert in a way that is, at times, breath taking in its beauty. There are scores of dazzling camera shots, notably one of the characters with a background of drifting sands and blue skies. Color photography – if it is perfected – is likely to bring about a complete readjustment of values, in photography, in make-up, and so on.

This story of Zane Grey is more or less indifferent. Adam Larey, a young pioneer prospector, becomes involved in a fight with his ne’er-do-well brother and accidentally kills him, or so it seems at the moment. Larey flees into the desert, has many narrow escapes and finally comes to live with an old miner. Still believing himself a hunted man, he pushes on to California. There Larey finds the girl he has loved and decides to go back to face the authorities. But a return discloses the fact that the old settlement has passed away. Then, too, his brother is still alive. So Larey pushes on again to California – and the girl.

Wanderer of the Wasteland is directed in a workman-like way by Irvin Willat, who deserves great credit. It is well played, particularly by Noah Beery, who makes the figure of the happy-go-lucky old prospector a graphic one. Here is a pioneer to take his place beside Ernest Torrence’s famous old guide of the plains. It is a fine performance in every way. Jack Holt is excellent, too.”

(Anonymous (1924): The Shadow Stage. A Review of the New Pictures. Wanderer of the Wasteland. In: Photoplay, Vol. 26, No. 3, p. 49.)

“THE BLACK PIRATE – United Artists

A ROISTERING tale of the Spanish Main is The Black Pirate, and I pity the man whom it does not waft back to the days of his boyhood, when he dreamed of himself climbing aboard the pirate craft and cleaning the seas of the bloodthirsty buccaneers, “Yo, ho, ho – fifteen men on a dead man’s chest.” Into it the ever-youthful Doug has injected the very spirit of boyhood romance and adventure, and it would be a hard-hearted parent, indeed, who would not willingly advance the price of the tickets for every youngster in the family. Incidentally, they should include themselves in the entertainment and adventure.

The entire picture is done in colors, not the usual colored photography, but soft tints that delight the eye and emphasize rather than detract from the story value. Nothing has ever been done in colors on the screen that approaches it in beauty and uniformity. The year of experimentation and study that has been put into this phase of the production has been well repaid. In it, Mr. Fairbanks, for the first time in motion pictures, has secured the beautiful effect of mural paintings.

The plot? What do you care about that? It’s all about pirates, with Doug, single-handed, capturing a huge galleon to prove he’s a good pirate himself. Imagine that!

Billie Dove is the beauty in distress, captured by the toughest pirate that ever slit a throat or scuttled a ship. Donald Crisp runs away with the acting honors, and it is a delight to watch the way in which Doug gives way to him on the screen and lets the audience enjoy Crisp’s characterization of an old Scotch pirate. Go see The Black Pirate.”

(Anonymous (1926): The Shadow Stage. A Review of the New Pictures. The Black Pirate. In: Photoplay, Vol. 29, No. 6, p. 48.)

“Technicolor’s first subtractive processes

Work on Technicolor’s second process, its first subtractive process, began in 1919. Work on the beam-splitting camera began a year earlier. The system was eventually developed in 1922, progress having been slowed down by lack of funds. Financial support was eventually obtained from lawyers, advertising executives and people like John McHugh of the Chase National Bank. Marcus Loew, and Nicholas and Joseph Schenck, prominent figures in the American film industry, were also interested, though they provided no direct financial support. The new system involved the use of the beam-splitting camera during filming. From the two separate negatives, two dyed positive ‘relief’ images were produced, as Kalmus later explained:

By a relief image I mean that instead of having silver deposits constituting the image of the picture as printed from the negative, hills and valleys are etched in the gelatin giving a relief image corresponding with the image of the picture. Two such relief images, one each for the red and green components, were welded together back to back in register. Then the two sides, one after the other, were floated over baths of the respective dyes and dried. Thus, we made a double-coated relief image in dyes.²

The system having been developed, Technicolor was offered facilities, a director (Chester Franklin) and a star (Anna May Wong) by Loew’s in order to shoot a feature, The Toll of the Sea. The film was distributed by Metro and received its premiere at the Rialto Theatre in New York in November 1922. The film grossed some $250,000 of which Technicolor received $165,000.

There were problems, however. Technicolor had no adequate means of providing rush prints, and had to charge 20 cents per foot for release prints. This problem was alleviated to some extent by opening a small laboratory and photographic unit in Hollywood. (This was important. According to Hal Hall and William Stull, one of the major reasons for the ultimate failure of Prizma’s subtractive system was the fact that the company remained based in Jersey City: ‘Had it joined the rest of the industry in its Westward trek, there is no doubt that it would be with us today’.)³ There were further difficulties over the technique of cementing the two coloured positives together. The film tended to ‘cup’ as it went through the projector, something which was a problem not only in itself, so to speak, but also inasmuch as it placed, a further strain on Technicolor’s print service when prints needed replacement and repair. There were problems too at the production stage. High intensity lighting was required, which caused difficulties for the actors.

The process was technically and aesthetically successful enough to be used further while Technicolor worked on improving its system. Wanderer of the Wasteland was shot for Famous Players-Lasky, and then several dream-sequences were shot in the studio for Sam Goldwyn’s Cytherea. The following year, 1925, the Technicolor process was used to shoot Douglas Fairbanks’ The Black Pirate.

The use of cemented positives, meanwhile, had proved particularly intractable, and in 1928, Technicolor announced the development of its second two-colour subtractive process.

Notes

² Quoted in Fred E. Basten, Glorious Technicolor (London: A. S. Barnes, 1980) p. 29.

³ Hal Hall and William Stull, ‘Motion Pictures in Natural Colours’, Cinematographic Annual, 1930, vol. 1, p. 278.”

(Neale, Steve (1985): The Beginnings of Technicolor. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge 2006, pp. 13-23, on pp. 14-15.)

“Starting in the mid-1920s, Technicolor had made available a color consulting service to work with the studios and designers prior to and during film production. Now that service was not only available but required – and expanded to include the upgrading of virtually every facet involved in color photography. A contract with Technicolor was a package that included not only the rental of the three-color camera but a Technicolor cameraman who worked as an advisor to the studio’s cinematographer; advice given to art directors, set directors and designers, wardrobe and property departments; use of make-up and assistance to the studio make-up departments; the requirements of special lighting equipment; and laboratory processing up to and including the final release print.¹²

Note

¹² Fred E. Basten, Glorious Technicolor (London: A. S. Barnes, 1980) p. 66.”

(Neale, Steve (1985): The Beginnings of Technicolor. In: Angela Dalle Vacche and Brian Price (eds.): Color. The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006, pp. 13-23, on p. 18.)

“4. LES PROCÉDÉS SOUSTRACTIFS

Autour des années trente, on assiste à la naissance presque simultanée des principaux procédés modernes qui relèvent tous du système soustractif. Dans ce système, la couleur est matérialisée sur la copie destinée à la projection. Le quasi-monopole exercé par les procédés soustractifs tient à un fait très banal: il ne demande aucune transformation du matériel de prise de vues et de projection. Mais cette simplification d’utilisation résulte d’une complexité accrue au niveau de la fabrication et du traitement des émulsions. C’est là que se situe le problème du point de vue de la conservation: les trois couches qui composent la structure de la plupart des films soustractifs sont composées de matières colorantes beaucoup plus instables que l’argent réduit de l’émulsion en noir et blanc.

a. Les procédés bichromes: plusieurs procédés bichromes soustractifs furent expérimentés dans les années vingt. Une solution consistait à coller dos à dos des films minces virés respectivement en rouge-orangé et en bleu-vert (Technicolor n° 2, 1922) ou encore à enduire chaque côté du support d’une émulsion virée dans ces couleurs. Comme pour tous les procédés bichromes, le résultat n’était pas satisfaisant.”

(Pinel, Vincent (1992): La forêt des techniques. In: Michel Ciment (ed.): Ciné mémoire. Colloque international d’information (7-9 octobre 1991). Paris: Femis, pp. 17–24, on pp. 21–22.) (in French)

“Technicolor was established as a corporation and by the early 1920s a more reliable two-colour subtractive system had been developed in which two thin layers of film were cemented together, back to back, after being exposed and dyed (one layer with red-orange tones and the other with blue-green). One advantage of the system was that, for the first time, colour film could use standard projectors. The first colour film made using this method was Toll of the Sea (1922), a Chinese version of Madame Butterfly, produced by the innovative and dynamic Joseph Schenk, directed by Chester Franklin, and filmed in a Hollywood studio.”

(Everett, Wendy (2007): Mapping Colour. An Introduction to the Theories and Practices of Colour. In: Wendy Everett (ed.): Questions of Colour in Cinema. From Paintbrush to Pixel. Oxford: Peter Lang, pp. 7–38, on p. 20.)

“In the 1920s, a two-strip Technicolor process was used almost exclusively in sequences in black-and-white movies.

[…]

To win Hollywood’s support, Technicolor employed a time-tested business tactic, that of supplying research prototypes. Every new Technicolor process was demonstrated in a sample film financed by the company itself or by a sympathetic backer. Kalmus and his colleagues produced The Gulf Between (1917) to display the additive process, Toll of the Sea (1922) to exhibit the initial two-color procedure, and The Flag (1927) and The Viking (1928) to publicize the revised two-color process.”

(Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet; Thompson, Kristin (1985): The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, on p. 353.)

“During the 1920s, Technicolor sequences were inserted into The Merry Widow (1925), Beau Geste (1926), Ben-Hur (1926), The Ten Commandments (1923), and others; in The Big Parade (1925) and The Wedding March (1928), the process was used for scenes of pageantry. The Black Pirate (1926), one of the first two-strip Technicolor features, made extensive use of color for spectacle.”

(Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet; Thompson, Kristin (1985): The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. London: Routledge, on p. 355.)

“Seit der Frühzeit des Kinos haben sich die Filmproduzenten immer wieder bemüht, ein scheinbares Manko des frühen Films wettzumachen: die fehlende Farbigkeit. Um die Nachfrage nach Farbe im Film zu befriedigen, wurden die Filme folglich hand- und schablonenkoloriert oder viragiert. In den folgenden Jahren wurden unzählige Versuche unternommen, um den Farbeindruck immer ‘natürlicher’ und ‘realistischer’ erscheinen zu lassen. 1922 gelang einer Firma, die dann anschließend fast dreißig Jahre lang nahezu konkurrenzlos den amerikanischen Farbfilmmarkt beherrschen sollte, der Durchbruch mit ihrem subtraktiven Zweifarbenfilm: Technicolor.

Das Aufkommen des Tonfilms ab 1927 machte das Viragieren unmöglich; die chemischen Bäder schädigten die Tonspur. Farbe im Film, wie man inzwischen weiß, in den frühen zwanziger Jahren dank Viragierung meist der Normalfall, wurde plötzlich zur Ausnahme.

Da für das Technicolor-Verfahren viel mehr Negativmaterial als für die herkömmlichen Filme benötigt wurde (in den Spezialkameras liefen zwei, für den Dreifarbenfilm später drei Schwarzweißnegative, die verschiedene Farbauszüge aufnahmen), verteuerte sich der Farbfilm erheblich und wurde damit zum Prestigeobjekt.

Farbe wurde zum Schauweit, ähnlich wie die Statistenheere oder Elefanten im Monumentalfilm. Und die Farbfilmproduzenten sorgten dafür, daß sie für ihr gutes Geld in ihren Filmen auch Farbe zu sehen bekamen. In den zwanziger Jahren drehte man häufig einzelne, meist die repräsentativsten, Sequenzen in zweifarbigem Technicolor, so z.B. den Maskenball in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (Rupert Julian & Edward Sedgewick, USA 1925).

Wenn vollständig in Farbe gedreht wurde, entstanden meist Kostümfilme wie THE BLACK PIRATE (Albert Parker, USA 1926) oder THE VIKING (Roy William Neill, USA 1928).

[…]

In der Geschichte und Entwicklung des Technicolor-Films hatten Filme, deren Handlung am oder auf dem Meer spielt, von Anfang an eine herausgehobene Stellung.

Im ersten subtraktiven zweifarbigen Technicolor-Film THE TOLL OF THE SEA (Chester M. Franklin, USA 1922), von Technicolor als Demonstration für ihr Farbverfahren produziert, spielen sich nahezu alle wichtigen und dramatischen Momente dieser “Madame Butterfly”-Variante am Meer ab.

Der erste frei produzierte Film im subtraktiven zweifarbigen Technicolor-System ist ein Piratenfilm: THE BLACK PIRATE (1926). Mit Douglas Fairbanks in der Hauptrolle entstanden, machte der Film intensive Farbtests nötig und ver schlang immense Summen (Bühler 1973, 452–453).

Literatur

Bühler, Wolf-Eckart (1973) Der Piratenfilm. In: Filmkritik 10, 1973, 435–487.”

(Penning, Lars (1988): Farbe im klassischen Piratenfilm. In: Karl-Dietmar Möller-Nass, Hasko Schneider and Hans J. Wulff (eds.): 1. Film- und Fernsehwissenschaftliches Kolloquium. Münster: MAkS, pp. 36–40, on pp. 36–37.) (in German)

“Trotz der beachtlichen Verbreitung, die Prizmacolor gefunden hatte, verschwand das Verfahren 1924 von der Bildfläche, nachdem ihm im Technicolor Prozess Nr. 2 ein – dank der subtraktiven Aufnahmemethode – überlegener Rivale erwachsen war.

In den Forschungslaboratorien der Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation, die 1915 von dem Absolventen des Massachusetts Institute of Technology Herbert Thomas Kalmus und zwei Geschäftspartnern in Boston gegründet worden war, hatte man sich etwa um 1920 der subtraktiven Farberzeugung zugewandt. Ebenso wie der Prizmacolor Prozess Nr. 1 war auch das erste Farbverfahren der Technicolor noch ein additives Folgeverfahren in der Tradition Kinemacolors gewesen, das mit Strahlenteilung, Rot- und Grünfilter und gebräuchlichem Schwarz-Weiß-Film arbeitete⁵⁹ und rasch in Vergessenheit geriet. Die subtraktiven Technicolor Prozesse Nr. 2 und 3 dagegen etablierten die Farbe als feste Größe im Hollywood-Kino der ausgehenden Stumm- und frühen Tonfilmepoche und bereiteten auf diese Weise den Boden für den späteren Ruhm der Marke Technicolor, die in der zweiten Hälfte der 30er Jahre synonym für den Durchbruch des farbigen Films werden sollte.

Beim Technicolor Prozess Nr. 2 erfolgte die Aufnahme zweier spiegelverkehrter Farbauszüge, die, als sogenannte Matrizen auf Positivfilm kopiert; passgenau aufeinander geklebt wurden und auf diese Weise einen einzigen zweifarbigen Filmstreifen ergaben, der trotz seines überdurchschnittlichen Durchmessers mit jedem gebräuchlichen Projektor vorgeführt werden konnte. Als erster Spielfilm nach dem Verfahren wurde Ende 1922 die Madame Butterfly-Adaption The Toll of the Sea (Chester M. Franklin) in New York uraufgeführt, die die technischen und ästhetischen Vorzüge des Verfahrens immerhin so überzeugend bewiesen zu haben scheint, dass sich Technicolor in den kommenden Jahren gegen seine Konkurrenten durchsetzen konnte. Zu diesem Aufstieg trug die Tatsache bei, dass Hollywood-Größen wie Cecil B. DeMille, Samuel Goldwyn und Douglas Fairbanks Gebrauch von dem Verfahren machten und so in kurzer Zeit eine ganze Reihe bedeutender Filmwerke entstanden, mit denen sich der Markenname Technicolor verknüpfte. 1923 machte der Gigantomane DeMille den Anfang, indem er Einzelszenen seines Bibel-Epos The Ten Commandments in Technicolor drehte. 1925 folgten unter anderem die berühmte Maskenball-Szene in The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian) und Passagen des Monumentalfilms Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ (Fred Niblo). Im darauf folgenden Jahr entstand als abendfüllender Technicolor-Film der Fairbanks-Kassenschlager The Black Pirate (Albert Barker). 1927 bediente sich wiederum DeMille des Verfahrens für Szenen seiner Christus-Verfilmung The King of Kings.

Wesentliche technische Verbesserungen brachte 1928 der Technicolor Prozess Nr. 3, bei dem zur Herstellung der Kopien ein spezieller Blankfilm und dessen Bearbeitung mittels eines Druckverfahrens (Dye Transfer Process) eingeführt wurden: An die Stelle der präzise aneinander geklebten Positivfilmstreifen trat der Blankfilm, auf den die Farbinformation der Matrizen aufkopiert wurde. Zukunftsweisende Bedeutung kam der Tatsache zu, dass sich auf dem neuen Kopierfilm auch eine Lichttonspur aufbringen ließ. Bereits die ersten Filme, die nach dieser dritten und letzten Evolutionsstufe des zweifarbigen Technicolor-Verfahrens hergestellt wurden, gehörten zur Gattung der sogenannten Sounds, die den Übergang des stummen Films zum Tonfilm-Kino markierten, beispielsweise das Wagner-inspirierte Spektakel The Viking (1928, Roy William Neill) und die Jules-Vernes-Adaption The Mysterious Island (1929, Luden Hubbard). 1930 setzte eine Welle modischer Color Talkies ein, die vorzugsweise Revue-Shows und Broadway-Glamour von der Bühne auf die Leinwand übertrugen: Allein in diesem Jahr stellten Universal und Tiffany Productions je einen, First National und Paramount Pictures je zwei, und Warner Brothers nicht weniger als sieben abendfüllende Spielfilme nach dem Technicolor-Verfahren her. Darüber hinaus entstanden zweifarbige Einzelszenen für rund 25 ansonsten schwarz-weiße amerikanische Spielfilme sowie eine größere Anzahl von Kurz- und Zeichentrickfilmen. Die Versuche der Technicolor Corporation, sich auf dem europäischen Markt zu etablieren, blieben dagegen erfolglos, wenngleich etwa die französische Großproduktion Michael Strogoff (1926, Viktor Tourjansky) mit Einzelszenen nach dem Technicolor-Verfahren veredelt wurde. Mit einer gewissen Verzögerung traten auch europäische Varianten des Zweifarbenfilms auf, stießen aber auf ein geringes Interesse der Produzenten.

Anmerkungen

⁵⁹ Der einzige komplett nach diesem Verfahren gedrehte Spielfilm war The Gulf Between (1917, Wray Bartlett Physioc), von dem heute nur noch einige Einzelbilder existieren.”

(Alt, Dirk (2011): “Der Farbfilm marschiert!” Frühe Farbfilmverfahren und NS-Propaganda 1933-1945. München: Belleville, on pp. 42–43.) (in German)

“Per aggirare questo ostacolo gli ingegneri della Technicolor orientarono le ricerche verso la sintesi sottrattiva, mediante la quale il colore si sarebbe potuto formare direttamente sulla pellicola. Il lancio del nuovo sistema sottrattivo (Technicolor 2) fu preparato con attenzione²⁴. Dopo accurate ricerche e sperimentazioni, il gruppo di Kalmus ottenne l’uso degli studi della Metro per la realizzazione di un film autoprodotto in due rulli, successivamente ampliato all’estensione di un lungometraggio: Fior di loto (The Toll of the Sea, Franklin, 1922), riadattamento cinese della Madama Butterfly.

Il favore con cui il film fu accolto sollecitò l’insorgere di un certo interesse da parte delle major. Tra il 1922 e il 1928 il sistema fu utilizzato da MGM, Paramount, First National e United Artists, ma solo per una ristretta minoranza dei circa trenta film realizzati il ricorso al colore fu integrale: il massimo successo fu ottenuto grazie all’avventuroso Il pirata nero (The Black Pirate, Parker, 1926), interpretato da Douglas Fairbanks. Nella maggior parte dei casi, invece, il sistema fu considerato da produttori e registi più che altro una lussuosa decorazione adatta a singoli episodi di grande portata spettacolare, come le sequenze dell’esodo in I dieci comandamenti (The Ten Commandments, DeMille, 1923) o quelle della natività in Ben-Hur (Niblo, 1925)²⁵. Si trattava ancora di un modo di considerare il colore naturale come un elemento di seduzione visiva, da collocare ai margini della rappresentazione istituzionale.

Questa stessa forza d’impatto del colore venne talvolta sfruttata con finalità più esplicitamente perturbanti o carnevalesche, per rovesciare provvisoriamente l’ordine tradizionale del bianco e nero: è il caso della mirabile sequenza a colori del ballo mascherato di Il fantasma dell’Opera (The Phantom of the Opera, Julian, 1925), con il fantasma che fa irruzione nel grande salone del ballo in maschera nei panni della morte rossa.

²⁴ Con il passaggio alla sintesi sottrattiva, il negativo di ripresa (in bianco e nero pancromatico) veniva impressionato tramite un sistema di divisione prismatica simile al precedente: le due immagini filtrate in rosso e blu-verde si formavano ancora su fotogrammi consecutivi di una stessa pellicola, ma in rapporto di specularità verticale. Da ciascuna delle due serie di fotogrammi si otteneva uno speciale positivo in rilievo (matrice); le due matrici venivano poi incollate e tinte; un lato in rosso e l’altro in blu-verde. La copia a colori così ottenuta poteva essere proiettata nei normali apparecchi in uso per il bianco e nero. La copia incollata, tuttavia, risultava molto delicata e presentava maggiori difficoltà di messa a fuoco (cfr. Basten 1980, pp. 29–36 e Haines 1993, pp. 4–8).

²⁵ Per I dieci comandamenti, DeMille ricorse anche al sopracitato sistema Handschiegl, nonché alle tecnologie monocromatiche della tintura e del viraggio (cfr. Cherchi Usai 1995, pp. 102–103 e Birchard 2004, p. 186).

Bibliografia

Basten, Fred E. (1980), Glorious Technicolor. The Movies’ Magic Rainbow, Barnes, Cranbury (N.J.).

Birchard, Robert S. (2004), Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood, University Press of Kentucky, Lexington.

Cherchi Usai, Paolo (1995), Le nitrate mécanique. L’imagination de la couleur comme science exacte (1830-1928), in Aumont, a cura di (1995a), La couleur en cinéma, Mazzotta-Cinémathèque française, Milano-Paris, pp. 95–109.

Haines, Richard W. (1993), Technicolor Movies. The History of Dye Transfer Printing, McFarland & Company, Jefferson (N.C.).”

(Pierotti, Federico (2012): La seduzione dello spettro. Storia e cultura del colore nel cinema. Genova: Le Mani-Microart, on pp. 126–127.) (in Italian)

“DR. TROLAND: […] However, we are under the orders of the producers and directors and have to photograph the subjects which they set before us. This applies also to the tendency to use color to strengthen a weak story; a principle which is also concerned in the use of “stars.” If a story is strong enough to get across without a star, the producers usually dispense with the latter, so that the stars commonly find themselves associated with a poor story.

However, I believe that it is significant as to the box office value of colors that such a production as The Black Pirate, which was not strong as to dramatic action, can show good financial returns. Nevertheless, if the producers were wholly wise in their use of color, they would combine it with features which are good in other respects, thus raising the general quality of the production to a level which could not otherwise be attained at all. This has been done in such pictures as Ben Hur and The King of Kings.”

(Troland, Leonard T. (1927): Some Psychological Aspects of Natural Color Motion Pictures. In: Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, 11, 26.9.1927, pp. 680–698, on pp. 695–696.)

“The earliest Technicolor process, again, in which thin films carrying wash-off relief images were cemented in register back to back was a triumph of technical skill; while the imbibition process of the Technicolor Company represented the first really practicable process for the production of motion pictures in large quantities at a cost at which they could be sold. In this process, the wash-off reliefs or matrices are used to form dye images, which are transferred by imbibition to a gelatin layer, and after this operation was carried out successfully with two colors, the Technicolor Company was able to produce three-color images, which today represent the furthest commercial development in the production of color motion pictures.”

(Mees, C. E. Kenneth (1937): The Development of the Art and Science of Photography in the Twentieth Century. In: Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, 28,1, pp. 3–20, on p. 13.)

“One should remember that the inventor and scientist may offer the user a perfect process, but unless the user exercises discrimination, accepting a new group of artistic formulae conditioned by the technical facts, it is just as possible to fail by misuse of a new medium as it is to inaugurate a splendid advance in film history. (Adrian Klein, 1935)¹

With the appearance of subtractive two-colour Technicolor in 1922, the introduction of dye-transfer printing in 1928 and the three-colour camera in 1932 some predicted ‘black-and-white films will soon be a thing of the past’, while others were more cautious, worrying that ‘with the screen a blazing riot of colour it is impossible to concentrate fully on any particular individual’.² Indeed, there were chromophiles, cautious chromophiles and chromophobes in the British colour adventure.

NOTES

¹ Today’s Cinema, Construction and Equipment supplement, 5 June 1935, p. iv.

² Today’s Cinema, 1 May 1935, Construction and Equipment supplement, p. iii; and Shirley R. Simpson, ‘A Plea for Natural Colour’, Kinematograph Weekly, 26 August 1937, p. 4.”

(Street, Sarah (2012): Colour Films in Britain. The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-55. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, on p. 37.)

“Colour continued to be a ‘glorious adventure’ for many in Britain from the 1920s into the 30s, continuing the instances of unstable hybridity around colour noted in the last chapter. This chapter will discuss the many processes that competed for technical and aesthetic prominence during this period when the sheer variety of approaches prompted extended debate on the future of colour cinema. As such the period constitutes a fascinating interregnum between the co-existence of both additive and subtractive colour experimentation and the commercial rise to prominence of three-strip Technicolor. […]

In the early 1930s it was far from clear that Technicolor would come to dominate the market. The subtractive, two-colour Technicolor features Toll of the Sea (1922) and The Black Pirate (1926) had been shown in Britain, and the company’s progress was followed as the development of a three-colour method was announced.⁷ Toll of the Sea had a glowing review in Kinematograph Weekly that described the film’s colour as its ‘chief charm’. The way this was expressed is interesting in terms of demonstrating how discourses around tastes were gravitating towards praise for ‘entirely natural’ colour in ‘a continuous series of brilliant pastel studies that are a sheer delight to the eye’. There was also an appreciation of how colour supported narrative and vice-versa: ‘The production has obviously been carried out with a view to displaying the colour qualities of the process to the best advantage, but the slender dramatic thread is artistically woven and the dramatic values very well balanced against the technique.’⁸ When The Black Pirate was released in Britain in March 1926 reviewers also judged its colour with admiration. The two-colour system was appreciated for rendering ‘cool and restful tones’, and was likened to the work of Dutch painters.⁹ Technical specialist and former Kinemacolor cameraman Colin N. Bennett also observed that its colour effects appeared as ‘refined down to more of an artistic suggestion than a robust reality’, more ‘faint infusion’ than the vibrant colours he had observed with Gaumont’s three-colour Chronochrome.¹⁰ Although other two-colour Technicolor films such as Whoopee (1930) were admired in Britain, the process was considered expensive and needing excessive light levels.¹¹ As Higgins explains, ‘subtractive systems were limited to reproducing a narrow slice of the spectrum. Based on two colors, usually cyan and magenta, these processes translated the mise en scène into compositions of bluish green and pinkish orange. Flesh tones and saturated primary hues were problematic.’¹²

NOTES

⁷ Rachael Low, The History of the British Film, 1918-29 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), pp. 282–3.

⁸ All quotations from Kinematograph Weekly vol. 74 no. 385, p. 65.

⁹ The Bioscope vol. 66 no. 101, 11 March 1926, p. 57.

¹⁰ The Bioscope, 1 April 1926, Equipment and Technical section, p. iii. The triple-lens Chronochrome was considered to be a high-quality process but was ultimately stymied by mechanical complications and because it required a special projector. See Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: An Introduction (London: BFI, 2000), pp. 30–1.

¹¹ Elliott Hammett, ‘Competing Colour Systems’, The Commercial Film vol. 1 no. 2, 1935, pp. 8, 19.

¹² Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), p. 4.”

(Street, Sarah (2012): Colour Films in Britain. The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-55. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, on pp. 37–38.)

“The company’s new subtractive approach still required use of a Technicolor camera, film, and printing, but the resulting color print could be run on any standard projector, greatly opening up opportunities for exhibition. The early 1920s would see Technicolor evolve from a novelty which worked better in the research laboratory than in practice, to the production and release of all-color features with Hollywood stars presented in theatres around the world.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on p. 85.)

“For the big-budget production of The Ten Commandments, the present-day story and its historical parallel biblical narrative would be told sequentially, with a prologue of the story of Moses and the escape from the Egyptians followed by a straightforward “modern story.” Much of the budget and nearly all of the spectacle went into the prologue dealing with the Bible’s Book of Exodus.

DeMille was planning special effects using the Williams traveling-matte process, which combined miniatures with live-action, and spot-coloring for the Pillar of Fire and other color effects. Always striving for showmanship and production value, DeMille responded when Kalmus offered to photograph the major sequences in Technicolor without cost; if DeMille liked the result, the studio could buy it; if not, Technicolor would junk the footage.

DeMille deployed numerous camera crews to cover the exterior crowd and action scenes for the Egyptian prologue, filmed at Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes starting in May 1923. “I was with him up at the location out in the desert where we had the tent cities built” for the actors and crew, Rennahan recalled, “and I didn’t get to shoot anything because he had thirteen cameras and I had one two-color camera.” There was a back-up two-color camera, “and on a couple of scenes I got the chance to use both cameras, but he covered everything himself so well with his thirteen cameras that it was a little difficult for me to get a whole sequence.”⁴⁴

The Technicolor shots in the final film consist of the horsemen and chariots of Pharaoh and his soldiers pursuing the Israelites over the plains (filmed at Muroc Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert), until just before the Pillar of Fire (printed in “special color”). Trucks carrying the black & white cameras and another truck with the Technicolor cameras raced at 40 miles per hour, ahead of the horses.

While later films would have a specific “Technicolor sequence,” with this production the Technicolor camera had not obtained all of the shots that De-Mille required. To make up for the lack of coverage by the Technicolor cameras, a shot of a chariot falling down a hill was tinted and toned, while shots of the Israelites by the sea were tinted orange. Despite the extensive coverage in color, the final prints had a modest 388 feet of Technicolor, and Paramount purchased 788 color prints to service worldwide distribution. The overall tinting scheme of The Ten Commandments was not complex, and served to highlight the Technicolor sequences. Most of the film was tinted orange, with sections in amber, blue, and lavender tints, and a blue tone for the fourteen-reel road-show prints. The eleven-reel general release version was even less elaborate.⁴⁵

The critical and public response to the opening of The Ten Commandments in December 1923 was rapturous, with the spectacle and religious overtones on the screen and ballyhoo in theatres serving to humble any doubters. Technicolor did not have the clout in the industry to require that the color process be included on the film credits or in advertising, unless the company paid for the advertising itself. The New York American noted, “There were some exquisite bits of color, and then some that were not so lovely. Especially effective were the scenes where the chariots were driven across the sands.” The New York Times agreed, concluding, “there are many impressive colorful scenes of the Israelites in the desert, some of them appearing better and more natural than other such effects we have witnessed on the screen.”⁴⁶

A major film such as The Ten Commandments, with a budget of nearly $1.5 million, could justify sequences in Technicolor. While the experience “sold him on color,” according to Ray Rennahan, DeMille would hold off on using the process until his next biblical spectacular, The King of Kings, released in 1927.⁴⁷ Of course, Kalmus needed to convince the industry that Technicolor was practical for ordinary program pictures, not just road-show spectaculars.

NOTES

⁴⁴ Rennahan, AFI Oral History with Charles Higham.

⁴⁵ The Ten Commandments cutting continuity, undated, Paramount Pictures Scripts, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

⁴⁶ “Newspaper Opinions: The Ten Commandments!” Film Daily, December 26, 1923, 2.

⁴⁷ Rennahan, AFI Oral History with Charles Higham.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on pp. 99–102.)

“Technicolor faced a host of challenges in the industry. In the 1920s producers and distributors had many options to add color to release prints, ranging from the widespread tinting and toning techniques available from every laboratory, to more specialized services such as Handschiegl spot-coloring or hand-coloring. As a “natural color” process, Technicolor had to integrate itself into standard production practices. Between 1923 and 1926, the studios first explored the use of Technicolor through short inserts in feature films.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on pp. 109–110.)

“The Technicolor process required more light than black & white to obtain an adequate exposure, and existing lighting setups often had to be reorganized on set. Although uncommon in the rest of the industry, exposure meters were used by the color cameramen to ensure the negatives consistently received enough light. For years the Technicolor camera crews were looked down upon by their black & white counterparts as technicians, not craftsmen. “Technicolor never hired a really top class cameraman,” remembered Howe. “Ray Rennahan was the best they had, and we didn’t consider him a top man like [Arthur] Miller, [Robert] Surtees or [Charles] Rosher.”¹³

NOTES

¹³ Scott Eyman, “James Wong Howe,” in Five American Cinematographers: Interviews with Karl Struss, Joseph Ruttenberg, James Wong Howe, Linwood Dunn, and William H. Clothier (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987), 70.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on p. 112.)

“The Technicolor process demanded strong illumination, with a broad spectral range. Carbon arcs provided an immediate solution to this, although the much less intense incandescent lamp was also suitable, if less practical. Arcs produced light by creating an electrical “arc” between two carbon-rod electrodes. The arc needed to be constantly monitored and manually adjusted as the carbon rods burned. A minute change in intensity and spectral qualities didn’t matter in black & white photography, but could produce very noticeable side effects in color work. As a result the color cameramen had to maintain close contact with the gaffer and makeup department, and constantly change filters to achieve consistent color balance.

The growth of Technicolor coincided with the greater adoption of panchromatic film by the motion picture industry, brought about by more competitive prices from Eastman Kodak. Before the improved Eastman Panchromatic Negative Film was introduced in 1926, the majority of black & white films were shot on blue-sensitive orthochromatic stock, which rendered actors’ skin darker and lips black. As a result, pale makeup was used to lighten skin and add emphasis to facial features. The panchromatic negative used by Technicolor recorded contrast and tone more faithfully, enabling more natural makeup to be used. As studio makeup departments were still relatively inexperienced, the color cameraman was responsible for ensuring that the correct makeup was applied. “We spent thousands of dollars developing makeup for the two-color process,” recalled Ray Rennahan. “If we had an actress coming on with her own makeup man who had no experience in color, they would want to put on the same makeup used for black and white… and we would [have to] take it off.”¹⁶

The use of color in art direction and costume design was handled by the studio. Good results at first depended on trial and error. Experienced production designer Ben Carré received little guidance in 1924 on Cytherea, his first encounter with Technicolor. “They told me I could use any color I wanted,” Carré recalled. “One of my sets was a Spanish setting with arches, and to force the light I painted the background with purples which when seen on the screen finally became absolutely brown… and they didn’t reshoot it.”¹⁷

Before Technicolor’s dedicated color consultancy division was formed in 1929, it was the responsibility of the company’s cameramen to advise production staff about on-set colors as best they could. The limitations of the two-color process meant certain colors were impossible to achieve in the final prints.

NOTES

¹⁶ Rennahan, interview by Bill Gleason.

¹⁷ Ben Carré, interview by Bill Gleason, 1970s, transcript, Karl Thiede Collection.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on p. 114.)

“The limitations of Technicolor’s two-color process meant certain subjects were more suitable than others. The biases of the red and green component colors emphasized flesh tones over other hues found in nature; and certain hair colors, such as red and blonde, reproduced vividly as a result.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on p. 123.)

“Extended fashion shows in color became a popular subject, and proved particularly appealing to female audiences. In a controlled environment and with careful color coordination, Technicolor’s limited palette could produce exceptional results.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on p. 124.)

“Other limitations of the process affected how producers used color in films. Cost and technical restrictions restrained its use, so new ways had to be devised to better integrate color inserts with the scenes surrounding them. Many early Technicolor efforts were incorporated as distinct sequences. Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925), for example, opened with a color prologue charting the lead’s failed proposals to his sweetheart. The insert stood on its own, and only after its conclusion did the film’s story begin. By 1926 producers were becoming more adventurous, and films frequently incorporated multiple color sequences, which were more thoughtfully assimilated into the narrative. Contracts with Technicolor were commonly for a limited number of days shooting over a specific time period. The restricted availability of cameramen and equipment meant the filming of these sequences had to be planned in advance.

Monta Bell’s Lights of Old Broadway (1925) presented two Technicolor sequences, both tightly integrated into the story. The inserts, in Reels 2 and 6, featured the film’s star, Marion Davies, and were important set-pieces that stood out because they were in color. In both instances Technicolor shots were intercut with tinting and other color effects to delineate space. In the first color scene, a series of vaudeville acts are performed onstage. The performers and sets were reproduced in Technicolor, whereas cutaways to the audience and scenes backstage were tinted amber. The transitions created a clear distinction between the onstage spectacle and the everyday world of the characters.

In the film’s second color scene New York’s first electric street lighting is turned on while a crowd watches. Technicolor was used to highlight a momentous occasion, marking a landmark in technical progress. The unlit amber-tinted street scenes were contrasted with the illuminated faces in color of the film’s cast once the lights come on. An 1880s New York street set was constructed to show the crowds at the event, and an enormous American flag was hung above it. As Technicolor required too much light to expose the large set adequately, parts of the scene were shot in black & white and inserted between the color shots. Technicolor’s limited palette was expanded by using the Handschiegl process to add color manually to the flag, lessening the contrast on-screen between different processes. Such hybridity was used frequently by the Hollywood studios to expand the options available. The Handschiegl process and hand-coloring were applied to a film after it was shot. Neither process was subject to illumination restrictions, direct production expense, or the limitations of colors possible in front of the camera.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on pp. 125–126.)

“For ten years the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation and Kalmus, Comstock & Wescott, Inc., had worked together to realize a full-color process. This partnership split responsibilities between the two companies – KC&W conducted the research and development, while Technicolor owned the processes and exploited them commercially. Cemented printing had been introduced in 1922, and Technicolor expanded its facilities on the East and West Coasts as demand grew. These double-coated prints were never seen as a long-term solution to the color problem, and research continued as steps were made toward a viable three-color process. The research engineers at KC&W began testing and implementing a new dye-transfer printing process, which would eventually replace the cemented prints already in use. In this process, dyed matrix films for each color record were pressed into contact with a blank film, allowing the dye to transfer from the matrix relief into the blank’s gelatin layer, forming a color image. This new imbibition-blank process (also known as the I.B. process) was set to improve upon many of the inherent flaws of bonded prints and promised to reduce production costs.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on p. 135.)

“The wide release of Douglas Fairbanks’s The Black Pirate highlighted many technical problems with the old Technicolor process. The cemented prints were prone to increased mechanical damage, separation, and bad cupping of the support. Fairbanks was an important producer in Hollywood, and before the film’s release it was hoped that other studios would follow his lead and consider the benefits of color. Fairbanks was vocal in his promotion of the process, but the bad press and word of mouth around Hollywood about the technical flaws of the process dampened Technicolor’s chances of securing comparable contracts.

Throughout 1925 and 1926, Herbert Kalmus began negotiating with executives at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to make more all-color productions. Connections with M-G-M had always remained strong, and the studio hoped to follow up the success it had had with Ben-Hur and The Big Parade with other road-show spectaculars, this time exploiting an expanded use of the Technicolor process. M-G-M began work on three big productions based on best-selling works: Rafael Sabatini’s Bardelys the Magnificent, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, and the popular Rudolf Friml-Herbert Stothart stage operetta Rose-Marie, set in Canada. Kalmus convinced the studio to fully incorporate color from the earliest planning stages, and introduced them to Fairbanks’s experienced production team from The Black Pirate. Fairbanks proved the best indicator of the future of color in the motion picture industry.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on pp. 155–156.)

“With the release of Mystery of the Wax Museum, the two-color Technicolor process had achieved the peak of technical and artistic accomplishment that was possible within the limitations of the process. Technicolor had introduced two-color to the public with The Toll of the Sea, and the eleven years that followed saw every element of the process revisited and reengineered. The company had redesigned the camera, made the transition from double-coated printing to dye-transfer, and in the last few years greatly improved color control and sharpness. They also proved that a color picture could be made on the same schedule and nearly the same budget as black & white. However, despite the positive audience response, the lack of business from producers demonstrated that, at least at current prices for release prints, two-color would never escape the niche of a novelty.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on p. 264.)

“Few people may remember the first Technicolor feature, The Gulf Between made fifteen years ago. To obtain the colour-effects, the projectionist had to keep two pictures simultaneously in register on the screen – which made him, in Dr. Kalmus’ words, “a cross between an acrobat and a professor.” Douglas Fairbanks’ Black Pirate of 1926 was Technicolor’s next milestone. Frining [fringing] and loss of focus was evident in that. This was due to the fact that it was a two-colour double-coated film. The double-coating caused “jumping.” First one side would “curl,” then the other, and so the film, curling this way and that, would jump.”

(Herring, Robert (1935): Technicolossal. In: Life and Letters Today, 13, Sep., pp. 194–196, on p. 194.)

“Three-colour Technicolor was the company’s fourth colour process. The previous three systems had been based on two-colour components, and they had met with varying degrees of success. When Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Comstock and W. Burton Wescott formed Technicolor in 1915, the company offered a two-colour process that required a special projector with dual apertures, each fitted with a colour filter.¹ The process was additive in the sense that colours were not mixed until they were superimposed on the theatre screen during projection. The second process was subtractive. Red-orange and blue-green positives were cemented back to back to create a single print that combined colours before they reached the screen, subtracting, or filtering, components from a single white light source.² The cement-positive process was introduced in 1922 and it found limited application until 1928 when Technicolor brought two-colour dye transfer printing to market. […]

Colour rendition of the two-colour processes was necessarily a compromise between the available blue-green and red-orange. Saturated and distinct reds, blues, greens and yellows were not possible. According to James Arthur Ball, who engineered the three-colour camera, Technicolor had always considered the two-colour systems to be preliminary and transitional processes:

In the earliest days of Technicolor development we recognized that the ultimate goal… must be a process that would add a full scale of colour reproduction to existing black-and-white product without subtracting from any of its desirable qualities, without imposing complications upon theater projection conditions, and with a minimum of added burden in the cost of photography and in the cost of prints.⁵

Notes

¹ For accessible, yet detailed discussions of the earlier two-colour processes, see: Herbert Kalmus, Mr. Technicolor, (Abescon, NJ: Magiclmage Filmbooks, 1993): 21–90; Richard W. Haines, Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1993): 1–17; Fred E. Basten, Glorious Technicolor (San Diego, CA: A. S. Barnes, 1980): 19–46; Roderick T. Ryan, A History of Motion Picture Color Technology (New York: The Focal Press, 1977): 77–82. In addition to these sources, I am drawing on Joe Schmit’s paper “History of the Technicolor Imbibition Process for Color Motion Pictures”, presented to the Hollywood section of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (25 May 1991).

² Haines, 4–7.

⁵ Ball, Joseph Arthur (1935): “The Technicolor Process of Three-Color Cinematography”. In: Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (August 1935), pp. 127. Ball presented this paper at a meeting of the Technicians Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 21 May 1935. It also appears in the Academy Technician’s Branch Technical Bulletin (31 May 1935), pp. 1–10.”

(Higgins, Scott (2000): Demonstrating Three-Colour Technicolor. Early Three-Colour Aesthetics and Design. In: Film History, 12,4, pp. 358–383, on pp. 358–359.)

“Le travail sur le système soustractif commence à la fin des années 10, mais ce n’est qu’au début des années 20 (1922), une fois les fonds pour la recherche débloqués, que la société procède au développement de son procédé. Ce dernier est un procédé bichrome, additif en prise de vues et soustractif en projection (procédé bipack, chimique)³. Le premier film réalisé dans ce procédé est The Toll of the Sea (1922), moyen métrage réalisé par Chester M. Franklin. Cependant, en raison de la fragilité du film utilisé en projection (deux fois plus épais qu’un film normal), la lenteur du processus de développement et la surconsommation de lumière pour produire une image correcte, ce premier procédé bipack soustractif en projection est progressivement abandonné.

Malgré ces difficultés techniques, le système est considéré comme une réussite à la fois d’un point de vue technique et esthétique et est utilisé, dans la première moitié des années 20, pour le tournage de certaines séquences de films à grand spectacle comme Les Dix Commandements (1923), Le Prisonnier de Zenda (1923), The Big Parade (1925), The Merry Widow (1925), Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1925), Ben Hur (1926). Certains films sont même intégralement tournés dans ce système dont le plus connu et le plus réussi sur le plan commercial est Le Pirate Noir de Douglas Fairbanks en 1926, dernier film tourné dans ce procédé.

Notes

³ Une caméra spéciale permet d’enregistrer les images sur deux pellicules, les négatifs de sélection du rouge et du vert (ce qui donne une image en relief). Ensuite, les positifs tirés sur un film mince sont, après blanchissement, virés en rouge/orange et en vert et collés dos à dos, formant la copie d’exploitation du film.”

(Kitsopanidou, Kira (2009): “Glorious Technicolor”. La stratégie d’innovation de la couleur de Technicolor dans l’industrie cinématographique Américaine. In: Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard (ed.): Cinéma et couleur. Paris: M. Houdiard, pp. 193–206, on p. 194.) (in French)

“Meanwhile, Coolidge and Hight’s original $10,000 investment had expanded to approximately $400,000, and they stopped shelling out. During the lean period that followed the company was held together largely by the optimism and resourcefulness of Dr. Kalmus, who, in 1920, induced William Travers Jerome to replace Coolidge as Technicolor’s principal backer. For many years Jerome was chairman of Technicolor’s board. Other board members and early backers included William Hamlin Childs, A. W. Erickson and Eversley Childs. Jerome had been the NYC district attorney who had prosecuted Harry K. Thaw for the murder of Stanford White.

It was under Jerome that Technicolor took its second major step, i.e., the introduction of a 2-color system which depended upon the positive print consisting of two gelatine relief images on thin celluloid glued or welded back-to-back and dyed in complementary colors.

Marcus Loew, and others at Loew’s Inc., also became involved in the Technicolor Corporation in 1920, but not to the extent of putting up “big” money, as did the men named above. However, they enabled Kalmus to make a two-reeler, later expanded to a feature which utilized the new process, at the Metro studio in Hollywood under the supervision of Joseph M. Schenck and the direction of Chester M. Franklin. John Arnold and Ray Rennahan were the cameramen, with Ball as technical consultant.

This was Toll of the Sea (’22), a variation on Madame Butterfly, staring Anna May Wong, Kenneth Harlan and Beatrice Bentley. According to Comstock “one of the difficulties in getting the picture photographed was to get the actors to take color seriously,” for at that time few had any faith in the future of color movies.

When Toll of the Sea opened at the Rialto Theatre in NYC (Nov. 26, ’22) the critics favorably commented on “the lack of fringing and flashing,” “the good definition,” “the nearer simulation of nature and ease in viewing,” “the colors that are clear, true and bright without being harsh.”

The New York Times flatly stated that, as a color project, Toll of the Sea was “noticeably superior to The Glorious Adventure,” a feature Prizma had shown several months earlier. J. Stuart Blackton had produced – and directed – that costume melodrama in England, with Lady Diana Manners in the starring role. The Times had said The Glorious Adventure had “the chromatic intensity of a cheap postcard and the indistinctiveness of a poorly lighted photograph. Colors run to strong hues with strong reds predominating.”

In September ’22 – two months before the opening of Toll of the Sea – Prizma announced it intended to sue Technicolor for infringing its patents. But the suit never materialized, and Prizma went out of business soon after. In ’28 its patent rights (Kelley’s) were acquired by Magnacolor, which was operated by Consolidated Film Industries, Inc. Cinecolor and Trucolor were other direct descendants of Kelley’s Prizma patents and processes.

Toll of the Sea may have won praise for its color, but it was not a hit as pure drama. However, it eventually grossed more than $250,000, of which Technicolor received approximately $165,000. In describing the effect upon Technicolor of this feature, Kalmus later said: “Every step of the Technicolor work in Toll of the Sea was carefully watched by the executives of the industry. Rex Ingram, who was in the midst of producing Prisoner of Zenda, wired Mr. Loew for permission to scrap everything he had done in black and white on that picture and start over again in color. D. W. Griffith wanted to produce Faust in it, and Douglas Fairbanks telephoned about producing a feature in it.

“Our first adventure in Hollywood seemed successful! We were told that if prints as good as those we were manufacturing in Boston were offered at 8 cents per foot the industry would rush to color.

“But… we had no adequate means of giving rush print service in Hollywood, and we were charging 20 cents a foot for release prints. It was another matter to convince a producer to employ the Technicolor Company to photograph and make prints of a production at his expense and risk and under the conditions which prevailed in the motion picture industry.”

So in April ’23 C. A. Willat, Ball, and a small group of technicians, were sent from Boston to establish a modest laboratory, and photographic unit, in Hollywood.

Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments (’23) proved to be a boon to Technicolor just when it needed one. In American Photography for Jan. ’23 DeMille had written that color movies diverted interest from narrative and action, offended the color-sensitivities of many, and cost too much. So, as DeMille later recounted in his autobiography, “the Technicolor Company approached me with a proposition both interesting and fair. For the big scenes of the Biblical prologue, would I let them set up a camera alongside mine, to shoot the scenes in color? If I liked the result, I could buy it. If I did not like it, the experiment would cost us nothing and they would give me the film to burn. I agreed.”

The scenes in Technicolor depicting the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their pursuit by the Egyptians were shot by Technicolor’s Ray Rennahan, working independently of the DeMille organization, and were highly successful.*

Practically everything that had been photographed in Technicolor up to this point had been shot out-of-doors in sunlight, since shooting color with artificial light then presented extra problems. Late in ’23 Samuel Goldwyn and George Fitzmaurice decided two dream sequences involving interior shots in Cytherea (’24) should be in color. The idea was that color would point up the lovers’ romanticization of Cuba in their dream, and that black-&-white would emphasize its reality when the lovers actually went there. Used in this way, it was thought, a color sequence would have dramatic value. The artificially lit interiors color-photographed well and both Fitzmaurice and Goldwyn were delighted.

The Technicolor sequence of The Ten Commandments prompted Famous Players (Paramount) to consider filming Zane Grey’s Wanderer of the Wasteland (’24) entirely in Technicolor. Grey’s contract with Jesse L. Lasky had stipulated that this particular novel should be shot in color. Lasky told Kalmus the studio had approriated no more for the film than for one photographed in black-&-white, and that the shooting schedule would have to be calculated on a black-&-white basis. Said Kalmus later:

“During the six weeks of photography our entire staff worked from early morning to late at night, including Sundays and holidays. At one time we were accumulating negative which we did not dare to develop because of inadequate facilities in our rented Hollywood laboratory. A few of us carried the terrorizing thought that there was no positive assurance that we would finally obtain commercial negative, and that the entire Famous Players investment might be lost. However, Mr. Lasky was not permitted to share that doubt… and the cut negative finally emerged satisfactorily.”

Wanderer of the Wasteland was photographed on various desert locations in California and Arizona. Irvin Willat – C. A. Willat’s brother – directed, and Jack Holt, Billie Dove (Willat’s wife), Noah Beery and Kathlyn Williams were the principal players. The reviews again praised the color. But it took Technicolor’s pilot plant in Boston almost a year to make enough prints for the theatres.

Early in ’25 Sidney R. Kent, then head of distribution for Famous-Players, wrote to Kalmus: “We have concluded not to do more Technicolor pictures for the present… because we have had a great deal of trouble in our exchanges… it is an added bother to our operators; and… because the cost is out of all proportion to its added value to us. We paid $146,000 additional for Wanderer prints.”

Nevertheless, color sequences in feature films increased during 1924-25, largely as a result of The Ten Commandments. And when Douglas Fairbanks announced that he would produce his forthcoming film, The Black Pirate (’26), entirely in Technicolor, Kalmus and his colleagues felt the lean days were over.

Fairbanks was a shrewd impresario and spent $125,000, and four months, shooting 50,000 feet of color film in order to test and determine proper color keys, make-up, fabric dyes, and location suitability. Catalina Island was rejected because its sand and foliage did not photograph to the satisfaction of Fairbanks and his experts. After the various tests it was decided to shoot 95% of the film, including almost all of the exterior ship sequences, on the United Artists lot. Henry Sharp, Fairbanks’ cinematographer on that film, worked closely with George Cave, Technicolor’s photographic representative.

After deciding to utilize color, Fairbanks had the story simplified and slowed in tempo so as to avoid unnecessary color distraction. Also he insisted that the color schemes should aim more “for glow than actual pigmentation.” Because Billie Dove’s complexion and coloring had registered well in Wanderer of the Wasteland, she was chosen to play opposite Fairbanks.

The Black Pirate was completed in twelve weeks of actual shooting time, and, according to Kalmus: “So far as audience reaction, press previews, and box-office receipts were concerned, it was a triumph from the start, but for the Technicolor company it was a terrible headache.” Added Kalmus later:

“Technicolor was still making the double-coated cemented-together relief prints, so that the red and green images were not quite in the same plane, and the picture didn’t project too sharply on the screen. This double-coated film is considerably thicker than ordinary black-&-white film, with emulsion on both sides which tend to make it cup [buckle] more readily and scratch more noticeably. And the cupping could occur in either direction… with the picture jumping out of focus. We sent field men to the exchanges with new prints, but our troubles never ended… Obviously Technicolor needed single-coated imbibition dye transfer prints – and volume.”

While Technicolor endeavored to develop a trouble-free imbibition printing method, audiences began to expect color sequences in black-&-white features. The Technicolor camera went underwater and to the South Seas for The Uninvited Guest (’24); glimpsed parts of the Ziegfeld Follies in Pretty Ladies (’25); showed a glittering coronation (The Merry Widow, ’25), the Paris Opera (The Phantom of the Opera, ’25), Gloria Swanson in a dream sequence (Stage Struck, ’25), an elaborate fashion show (The American Venus, ’26), a Viennese religious and military procession (The Wedding March, ’28), an entire city in flames (The Fire Brigade, ’27), Clara Bow in a bathing suit (Red Hair, ’28), Mary Magdalene’s palace of sin and the Resurrection of Christ (The King of Kings, ’27). And much else.

In the fall of ’24 Technicolor had six men and four cameras working in Rome on MGM’s Ben Hur (’26), but little or none of the color footage shot abroad was in the final version. However, the prefatory Nativity scenes, which were photographed in Technicolor in Hollywood and at California desert locations, were used.

Over $2,500,000 had been put into the Technicolor Corporation by 1926 and many changes in personnel had taken place. In ’25 Comstock had severed relations with Technicolor, receiving control of most of Kalmus, Comstock and Wescott’s non-Technicolor properties. W. Burton Wescott had resigned in ’21, and his brother, Ernest, left when Comstock did. The firm of Comstock and Wescott is still in existence.

Because of high print cost and the projection problems experienced with Wanderer of the Wasteland and The Black Pirate, Technicolor decided in ’26 its best immediate market was the two-reel short, and created two subsidiaries to make some. Written and directed by Arthur Maude, the first block was “inspired” by paintings – Blue Boy, The Vision, Mona Lisa, etc. (all in ’26). These were followed by historical subjects: Buffalo Bill’s Last Fight (’27), Cleopatra (’28), The Virgin Queen (’28), etc. The average negative cost was $20,000. These shorts helped Technicolor to make the all-important transition from cemented-prints to the imbibition dye-transfer method.

* The parting of the Red Sea, involving special effects and the compositing of photographic material, was tinted and toned to tie in with the Technicolor footage which it immediately preceded.”

(Behlmer, Rudy (1964): Technicolor. In: Films in Review, 15,6, pp. 333–351, on pp. 337–342.)

“Il prezzo da pagare per il passaggio alla sintesi sottrattiva (Technicolor no. 2), con la quale le tinte non si formano più sullo schermo ma nell’emulsione della pellicola positiva, è l’introduzione del metodo assai poco pratico dei due negativi di ripresa, ancora impressionati attraverso un prisma divisore, da cui poi sono ricavati (dopo stampa e imbibizione) i due speciali positivi colorati (le matrici), che, cementati insieme, possono essere proiettati in un qualsiasi apparecchio per il bianco e nero. Il nuovo sistema è utilizzato tra il 1922 e il 1927 da alcune major per realizzare film interamente o parzialmente a colori, come The Toll of the Sea (Chester M. Franklin, 1922), Il pirata nero (The Black Pirate, Albert Parker, 1926) e Ben Hur (Fred Niblo, 1926). Una nuova serie di problemi in proiezione, connessi stavolta all’impiego dei positivi cementati, spinge i tecnici della società a modificare il processo di stampa.”

(Pierotti, Federico (2016): Un’archeologia del colore nel cinema italiano. Dal Technicolor ad Antonioni. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, on pp. 31–32.) (in Italian)

“With increased activity in all departments, the laboratory on wheels became too confining. Additional space for a pilot plant was obtained in the basement of the building occupied by the Technicolor engineers, Kalmus, Comstock & Wescott, on Brookline Avenue in Boston. There, “Technicolor Process Number Two,” a two-component substractive process, was developed. This was largely achieved under the direction of Dr. Leonard T. Troland, who later became Technicolor’s research director.

As Dr. Kalmus described it, the new process was accomplished by “making two separate ‘relief’ images. By a relief image I mean that instead of having silver deposits constituting the image of the picture as printed from the negative, hills and valleys are etched in the gelatin giving a relief image corresponding with the image of the picture. Two such relief images, one each for the red and green components were welded together back to back in register. Then the two sides, one after the other, were floated over baths of the respective dyes and dried. Thus, we made a double-coated relief image in dyes.”

The new process used a specially constructed camera equipped with a split-beam system so that two exposures of the same scene could be made simultaneously through the single lens. The image was relayed from the lens to a prism which split the beam into two portions and filtered the rays to form red and green images on the film.

Research on “Technocolor Process Number Two” was begun in 1918. By 1920, the money that Mr. Coolidge and his associates had invested in developing an acceptable color process had run close to $400,000. Since not a penny had been returned in profits, they withdrew their support.

Dr. Kalmus made a quick trip to New York City, where he managed to intrigue William Travers Jerome, the famed trial lawyer who prosecuted Harry Kendall Thaw for the killing of Stanford White. Mr. Jerome, in turn, interested two advertising executives, A.W. Erickson and Harrison K. McCann, who each brought in several of their own clients (their agencies did not merge until 1930). The new investors included William Hamlin Childs and Eversley Childs, makers of Bon Ami; Albert W. Hawkes of Congoleum-Nairn; and John McHugh, of (what was at that time) the Chase National Bank.

With substantial backing now guaranteed, the work on Technicolor’s new process could proceed without interruption. And progress was being made. A number of tests had been run, problems noted and refined.

[…]

By 1922, the Technicolor process had reached a level that “will surprise many people,” as Dr. Comstock put it. The doctor’s confidence was bolstered by the fact that, while only two colors (red and green) were being used, they each contributed roughly half of the whole spectrum of color – the precise split arranged so that mixing the two in the right proportions showed a very pleasing flesh tint. Too, he was satisfied that the sharpness problem had been corrected. He no longer worried about seeing “the whites of a person’s eyes at a reasonable distance.”

Encouragement came from another source as well. Mr. Jerome, the lawyer and investor, had contacted Dr. Kalmus to introduce him to three men who were fascinated with the idea of color. They balked at putting any money into the project but offered their assistance should it ever be needed. The trio included movie magnates Marcus Loew and Nicholas M. Schenck of Loew’s, Inc., and Joseph M. Schenck.

The alliance could not have been more timely. Technicolor was making plans to produce its second film, and its first in the new process. The three new associates immediately made good their word. It was decided to film the picture in Hollywood under the general supervision of Joseph M. Schenck. A photoplay called The Toll of the Sea, a Chinese version of Madam Butterfly, was selected. Thanks to Mr. Schenck, Technicolor was given the use of his studio’s facilities, a director (Chester Franklin), and even the star of the picture (Anna May Wong) – without charge.

One of the greatest difficulties encountered during the making of The Toll of the Sea, according to Dr. Comstock, was to get the actors, including Miss Wong and male lead Kenneth Harlan, to treat their work seriously. As on the first production, the players’ attitude was, “This picture will never reach the screen.”

But reach the screen it did, Nicholas Schenck having arranged for the release through the Metro Film Company. The premiere showing was held at the Rialto Theater in New York during the week of November 26, 1922. (Insufficient laboratory space in Boston, coupled with the great demand for bookings, created a slowdown in quantity prints, delaying the general release in the United States until the following year.)

The Toll of the Sea was shown in thousands of theaters across the country and received high praise from critics everywhere, among them the esteemed artists Maxfield Parrish and Charles Dana Gibson. The general manager of Metro wrote, “I would lay great stress on the fact that The Toll of the Sea has been universally accepted as the perfect motion picture in natural colors.” (Dr. Comstock, recalling the comment years later, said, “Of course, any really new product is a novelty and the public is far less critical at the start than it is sure to be years later.”)

Every phase of the color work in the film was carefully watched by executives of the industry. Adolph Zukor of Famous Players-Lasky Corporation sent a note of congratulations. Producer-director Rex Ingram, who was in the midst of producing The Prisoner of Zenda for Metro Pictures, wired Mr. Loew for permission to scrap all the black-and-white scenes already shot on the picture and begin again in Technicolor. D.W. Griffith expressed an interest in color for a proposed version of Faust. And Douglas Fairbanks telephoned about producing a feature some day.

The “novelty” proved its earning power, grossing more than $250,000, of which Technicolor received approximately $165,000. “Our first adventure in Hollywood seemed successful,” wrote Dr. Kalmus. “Thus far we had made only one feature and several inserts (sequences for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 version of The Ten Commandments, shot by Technicolor’s Ray Rennahan, which the director agreed to use only after seeing them). We were told that with prints as good as we were manufacturing, if offered at eight cents per foot, the industry would rush to color.

Cost was a major drawback, however. Technicolor had no adequate means of giving rush print service and the company was charging twenty cents per foot for release prints. But steps were being taken to help correct the situation. Plant Number Two (buildings were designated by number as constructed) was being built in Boston in a building adjoining the Pilot Plant. The new facility would be able to handle approximately one million feet of prints per month. And in April, 1923, a team of Technicolor’s top technicians (“Doc” Willat, J. A. Ball and G. A. Cave) was sent to the West Coast to establish a small laboratory and photographic unit. A rented building in Hollywood served as headquarters.

Despite Technicolor’s efforts to make its services more available, and marketable at a more realistic rate, other problems began to surface. Theaters around the country began to report on the mounting complaints of their projectionists. Technicolor’s film, actually two films cemented back to back to give the combinations of colors, “cupped as it sped through the projectors – first one way, then the other. The men in the booths tired of the constant adjustments necessary to keep the picture in focus on the screen. Another problem concerned working conditions on the set. Slow-speed film required high-intensity lighting to capture color. Actors not only had to endure the heat and glare of the sun but banks of baking kleig lights, as well.

These objections failed to discourage one major Hollywood producer. In November, 1923, Jesse L. Lasky and Dr. Kalmus agreed on the terms of a contract between Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation and Famous Players-Lasky Corporation for the production of Zane Grey’s Wanderer of the Wasteland – to be shot out-of-doors without artificial lighting. Dr. Kalmus related:

We were told by Mr. Lasky, that they had appropriated not more for this picture than they would have for the same picture in black-and-white. Also, that the time schedule allowed for photographing was identical with what it would have been in black-and-white. The photography was to be done by our cameras in the hands of our technical staff, following a budget and a time schedule laid out for them by Famous Players. Rush prints and the quality of negatives were to be checked by them each day.

During the six weeks of photography our entire staff worked from early morning to late at night, including Sundays and holidays. At one time we were accumulating negatives which we did not dare to develop because of inadequate facilities in our rented laboratory. A few of us in Technicolor carried the terrorizing thought that there was no positive assurance that we would finally obtain commercial negative, and that the entire Famous Players investment might be lost. However, Mr. Lasky was not permitted to share that doubt. His confidence and help during the darkest hours were really marvelous and finally the cut negative emerged satisfactorily. We delivered approximately one hundred and seventy-five prints which were shown in several thousand theaters over the country.

Nevertheless, there were reasons why we could not obtain a volume of business. Every producer in Hollywood knew that the first important production by the Technicolor process under actual motion picture conditions and not controlled by the Technicolor company, had just been completed by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. A considerable group of producers expressed themselves as interested, but were waiting to see the outcome. Another group believed the process to be practical and might have paid our then price of fifteen cents a foot, but considered it impracticable to send the daily work to Boston for rush prints.

Striving to make the services of his company as convenient as possible, Dr. Kalmus approved construction of a small plant at 1006 North Cole Avenue in Hollywood. The new building served primarily for the purpose of developing negatives, making rush prints, and providing a California headquarters for Technicolor.

Wanderer of the Wasteland, starring Jack Holt, Noah Beery, Richard Neill, and Billie Dove, provided an enormous boost for the Technicolor process with the movie-makers and the general public. Aside from the expense, Mr. Lasky expressed genuine pleasure with the new dimension and all that it brought to his production. “I particularly remember the dramatic use we made of color in one scene where the hero, tracking down the wounded villain who has concealed himself in a gold-mine stamp mill, notices a trickle of muddy water flowing from the mill sluiceway slowly turning red – and it thus led to the hideout of his quarry.”

Neither The Toll of the Sea, Wanderer of the Wasteland, or any of the sequences made until the middle of 1924, had given the Technicolor people any experience photographing an interior set on an artificially lighted stage. Everything, to date, had been filmed out-of-doors with the aid of natural lighting. The staff was therefore enthusiastic when the company received a contract to shoot two dream sequences for the Samuel Goldwyn feature Cytherea.

The film was shot in Hollywood for First National Pictures under the direction of George Fitzmaurice. In its review of May 26, 1924, the New York Times said of Cytherea‘s color: “There are some exquisite sequences of color photography in which one enjoys the sight of the varied hues and tints of Cuban costumes and scenery … These are not only beautifully photographed, but they are introduced most realistically.

Technicolor’s first experience with indoor shooting was termed a success. Still, the studios continued to be cautious. The company was currently involved in only one production, M-G-M’s original Ben-Hur, filming in Rome. Six men and four cameras had been sent overseas. But upon release in 1926 the feature contained little of that footage. It was a puzzling situation. Hollywood was churning out hundreds of films, yet few producers were willing to take a chance with color. The movie town was still young. The area was bustling with energetic, bright people filled with fresh ideas. Everyone wanted to be first with a new approach, to build a name and a reputation.

What could be more naturally suited for motion pictures than color? While black-and-white films seemed to satisfy most of the demands of the moviegoers and movie-makers, Dr. Kalmus knew that there was a vast audience that had yet to be exposed to his product – and he leveled part of the blame directly at the studios. “From my own point of view,” he stated, “they have never yet seriously undertaken any color work. By seriously, I mean with adequate preparation by people who are ambitious to do great work and who are at the same time sympathetic.”

The doctor also felt that Technicolor needed a major personality to endorse it, one that would lend stature and marquee value. The movies had established a long list of powerful names: Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Rudolph Valentino, Colleen Moore, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, William S. Hart, Tom Mix, John Gilbert, Pola Negri. And more. Trying to lure any one of them into a color production would not be easy, Dr. Kalmus knew. But the fact remained: Technicolor needed a star.

That hurdle was not as awesome as anticipated. In early 1925, Dr. Kalmus received a phone call in Boston from one of the greatest stars of silent films, Douglas Fairbanks. Mr. Fairbanks indicated that he had found a vehicle, The Black Pirate, and wanted to make good his promise of two years earlier. He had the idea, the doctor reported:

that the screen had never caught and reflected the real spirit of piracy as one finds it in the books of Robert Louis Stevenson, or the paintings of Howard Pyle, and that he could catch it by the use of color. He said, ‘This ingredient has been tried and rejected countless times. It has always met overwhelming objections. Not only has the process of color motion picture photography never been perfected, but there has been a grave doubt whether, even if properly developed, it would be applied without detracting more than it added to motion picture technique. The argument has been that it would tire and distract the eye, take attention from acting and facial expression, blur and confuse the action. In short, it has been felt that it would militate against the simplicity and directness which motion pictures derive from unobtrusive black-and-white. These conventional doubts have been entertained, I think, because no one has taken the trouble to dissipate them. A similar objection was raised, no doubt, when the innovation of scenery was introduced on the English stage – that it would distract attention from the actors. Personally, I could not imagine piracy without color …

The Black Pirate was to cost one million dollars, a staggering sum for the production of a motion picture in 1926. Mr. Fairbanks’ attorneys, expressing natural concern, asked for a guarantee that Technicolor co’uld deliver not only prints but satisfactory ones. A mutually satisfying agreement was reached when the engineering firm of Kalmus, Comstock & Wescott, Inc., assented to deliver prints in the event that Technicolor failed.

As production began, according to Dr. Kalmus, there was “great discussion as to the color key in which this picture would be pitched. We made test prints for Mr. Fairbanks at six different color levels, from a level with slightly more color than black-and-white, to the most garish rendering of which the Technicolor process was then capable.” The star was taking no chances on this production. He spent $125,000 shooting over fifty thousand feet of film, over a four month period, to test color keys, make-up (his co-star, Billie Dove, was selected because her complexion and coloring photographed so well in Wanderer of the Wasteland), fabrics – and even locations.

Douglas Fairbanks originally set to work on the shore of Catalina Island and off the shore on a specially constructed pirate ship (with four of the seven Technicolor cameras then in existence) to capture moods after the manner of impressionistic paintings. But much of that film was rejected because the backgrounds did not photograph to Mr. Fairbanks… satisfaction. Instead, most of the picture was shot on the United Artists lot, including, as Dr. Kalmus expressed it, “some of the most realistic pirate scenes aboard ship … all being done on a tremendous model afloat in an artificial pool which is rocked by mechanically produced waves.” Henry Sharp, Mr. Fairbanks’ cinematographer, worked closely with Technicolor’s own cameraman, George Cave.

During the production, Dr. Kalmus kept in constant touch with his eastern office. “No description which I have had and passed on of The Black Pirate pictures,” he wrote to Dr. Troland, “has been adequate to express how really remarkable they are. Everybody concerned is just raving about them and my own enthusiasm is beyond anything I can express. Doug and his whole organization think this picture will be epoch making. ”

With the completion of The Black Pirate, all of the key elements Dr. Kalmus felt necessary for a truly exceptional box office attraction had come together. Now, there was nothing left to do but wait for the release of the film.”

(Basten, Fred E. (1980): Glorious Technicolor. The Movies’ Magic Rainbow. South Brunswick: Barnes, on pp. 29–36.)

The Phantom of the Opera (USA 1925, Rupert Julian)

“2. Die dramaturgischen Funktionen

2.1 Die ortsbezogene Farbgebung (indexikalisch)

Eine der elementarsten Aufgaben der Viragierung ist die Indikation der Handlungsorte. Helmut Regel versteht diese Art der Färbung in seinem Aufsatz über “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari in Farbe” als “dramaturgische Verständnishüfe”; er schreibt:

Das Springen der Handlung zwischen verschiedenen Schauplätzen, zum Beispiel zwischen einem Arbeitszimmer des Hausherrn in Sepia und einem Salon des Hausfreundes in Gelborange, war wegen der unterschiedlichen Viragierung leichter nachvollziehbar (Regel 1985, 8).

Als Ortsindikator diente die Farbe zur Markierung bestimmter Schauplätze in Sequenzen mit häufigem Wechsel zwischen gleichbleibenden Szenerien. Der primäre Zweck war also die Kontrastierung der Schauplätze durch Farbe; zugleich wurde die jeweilige Örtlichkeit mit der einmal definierten Ortsfarbe wiedererkennbar gemacht.

Unbedingte Voraussetzung für diese Art dramaturgischer Farbgebung war jedoch, daß sie beibehalten werden mußte; zumindest solange, wie es im Kontext der Sequenz wichtig war, daß der Wiedererkennungseffekt beim Wechsel auf einen bereits eingeführten Schauplatz garantiert blieb.

In The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian & Edward Sedgewick, USA 1925) beispielsweise dient Violett als Standardfarbe für die Innenräume des Opernhauses (für die Bühne und die Kulissen, den Zuschauersaal und das Foyer) und wird damit zur meist verwendeten Farbe der ersten Filmhälfte. In ortsbezogenen Kontrast gesetzt ist sie hier mit Gelb, in welches die Szenen im Büro der Direktion der Oper, in und vor der Garderobe der Sängerin Christine Daaé sowie zwei kurze Einschöbe, die im Haus ihres Geliebten Raoul bzw. im Büro des Polizeipräfekten spielen, getaucht sind.

Weiterhin manifestiert sich ein ortsbezogener Kontrast zu Blau, der Standardfarbe für “Nacht”, mit der in diesem Film – in dem es so gut wie keine Szenen gibt, die bei Tag spielen – das “Außen” versinnbildlicht und in Gegensatz zum “Innen” (Violett, Gelb) im Opernhaus oder – in der zweiten Filmhälfte – (Grün) in den Katakomben gesetzt wird.

Am Beginn der zweiten Hälfte, wo zum erstenmal seit den Credits wieder Blau erscheint, ist dies eindeutig zu sehen:

BLAU: Auf dem Dach der Oper, Nacht.

(Raoul und Christine, die sich in Sicherheit gebracht zu haben glauben, besprechen Fluchtpläne, werden aber vom Phantom belauscht.)

VIOLETT: Foyer, Gänge in der Oper.

(Raoul und Christine tauchen in der tanzenden Menge unter, nachdem ihnen der Polizist Ledoux einen ungefährlichen Weg gezeigt hat. Das Phantom rauscht als Roter Tod kostümiert einen Gang entlang und läßt einen der Anwesenden erschrocken in Ohnmacht sinken.)

Die offensichtliche farbige Ortsbestimmung korrespondiert in beiden Szenen mit einer eröffnenden Totalen, einerseits auf das Dach der Oper, von dem aus man den Blick über Paris erahnen kann, andererseits auf das große Foyer, in dem sich zahllose Tanzende bewegen; ein alter Kunstgriff der Montage, um dem Zuschauer eine Orientierung innerhalb bzw. überhaupt eine Identifizierung des Schauplatzes zu ermöglichen. In diesem Fall also geht die gängige Assoziation (und nichtsdestotrotz weiterhin immanente Bedeutung) der Farbe Blau als “Nacht” über in die Bedeutung “Außen”. Tatsächlich gibt es in The Phantom of the Opera nur eine Tageslichtszene im Freien; nämlich als am Tag nach der “Kronleuchterkatastrophe” auf der Straße die Zeitung verkauft wird, die darüber berichtet. Interessanterweise ist diese kurze Szene in Gelb gehalten, das bisher nur “neutralen” Innenräumen vorbehalten war. Inwieweit in diesem Zusammenhang der Farbe Blau der zeitliche Gegensatz in Form des “Tag – Nacht” zugunsten des räumlichen Verhältnisses von “Innen – Außen” zurückgetreten ist, verdeutlicht noch einmal, wie wichtig zuweilen die Ortsbestimmung ist, daß sie gegenüber der Zeitebenenbestimmung beispielsweise (s. Punkt 2,2) Vorrang hat.

[…]

2.3 Die personenbezogene Farbgebung (indexikalisch)

Die letzte noch verbleibende Möglichkeit der Farbgebung mit indexikalischer Struktur, die Zuordnung einer bestimmten Farbe zu einer bestimmten Filmfigur im Sinne eines Leitmotivs, ist ein relativ selten nachzuweisender Fall. Als Musterbeispiel hierfür kann jedoch wiederum The Phantom of the Opera gelten, in welchem sich diese Vorgehensweise sehr auffällig manifestiert.

In der ersten Hälfte des Films, die sich – wie bereits erwähnt – im Hinblick auf die Strategien des Farbeinsatzes völlig von der zweiten Hälfte unterscheidet, ist Grün die Leitfarbe des Phantoms. (In der zweiten wird Grün zur ortsbezogenen Farbe der Katakomben, dann auch eingesetzt, wenn das Phantom selbst nicht im Bild erscheint; ebenso sind dann – am Ende des Films – die Nachtszenen auf der Straße trotz der Anwesenheit des Phantoms in Blau.)

Während der ersten beiden Akte des Films besteht die Viragierung fast auschließlich aus Violett und Gelb, einzige Ausnahme ist das Blau der Credits und der allerersten Szene. Nach beinahe zwanzig Minuten Film kommt es zum ersten Auftritt des Phantoms und zur erstmaligen Verwendung der Farbe Grün:

Als erstes Grün erscheint ein erläuternder Zwischentitel:

“From hidden places beyond the walls a melodious voice, like the voice of an angel, spoke to her.”

Die nachfolgende Einstellung zeigt den Schemen des Phantoms als Schatten an einer Wand, ebenfalls in Grün.

Im nachfolgenden Dialog sind die Zwischentitel unterschiedlich viragiert, um dem Zuschauer die Zuordnung der entsprechenden Dialogpassage zur jeweils sprechenden Figur zu erleichtern. Die Dialogsätze des Phantoms in Grün (was das Phantom – verborgen hinter einer Wand – zu Christine sagt) stehen in Kontrast zur Antwort Christines (in Gelb), die in ihrer Garderobe auf die Stimme aus der Wand lauscht.

Auffällig hierbei ist, daß die klassische Zeichenstruktur der Dialogzuweisung im Stummfilm trotz der farblichen Unterschiedlichkeit der Zwischentitel dennoch beibehalten ist; folglich ist die Szene nicht bereits auf eine beabsichtigte farbliche Unterscheidung hin montiert worden.

Die Dialogzuweisung im Stummfilm funktionierte allgemein nach drei Kriterien:

1. Der Zwischentitel wurde durch Anführungszeichen (“”) als Dialog ausgewiesen – im Gegensatz zu erläuternden Inserts.

2. Der Dialog-Zwischentitel wurde zwischen zwei gleiche Einstellungen der den Mund bewegenden Figur montiert.

3. Zumindest der erste Zwischentitel ist adressiert. (“‘Christine,…(Text)’”). Hierdurch ist der Adressat des Dialogsatzes identifiziert und dem Zuschauer als nicht identisch mit dem Sprecher ausgewiesen.

Dem denkbaren Einwand, es könne sich hier ebensogut um eine ortsbezogene Farbgebung handeln, da sich die beiden Figuren Christine und Phantom an verschiedenen Orten aufhalten (eben diesseits und jenseits der Wand), läßt sich entgegenhalten, daß die Systematik von Grün als Leitfarbe des Phantoms in der ersten Filmhälfte konsequent durchgehalten ist: In der Szene beispielsweise, als das Phantom den großen Kronleuchter im Zuschauersaal absägt, wird die ortsbezogene Farbgebung zugunsten der personenbezogenen aufgegeben. Schauplätze, die nach der ortsbezogen definierten Farbe Violett sein müßten (bei der Flucht des Phantoms über die Lichtböden etwa) sind mit einem Male ebenfalls Grün.

Literaturverzeichnis

Regel, Helmut (1985) Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari in Farbe – Zur Rekonstruktion durch das Bundesarchiv. In: Fischer, Robert (Hrsg.): Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari. Stuttgart: Fischer, Kress, Wiedleroither, 8–13. (FOCUS-Filmtexte).”

(Traber, Bodo (1995): Dramaturgische Funktionen monochromer Farbgebung im Stummfilm. In: Karl-Dietmar Möller-Nass Möller-Nass, Hasko Schneider and Hans J. Wulff (eds.): 1. Film- und Fernsehwissenschaftliches Kolloquium. Münster: MAkS, pp. 30–36, on pp. 31–33.) (in German)

The Phantom of the Opera (USA 1925, Rupert Julian)

“Early Technicolor was similarly imbricated with a hybrid colour aesthetic that is reminiscent of prior intermedial relations. Its persistence was influenced by the race for perfection in photographic colour systems that sought to complement or even displace established applied conventions. The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian,
Universal, 1925/1929–30 sound reissue), for example, combined various colour looks and techniques, including tinting throughout most of the film, toning, Handschiegl, and Technicolor’s first subtractive two-colour process, Technicolor No. 2, used for the ‘Bal Masqué de l’Opera’ sequence and other scenes that are now lost. The ‘Bal Masqué’ sequence was originally planned in Prizma Color, but Technicolor was able to win over Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, for the final contract (Riley 1999, 56). Several versions of the film have been preserved, including one with sound, and the most complete version is Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s 1996 reconstruction through Photoplay Productions. Brownlow and Gill drew primarily from a George Eastman House preserved, safety copy of a 1930 international release print; however, for the Technicolor sequences, they used a separate nitrate copy discovered by David Shepard of the film from the 1929–30 re-release, and this material – though shot in Technicolor No. 2 – was reprinted in 1929 through Technicolor’s imbibition, dye transfer process (Technicolor No. 3).³

The surviving Technicolor footage is stylistically effective in the scene, and occurs approximately 49 minutes into the film and is broken into two sequences, the first of which lasts for four minutes and the second for one minute, divided by a four-and-a-half minute sequence on top of the opera house. (The second Technicolor sequence in fact does not survive on film, and Brownlow and Gill colourized the footage.) Especially as the Technicolor scenes are preceded entirely by tinted scenes, a more intricate colour look is immediately signalled at the beginning of the scene; first through the Technicolor title card announcing the Bal Masqué in twocolour flourishes of reds and greens, and then by the ensuing shots of the grand staircase of the theatre’s foyer. Beginning with a dramatic extreme long shot that tilts down to showcase the grandeur of the staircase, the scene is populated with rushing, masked figures dressed in red-, black-, and green-accented costumes. Closer shots allow fuller appreciation of the costumes as the crowd – caught in a frenzy of excitement as the disguised try to identify each other – appears to be waiting for something momentous to happen. The title: ‘Into the midst of the revelry, strode a spectral figure, robed in red’ cues the audience for what is to come. The people make way as a figure – the Phantom, unknown to the revellers – descends the stairs and a medium cut-in permits full sight of his red costume, black- and red-plumed hat and skeletal masked face. To complete this terrifying appearance, the contrasting green cane held by the Phantom is topped by a small skull being pecked by a bird’s beak. The contrast between the grey death’s-head visage and bright red costume is striking, revealing Technicolor in a richly layered image that intermedially connotes opera, theatre, melodrama, and horror all at once.

The Photoplay reconstruction also illustrates tinting effects for particularly atmospheric scenes such as the Phantom’s shadow in purple (keyed throughout the film to backstage and underground scenes) as he manipulates the chandelier high above the stage as it shakes, falls, and sabotages the performance 25 minutes into the film. Later, this version of the film displays shots of the Phantom in his red cloak on the roof of the opera house that were achieved originally by the Handschiegl colour process, though Brownlow and Gill have again reconstructed this footage through colourization. These shots are in the middle of the Technicolor sequences, and this time the Phantom’s deep red cloak is foregrounded against a blue-toned background for maximum impact, drawing attention to the depth of colour achievable with the particular process. Max Handschiegl was a craftsman from St. Louis who specialized in lithography and photoengraving, and he collaborated with Cecil B. DeMille, Alvin Wyckoff, and Loren Taylor to develop the colouring process (Yumibe 2012, 133–135). Handschiegl was used in a number of motion pictures between 1916 and 1927, by itself or often intermixed with Technicolor and other colouring processes. The process was complex and labour intensive, functioning like the chromolithographic process. Dye-transfer printing matrices were prepared for each colour to be applied in a sequence. The matrices were developed from duplicate negatives, and each section to be coloured was chemically treated to absorb dye. Once prepared, the matrix would then be pressed in registered alignment against the final, positive print of the film to transfer the dye to the print. (Technicolor would later develop a similar method of dye transfer known as imbibition printing for its Nos. 3 and 4 processes.) Other high-profile films that used Handschiegl included Joan, the Woman (the first film showcasing the process, in 1916), Greed (shots of golden props, such as a tooth and coins, 1924), Volcano (1926), The Merry Widow (1925), The Big Parade (1925), and The Lights of Broadway (1925).

The prevalence of colour hybridity meant that The Phantom of the Opera‘s layered, almost painterly, look invited audiences to appreciate its textures and distinguish new developments in colour technology. Introducing Technicolor and Handschiegl to punctuate particularly dramatic moments had a double impact, both as announcing key narrative moments and as impressive colour spectacles with broad associations. The concentration of red invited the audience to relish chromatic density and, particularly with Handschiegl, a deeply textured saturation. The film inspired the US Textile Color Card Association to develop ‘Phantom Red’, a new shade that adorned numerous products including shoes, lipstick, hags, hats, slippers and gowns. The trade press reported on how ‘Phantom Red Becomes the Rage’ as commercial tie-ins accompanied the film’s exhibition in the USA and beyond (Universal Weekly 1925). In this way, the film image was far from being closed off from other medial influences. As the Handschiegl shots attracted the eye to experience textures and a tactile sense of colour, at the same time the effect was redolent of other media, drawing the viewer both inwards and outwards at the same time as colour hybridity invited comparison with paintings, with clothing, with stage sets and opera.

Just as The Phantom of the Opera‘s most dynamic colour scenes occur in lushly decorated interior and exterior scenes, a number of other films from the 1920s continue this trend, connecting colour cinema intermedially to contemporary developments in architecture, interior design, and modernism.

[…]

Notes

³ We are grateful to James Layton of George Eastman House for further details on the colour sequences in the film. Also see Tsiantis 2004.”

(Street, Sarah; Yumibe, Joshua (2013): The Temporalities of Intermediality. Colour in Cinema and the Arts of the 1920s. In: Early Popular Visual Culture, 11,2, May, pp. 140–157, on pp. 149–151.)

The Black Pirate (USA 1926, Albert Parker)

“For the look of The Black Pirate, Fairbanks was inspired by the work of the celebrated contemporary illustrators Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth, whose images had romanticized piracy in The Book of Pirates (1921) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1911 edition). Fairbanks also studied the paintings of the Dutch Masters at local galleries, and chose to adopt their muted brown tones and aged look for his film. Four months of thorough testing began in May 1925, to prepare the production staff for the new challenges of color photography and to determine the visual and design choices necessary to enliven the story.

Herbert Kalmus traveled to Los Angeles by train for a two-week visit in July 1925 to strengthen Technicolor’s new relationship. He signed the final contract with Douglas Fairbanks’s brother and technical director, Robert, on July 9, and met with Doug, Robert, and production manager Ted Reed to initiate some early printing tests.⁴⁶ “There was much discussion on the color key for this picture,” remembered Kalmus. “We made test prints for Doug at six different color levels, from a very muted palate [sic] to the most garish rendering Technicolor was capable of. He chose one that he felt would capture moods in the manner of impressionistic paintings.”⁴⁷ Kalmus and his staff assisted Technicolor’s biggest client to date in every way they could. Fairbanks was willing to spend money to get the best results, and Technicolor accommodated his demands.

According to Herbert Kalmus, $125,000 was spent on preparation. Fairbanks’s team of researchers, advisors, and artists had to learn the intricacies of color design and photography from scratch. Every element of the production was tested in front of the Technicolor camera. “Sets were built in all the colors of the rainbow, and test shots were taken,” reported Edwin Schallert. “The walls of the studios were painted in patches of blue, green, pink, lavender, orange, mauve, and every other tint that might be thought of. Special attention was also given to the texture of the buildings and costumes.” Wanting to fully control the limited palette of the two-color process, it was decided to contain much of the photography within the studio, eliminating location filming in favor of exterior sets at the Pickford-Fairbanks lot. Beaches, galleons, and oceans would all be re-created in Hollywood to minimize the appearance of yellows, blues, and any other undesired colors. It was a case of “overcoming artificiality with artifice.”⁴⁸

Learning this the hard way, the film’s location managers had scouted Catalina Island to find scenery matching Carl Oscar Borg’s designs. As the film’s art director, the Swedish landscape painter had sketched out a simple sand-spit scene in muted browns and golds. An early photographic test shot at a real beach proved such controlled design was not possible. “The yellows were too yellow and the greens too violent,” reported the Thumb Tack. “All the sets of Borg and his staff of artists thereafter had to be duplicated in the studio where [associate artists] Henry Oliver could antique the properties and Edward Langley tone down the sky. Borg painted what he would, secure in the knowledge that it did not matter whether nature had ever thought of the combination before him.”⁴⁹ The cost of the sets alone for the film amounted to more than $ 200,000.⁵⁰

In the end most of the film was shot on constructed sets, where colors and fighting could be controlled precisely. Two full-size ships, 100 feet and 212 feet in length, were built at the Pickford-Fairbanks studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. Backdrops were used to control the exact color rendition of the sky, and a large water tank was installed for scenes requiring action on the sea. The final siege of the pirate ship by the Black Pirate and his men was the only sequence shot on location, off the secluded coast of Catalina Island, and was recorded by a battery of cameras. The scale of the scenes, as Fairbanks’s 75-foot-long galley, propelled by a hundred oarsmen, approached the vast pirate ship, could not be achieved at the studio.

Borg designed the entire film, from the sets and costumes down to the smallest details. He created a series of watercolor sketches for each setting, limiting his palette of colors to those capable of being reproduced by the Technicolor process. The film’s director, Albert Parker, described The Black Pirate‘s color scheme as dominated by “greens of all the softer shades, and brown running the whole gamut from the lightest tint of old ivory to the deepest tone of mahogany.”⁵¹ According to Fairbanks, “Brown is the most restful color to the eye and green is next.”⁵² He didn’t want any bright flourishes to cause distraction from the storytelling: “We were afraid the public might at first be more intrigued by the colors than by the story itself, so we decided to practice restraint.”⁵³ Red was used only a few times, for emphasis: to depict the burning of ships, and to convey to the audience the horror connected with blood and violence.

Despite exhaustive testing, many problems still had to be resolved during filming. The actors’ makeup and costumes proved particularly troublesome. The difference in color temperature between natural and artificial fight meant alternatives had to be developed for both conditions. It was discovered that “the actors must alter their facial color schemes according to whether the picture was to be made indoors or out,” reported the Thumb Tack. Douglas Fairbanks’s facial hair had to be reddened by makeup because it was photographing too green, whereas the film’s villain, Sam De Grasse, required no makeup at all. The color rushes service overseen by Arthur Ball proved invaluable in identifying these concerns. As for clothing, the Costume Department quickly found that the rules it followed for black & white photography did not apply to color. Because of the effects of different lighting, clothing appeared one shade by daylight, and another shade under artificial illumination. Each actor therefore had to have two sets of costumes—one optimized for outdoors and one for the studio.⁵⁴

Kalmus worked closely with Fairbanks throughout the shooting of The Black Pirate. He and Natalie journeyed to Los Angeles by train on November 12 and stayed for almost two months, until the production was largely complete.

[…]

For the first time, an all-color feature had creatively incorporated color in a solid story, with top production values, and it starred one of the most popular film stars in the world. The color was not decorative or a stunt, but had been planned as vital to the storytelling from the earliest pre-production stages. Douglas Fairbanks had clout in Hollywood, and with his pirate film as a showcase for Technicolor, it was hoped others would soon follow suit. With adequate testing and support, Fairbanks proved that artistic results of the highest merit could be achieved, and that color should not be a cause for anxiety.

NOTES

⁴⁶ H. Kalmus, memoranda books, July 9,1925.

⁴⁷ H. Kalmus, Mr. Technicolor, 54.

⁴⁸ Schallert, “Yo, Ho, and a Bottle of Rum!”

⁴⁹ The Thumb Tack, February 1926,38 and 48, Carl Oscar Borg Scrapbooks, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

⁵⁰ “Production Cost Picture No. 23 w/e 1/1/1927,” Douglas Fairbanks Papers.

⁵¹ Dunham Thorp, “How Fairbanks Took the Color Out of Color,” Motion Picture Classic, May 1926,89.

⁵² Grace Kingsley, “Doug Cavorts Over Seven Seas in Dashing, Desperate Buccaneer Role,” Los Angeles Times, November 8,1925,27.

⁵³ R. J. B. Denby, “Doug Shoots Tomorrow’s Perfect Film,” Liberty, May 15,1926. ⁵⁴ The Thumb Tack, February 1926,38.

⁵⁵ H. Kalmus, memoranda books, November–December 1925.

⁵⁶ H. Kalmus, memo to Leonard Troland, March 10,1926, Technicolor Corporate Archive.

⁵⁷ C. S. Sewell, “The Black Pirate,” Moving Picture World, March 20,1926,181.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on pp. 129–133.)

The Black Pirate (USA 1926, Albert Parker)

“The first things to be determined during the testing phase were the general approach to the color and whether locations would be used for the exteriors. Herbert Kalmus recalled: “There was great discussion as to the color key. . . We made test prints for Mr. Fairbanks at six different color levels, from a level of slightly more color than black & white, to the most garish rendering of which the Technicolor process was then capable. Mr. Fairbanks set to work on the shore of Catalina Island and off that shore.” After viewing the results of the location tests, it was determined that complete control could only be accomplished by shooting almost all of the exteriors on the back lot of the Pickford-Fairbanks studio (now Warner Hollywood Studios) at Formosa and Santa Monica Boulevards.

In determining the look of the film, the paintings of Rembrandt in particular were analyzed. To Henry Sharp, “Rembrandes great strength was his use of one positive light scale. One central light perspective was always used.” Fairbanks decided, after all of the testing, studying, and observing, to subdue the colors in The Black Pirate – to “take the color out of color.” Albert Parker said at the time that it was Fairbanks’ idea “to make a pirate picture that would seem to the spectators as something that had been down in the cellars for 300 years, and looked as if it had been cleaned and varnished for theater showing.” With the compilation of color charts, the decision was made to paint and/or dye every piece of setting, prop, fabric, etc., in order to properly accomplish the required muting and harmonizing of each scene’s color values.

[…]

Albert Parker was quoted at the time as saying, “The story was produced with color in mind, which is to say that we realized that the color must never dominate the narrative. . . It has been made a story of situations rather than plot, the main narrative being a bare thread.” The story was officially credited to “Elton Thomas,” Fairbanks’ middle names.

[…]

“This is being shot in Technicolor, but not in vivid tones. I saw several reels of the first days shooting and afterwards learned from Doug that about $100,000 and about four months of time were spent in synchronizing tone colors, so that the Technicolor effects would look natural. The tones are down to the wood colors of a ship – dull browns with, here and there, a trifle of green. But very easy on the eyes. You should be able to watch twenty reels of this without tiring the eyes.

The Pickford-Fairbanks back lot resembled a shipyard, with various portions of 17th-Century galleons and argosies carefully reproduced in considerable detail under the supervision of Carl Oscar Borg and his associates Edward M. Langley and Jack Holden. Marine technician P.H.L. Wilson saw to it that the hulls were fashioned with extreme care for accuracy of detail, and made sure that equal attention was paid to the rigging and to the bending of the sails.

For shots requiring the ocean to be seen, a back lot tank area was flooded. Even the desert island and shore were constructed and photographed outside at the studio (see photo). Out of camera range, airplane propellers created waves to aid the illusion.

Two-color Technicolor obviously had limitations in the color spectrum. Blue and yellow were nonnistent, and eliminating yellow caused blue skies to register as turquoise. The studio attempted to solve this problem by avoiding shooting the sky, or by saving sky shots for a hazy or overcast day. “Toward the end there is a scene where it was necessary that the sky be blue,” Albert Parker said. “When you see it, I think you will agree that it is far less pleasing than the others.”

Fortunately, the ocean comes in various shades, and in the film it is rendered in blue-green, the color easily controlled in the tank shots at the studio. Shots of the climactic rescue sequence, with the long galley heading toward the pirate ship and its prisoner (Billie Dove), had to be photographed on the real ocean. The waters off Catalina were chosen, again with hazy skies (except for one or two turquoise backgrounds). All four of the allotted Technicolor cameras, in addition to a fifth camera, were used to cover the action from a barge.

The only other scenes made on the real ocean were long shots involving the large miniature ships built to specifications for the film. The designers operated on the sound principle that big, detailed miniatures are superior to smaller Ones, especially in relation to water (a sure giveaway). The ships’ scale can be ascertained by looking at the men on the ship in the accompanying photo.

The underwater sequence, in which the rescuing oarsmen swim in formation toward the pirate ship after deliberately submerging their galley, was photographed at the studio without water against a blue-green background cyc, with the men suspended in midair from a crane by piano wires. The mock swimmers went through the motions of the breast stroke, and the crane carried them from camera left to right, across the frame. A small, thin tank of water in the foreground rigged with visible air bubbles might have been used to complete the illusion, or the bubbles might possibly have been double exposed. The Crimson Pirate (1952) featured a new version of this sequence, but this time it was actually photographed underwater.”

(Behlmer, Rudy (1992): High Style on the High Seas. In: American Cinematographer, 73,4, pp. 34–40, on pp. 36–40.)

“The First Successful Color Movie

How an Inventor, by Ingeniously Combining Blue-Green and Red-Orange on Double Photograph, Tricks Our Eyes into Seeing Delicate Shades of All Colors, Vividly Representing Life

By Thomas Elway

WHEN I was told, a few week ago, that another new process for taking motion pictures in color had been “perfected,” I confess I smiled skeptically to myself.

I had seen many colored movies before. They had left me either unimpressed or thoroughly displeased.

To be sure, I knew that this new method had been invented by a scientist of distinction – Dr. Daniel Frost Comstock, of Boston – and that 10 years of patient research and experiment had gone into its development. I was told that more than $1,000,000 had been spent upon these experiments; that the enterprise had the financial backing of no less a figure than William Travers Jerome, former District Attorney of New York, and that artists and motion picture experts who had seen the film hailed it as a phenomenal improvement, charming in its colorful realism, lessening eyestrain, and destined to revolutionize motion picture work.

A Colorful Dream Comes True

And, finally, I had fully shared the great dream of motion picture enthusiasts during the past decade – the dream that the movies some day would be shown to us in all the beauty of natural color, enhancing enormously the power of their appeal.

Nevertheless, I did not realize the art had advanced far enough to make this dream a reality. But when I witnessed the private exhibition in New York of this new colored film feature – a play called The Toll of the Sea starring the young Chinese girl, Anna May Wong, whose fame has begun to spread eastward from California – I was frankly surprised by the unexpectedly high quality of the color work. Here was a film in which colorful costumes and feminine beauty moved convincingly across the screen, with slight trace of the garishness, flicker, and distracting color fringes that have hurt so many other color films.

Not that this color work is perfect. Some of the reproductions of blues and greens are bad. The yellows are even less satisfying. But this motion picture does constitute, to my mind, the best color work done so far in the films, and the process used, the new Technicolor process, promises still better things to come. For the first time I have begun to expect something really big from color photography on the screen, something that will affect the fundamentals of motion picture art. It isn’t only that we may expect enhanced charm of settings, and still greater beauty of feature in our heroines; or that we shall see them blush real blushes, as we now see them weep real fears; that expressions will be more lifelike, costumes more fascinating, natural scenery more magnificent.

[…]

Two-Color Dyes

In this particular feature, as in most other color movie processes, the two colors selected are a reddish orange and a bluish green. These colors are represented by two dyes, carefully chosen from more than 200 dyes that were tried. As I shall explain later, the original photograph consists of two separate images. One image, printed on one side of the film used in projection, is dyed blue-green; the other, printed on the reverse of the film, is dyed red-orange. Where the images overlap, these dyes blend. In projection onto a screen the light is colored by the dyed images, the colors blend likewise, we see both images together, and the eye does the rest.

What we really see are various shades and mixtures of blue-green and red-orange. What we think we see are all the colors of the spectrum. It all depends upon the capacity of the eye for being wrong about colors. It is just like the rabbit that you think you see coming out of the conjurer’s hat.

This is what the two-color photograph is, but how is it taken? In exactly the same way. You take two photographs at the same time, one through a screen that lets pass only the blue-green color, absorbing all others; the second through a screen that absorbs all but the red-orange. Suppose you are photographing a red and blue dress. The red parts “take” only on the photograph made through the red-orange screen. They will not show on the other photograph. The blue parts, on the other hand, take only through the blue-green screen. Now we dye one photograph red-orange and the other one blue-green. The first represents the red parts of the dress, the second the blue parts. We put them together, one on top of the other (of course both are transparent), and we have a color photograph of the dress.

All this is simple enough, but when we come to apply it to motion pictures, there are difficulties. The greatest is to discover some way of taking two photographs at the same instant, through the same lens.

This problem Doctor Comstock solved in a very ingenious way. Just back of the lens of the camera he placed a silver mirror with holes in it. Half of its surface is polished silver, the other half is holes. It stands at an angle of 45 degrees to the beam of light. What happens to the light can be seen immediately from the diagram on page 59. One half of the light is reflected at a right angle. The other half goes straight on. The light beam from the lens is thus split into two beams, exactly alike. One of these beams is led through the blue-green color screen, to make the blue-green image at one point on the film. The other is led through the red-orange screen and makes the red-orange at the same instant on a lower portion of the film. Then the film moves and two new images are made again, one above the other.

The film consists, then, when removed from the camera and developed, of a succession of double pictures (one below the other) all still in black and white. One picture of each pair corresponds to a blue-green image, the other to a red-orange image. This film, of course, is a negative.

The next step is to make the positive print from this negative. On this print the pair of images taken at the same instant and that are separate on the negative must be brought together and superposed. The blue-green one of a pair is printed on the front of the positive film, the red-orange one is printed on the back of the same film. They must now be dyed.

In this process the positive film is run through one dye bath that contains in solution the blue-green dye and the red-orange dye. The dyes are taken up selectively by the two images on the film; the blue-green dye “takes” only on the blue-green image; similarly, the red-orange dye colors only that image. The result of this selective dyeing is a colored positive print ready for projection. Aside from the technical difficulties involved in the perfection of color movies, there remain other still more interesting problems – problems of directing, of acting, of the psychology of audiences. At present the movie actress’s make-up, for instance, is a horrible looking mess of yellow cheeks and blue chin and forehead; blues for what is to be white, yellow for healthy flesh. For color movies all this must change.

An effective make up, I believe, may prove to be greenish or violet, with reds inclining to orange, instead of the yellows and blues now used. Certainly, when the color movie make-up technique is so perfected as to simulate a beautiful star’s natural color of complexion, hair and eyes, we shall have more fascinating photo plays than ever.”

(Elway, Thomas (1923): The First Successful Color Movie. In: Popular Science Monthly, Feb., pp. 59–61, 114.)

“À peine plus facile est l’évaluation du Technicolor n° 2, le premier à synthèse soustractive. Un seul négatif était impressionné par un rayon lumineux séparé par un prisme, et passant à travers un filtre rouge et un filtre vert sur des photogrammes entraînés de façon couplée par le mécanisme à intermittence ; suivant l’intuition traduite par Arturo Hernandez-Mejia dans son Colorgraph – breveté en 1916, mais dont le principe avait été imaginé cinq ans plus tôt – chaque image était renversée par rapport à la précédente (le bord inférieur des deux images étant en contact). Au moment du tirage, tous les photogrammes “rouges” étaient imprimés sur une pellicule, les “verts”, sur une autre. Les deux positifs étaient alors collés dos à dos, et colorés respectivement d’une teinture rouge et d’une teinture verte

The Toll of the Sea, dirigé par Chester M. Franklin pour la Métro, fut officiellement présenté à New York le 26 novembre 1922. Le jugement de la critique de l’époque sur la couleur apparaît raisonnable, même après coup ; la copie restaurée par la UCLA Film and Télévision Archive présente une image bien définie et stable, avec des tons rouges et orangés indubitablement éclatants, mais aussi avec une certaine tendance au marron dans toutes les scènes comportant des extérieurs de végétation, et un empâtement des détails plus complexes et des lointains. C’était cependant un équilibre supérieur à tous ceux obtenus avec les systèmes soustractifs à deux couleurs, et l’avantage de pouvoir projeter le film sans appareillage spécial en fit le succès si immédiat⁷⁰ que Technicolor se trouva dans l’incapacité de répondre à toutes les demandes des exploitants. Avec ce système furent réalisés vingt-huit longs-métrages et au moins six courts-métrages. Au moins un tiers de ces titres est aujourd’hui conservé, mais la plupart ne sont disponibles que dans des copies noir-et-blanc ; dans les autres, tirées avec des systèmes de couleur approximatifs, la couleur est si détériorée que – au moins jusqu’à ce qu’on ait trouvé le moyen de les restaurer convenablement – il est impossible d’en rien dire, sinon que les séquences en couleurs avaient une fonction plus décorative que dramatique, et étaient situées dans des parties du film où l’on pensait que le caractère grandiose de la scénographie pouvait être mieux mis en valeur par le “luxe” de la couleur ; ainsi, dans les scènes du bal masqué de Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925) et du défilé de mode d’Irene (Alfred E. Green, 1926).

La détérioration que l’on vient de signaler n’est pas un phénomène récent. Elle avait déjà été notée par les producteurs et les exploitants quelques mois après la sortie des films ; ses causes étaient, à ce moment, d’ordre principalement mécanique. En premier lieu, comme dans tous les films à double émulsion réalisés jusqu’à ce moment, la pellicule Technicolor n° 2 se rayait assez facilement, et il était nécessaire de la remplacer après un nombre limité de projections. En second lieu, le rétrécissement des deux pellicules collées l’une à l’autre provoquait rapidement une incurvation du support, créant de graves problèmes de mise au point. Ces deux inconvénients ne furent palliés qu’en 1928, avec la présentation de The Viking (R. William Neill), tiré en Technicolor n° 3.

⁷⁰ Frank J. Taylor, “Mr. Technicolor”, The Saturday Evening Post, 22 octobre 1949, p. 131.”

(Cherchi Usai, Paolo (1995): Le nitrate mécanique. L’imagination de la couleur comme science exacte (1830-1928). In: Jacques Aumont (ed.): La couleur en cinéma. Milan-Paris: Mazzotta/La Cinémathèque française, pp. 95–109, on pp. 103–104 and on p. 109.) (in French)

The Ten Commandments (USA 1923, Cecil B. DeMille)

“Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments (’23) proved to be a boon to Technicolor just when it needed one. In “American Photography” for Jan. ’23 DeMille had written that color movies diverted interest from narrative and action, offended the color-sensitivities of many, and cost too much. So, as DeMille later recounted in his autobiography, “the Technicolor Company approached me with a proposition both interesting and fair. For the big scenes of the Biblical prologue, would I let them set up a camera alongside mine, to shoot the scenes in color? If I liked the result, I could buy it. If I did not like it, the experiment would cost us nothing and they would give me the film to burn. I agreed.”

The scenes in Technicolor depicting the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt and their pursuit by the Egyptians were shot by Technicolor’s Ray Rennahan, working independently of the DeMille organization, and were highly successful.*

*The parting of the Red Sea, involving special effects and the compositing of photographic material, was tinted and toned to tie in with the Technicolor footage which it immediately preceded.”

The Ten Commandments (USA 1923, Cecil B. DeMille)

“Laboratory services for Technicolor were headed by Carl A. “Doc” Willat, older brother of Irvin Willat. With an entree to the studio, Technicolor offered to shoot for free. If DeMille liked the footage, he could use it in the finished film. If he didn’t, Technicolor agreed to destroy the color material. The proposal appealed to DeMille. He had a long-standing interest in color on the screen and his films were noted for their use of elaborate tinting and toning. He also employed the Handschiegl stencil-color process on all of his silent films after 1917.

Rennahan’s Technicolor footage met with the director’s approval and was used in the picture. However, the color coverage of the Exodus did not duplicate every set-up of the black & white cameras, so DeMille was forced to integrate the color scenes with tinted and toned monochrome footage. He also employed the Handschiegl process to augment the natural color footage.

The version of The Ten Commandments currently released by Paramount Home Video does not preserve
the original tints and tones of the rest of film, but it does offer an opportunity to view the color footage. As odd
as this may seem, the warm red and green tones of the Technicolor footage blended almost imperceptibly with the sepia-tinted scenes. An example of the Handschiegl process can also be seen in the video release in the bright orange wall of fire that halts the Pharaoh’s charioteers.

Shooting in late spring, DeMille encountered typical California coastal weather: night and morning low clouds and fog, with clearing by midday. A reporter visiting the location in early June wrote, “There is much fog and little sunshine… Though the scenes were supposed to take place in intense heat, the wind was so bitter that the cast and extras had to huddle in blankets to keep warm before a scene began.”

(Birchard, Robert S. (1992): The Ten Commandments (1923). DeMille Completes Personal Exodus. In: American Cinematographer, 73,10, pp. 76–80, on pp. 76–77.)

The Ten Commandments (USA 1923, Cecil B. DeMille)

“Many of DeMille’s successful dramas had included flashbacks; his previous picture, Adam’s Rib (1923), had a prehistoric caveman sequence. For the big-budget production of The Ten Commandments, the present-day story and its historical parallel biblical narrative would be told sequentially, with a prologue of the story of Moses and the escape from the Egyptians followed by a straightforward “modern story.” Much of the budget and nearly all of the spectacle went into the prologue dealing with the Bible’s Book of Exodus.

DeMille was planning special effects using the Williams traveling-matte process, which combined miniatures with live-action, and spot-coloring for the Pillar of Fire and other color effects. Always striving for showmanship and production value, DeMille responded when Kalmus offered to photograph the major sequences in Technicolor without cost; if DeMille liked the result, the studio could buy it; if not, Technicolor would junk the footage.

DeMille deployed numerous camera crews to cover the exterior crowd and action scenes for the Egyptian prologue, filmed at Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes starting in May 1923. “I was with him up at the location out in the desert where we had the tent cities built” for the actors and crew, Rennahan recalled, “and I didn’t get to shoot anything because he had thirteen cameras and I had one two-color camera.” There was a back-up two-color camera, “and on a couple of scenes I got the chance to use both cameras, but he covered everything himself so well with his thirteen cameras that it was a little difficult for me to get a whole sequence.”⁴⁴
The Technicolor shots in the final film consist of the horsemen and chariots of Pharaoh and his soldiers pursuing the Israelites over the plains (filmed at Muroc Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert), until just before the Pillar of Fire (printed in “special color”). Trucks carrying the black & white cameras and another truck with the Technicolor cameras raced at 40 miles per hour, ahead of the horses.

While later films would have a specific “Technicolor sequence,” with this production the Technicolor camera had not obtained all of the shots that DeMille required. To make up for the lack of coverage by the Technicolor cameras, a shot of a chariot falling down a hill was tinted and toned, while shots of the Israelites by the sea were tinted orange. Despite the extensive coverage in color, the final prints had a modest 388 feet of Technicolor, and Paramount purchased 788 color prints to service worldwide distribution. The overall tinting scheme of The Ten Commandments was not complex, and served to highlight the Technicolor sequences. Most of the film was tinted orange, with sections in amber, blue, and lavender tints, and a blue tone for the fourteen-reel road-show prints. The eleven-reel general release version was even less elaborate.⁴⁵ The critical and public response to the opening of The Ten Commandments in December 1923 was rapturous, with the spectacle and religious overtones on the screen and ballyhoo in theatres serving to humble any doubters. Technicolor did not have the clout in the industry to require that the color process be included on the film credits or in advertising, unless the company paid for the advertising itself. The New York American noted, “There were some exquisite bits of color, and then some that were not so lovely. Especially effective were the scenes where the chariots were driven across the sands.” The New York Times agreed, concluding, “there are many impressive colorful scenes of the Israelites in the desert, some of them appearing better and more natural than other such effects we have witnessed on the screen.”⁴⁶

A major film such as The Ten Commandments, with a budget of nearly $1.5 million, could justify sequences in Technicolor. While the experience “sold him on color,” according to Ray Rennahan, DeMille would hold off on using the process until his next biblical spectacular, The King of Kings, released in 1927.47 Of course, Kalmus needed to convince the industry that Technicolor was practical for ordinary program pictures, not just road-show spectaculars.

Notes

⁴⁴ Rennahan, AFI Oral History with Charles Higham.

⁴⁵ The Ten Commandments cutting continuity, undated, Paramount Pictures Scripts, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

⁴⁶“Newspaper Opinions: The Ten Commandments!” Film Daily, December 26, 1923,2.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on pp. 99–102.)

The Black Pirate (USA 1926, Albert Parker)

“Nevertheless, color sequences in feature films increased during 1924–25, largely as a result of The Ten Commandments. And when Douglas Fairbanks announced that he would produce his forthcoming film, The Black Pirate (’26), entirely in Technicolor, Kalmus and his colleagues felt the lean days were over.

Fairbanks was a shrewd impresario and spent $125,000, and four months, shooting 50,000 feet of color film in order to test and determine proper color keys, make-up, fabric dyes, and location suitability. Catalina Island was rejected because its sand and foliage did not photograph to the satisfaction of Fairbanks and his experts. After the various tests it was decided to shoot 95% of the film, including almost all of the exterior ship sequences, on the United Artists lot. Henry Sharp, Fairbanks’ cinematographer on that film, worked closely with George Cave, Technicolor’s photographic representative.

After deciding to utilize color, Fairbanks had the story simplified and slowed in tempo so as to avoid unnecessary color distraction. Also he insisted that the color schemes should aim more “for glow than actual pigmentation.” Because Billie Dove’s complexion and coloring had registered well in Wanderer of the Wasteland, she was chosen to play opposite Fairbanks.

The Black Pirate was completed in twelve weeks of actual shooting time, and, according to Kalmus: “So far as audience reaction, press previews, and box-office receipts were concerned, it was a triumph from the start, but for the Technicolor company it was a terrible headache.” Added Kalmus later:

“Technicolor was still making the double-coated cemented-together relief prints, so that the red and green images were not quite in the same plane, and the picture didn’t project too sharply on the screen. This double-coated film is considerably thicker than ordinary black-&-white film, with emulsion on both sides which tend to make it cup [buckle] more readily and scratch more noticeably. And the cupping could occur in either direction… with the picture jumping out of focus. We sent field men to the exchanges with new prints, but our troubles never ended… Obviously Technicolor needed single-coated imbibition dye transfer prints – and volume.”

(Behlmer, Rudy (1964): Technicolor. In: Films in Review, 15,6, pp. 333–351, on pp. 340–341.)

Ben-Hur. A Tale of Christ (USA 1926, Fred Niblo)

“Technicolor sequences were being planned to portray lavish spectacles and many of the religious scenes for Ben-Hur. The film was to open in color with the Nativity, followed by the birth of Judah Ben-Hur, and color would reappear for all subsequent scenes of Christ up to the Crucifixion. Color was also envisioned for an extravagant street parade midway through the story, and for scenes of the Roman villa of Arrius. Second-unit teams were set up to film the stand-alone religious inserts, under the direction of Christy Cabanne and Alfred Raboch. They were to shoot the carefully composed scenes in two versions simultaneously, taking four black & white negatives for international release and backup, and two color negatives. Karl Struss was one of the black & white cameramen working with Cabanne.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on p. 119.)

Ben-Hur. A Tale of Christ (USA 1926, Fred Niblo)

“Having to re-create some of the events from Christ’s life away from the Italian locations led to a more stylized design. Ferdinand Pinney Earle, the famous matte artist and trick photographer, was hired to work with Christy Cabanne to realize many of these scenes, including the birth of Christ, the Last Supper, and the Crucifixion. Working on the Nativity scene, Rennahan was challenged with creating the Virgin Mary’s Technicolor halo. Thalberg “wanted a halo effect over [Betty Bronson’s] head, and I guess we tried to get it about a half dozen times,” he recalled years later. “Finally I had one of the studio artists on the lot paint a halo right at the spot behind her head. Then we killed all the light on it, and I had a dimmer lamp that came in on cue and brought the halo on behind her head.”³⁴

Ben-Hur finally premiered in December 1925. Its troubled production had lasted almost two years and cost M-G-M a fortune. Logistically, producing a film on this scale on a different continent was a challenge, and it proved doubly difficult incorporating Technicolor. Color was used extensively, but mostly as stand-alone inserts. Sidelined as artistic punctuation, the color sequences were overseen by the film’s second unit. Even then, the results of the color filming far from home could not always be trusted – heat, moisture, and other variables were a constant concern – so each Technicolor scene was shot in both color and black & white simultaneously.

The resulting production set M-G-M back almost $4 million, but the expense was worth it in the long run. The film’s production values showed in its two massive set-pieces, a cast of thousands, and nine color sequences, totaling 1,029 feet and inserted throughout the film’s twelve reels.

Notes

³⁴ Rennahan, interview by Bill Gleason.”

(Layton, James; Pierce, David (2015): The Dawn of Technicolor. Rochester: George Eastman House, on p. 121.)

The Black Pirate (USA 1926, Albert Parker)

“Such visible deficiencies influenced debates among Technicolor personnel. Caution prevailed to such an extent, as noted in chapter 3, that the color scheme for The Black Pirate (Albert Parker, U.S.,1926) was designed to be restful, with no distracting bright colors. Restraint was the watchword, advocated by Albert Parker and lead performer Douglas Fairbanks as the most appropriate style: “Greens of all the softer shades, and brown running the whole gamut from the lightest tint of old ivory to the deepest tone of mahogany.”⁴⁸ This strategy paid off and the film’s color was praised, but problems including “incorrect handling and sloppy projection standards” and variable environmental conditions in theaters meant that the company’s business soon slumped.⁴⁹ In spite of the care taken over the films color palette and Fairbanks’s meticulous historical research with illustrations and paintings, Technicolor was unable to control how the film was exhibited. Color continued to be a frustrating technical challenge, leading to intensive work on the development of Technicolors dye-transfer process, the new imbibition-blank process (I. B.) that eventually constituted its unique selling point.

Notes

⁴⁸ Albert Parker, quoted in Layton and Pierce, The Dawn of Technicolor, 131.

⁴⁹ Layton and Pierce, The Dawn of Technicolor, 141.”

(Street, Sarah; Yumibe, Joshua (2019): Chromatic Modernity. Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s. New York: Columbia University Press, on p. 222.)

“Dopo qualche altro tentativo, ma per il costo ancora eccessivo della pellicola limitato per lo piú alle copie riservate alle sale di prima visione (mentre nel circuito successivo e all’estero i film venivano in genere distribuiti in bianco e nero), fra cui vanno soprattutto ricordate nel 1924 le esperienze di riprese in esterni di un Western, The Wanderer of the Wasteland (da un romanzo di Zane Grey), e quelle in interni – le prime in Technicolor con luce artificiale – di alcune sequenze di Cytherea (un film di ambiente moderno, da un romanzo di Ergesheimer, in cui aveva di nuovo messo le mani Frances Marion), il Technicolor in bicromìa raggiunse il suo risultato per quell’epoca piú persuasivo con The Black Pirate (“Il pirata nero“, 1926), diretto da Albert Parker, con Douglas Fairbanks, che ne era anche soggettista e produttore. Stavolta fu concesso a tutti indistintamente – mercati coloniali compresi – di fare “ah!” dinanzi ai verdazzurri orizzonti solcati dal funereo stendardo corsaro di Douglas e di ammirare gli sciropposi primi piani di Billie Dove (le cui labbra a cuore – color del lampone – erano già apparse in Wanderer of the Wasteland). Karl Oscar Borg, preposto all’ “art direction”, ebbe l’accortezza di suggerire all’operatore Henry Sharp di caricare al massimo i toni scuri, affogando nel buio certi riferimenti cromatici poco precisi e riuscendo in tal modo alla fine ad ottenere dei buoni effetti con la semplice eliminazione del colore. The Black Pirate, il cui protagonista fra l’altro vestiva sempre di nero, fu in sostanza il primo e forse ultimo esperimento di cromocinematografia in cui i colori venissero usati con relativa parsimonia o addirittura soppressi da una prevalenza del bianco e nero, la cui magica allusività – specie negli interni – risultava ancor piú preziosa in virtú del raffronto con le inevitabili stonature di qualche esterno intemperante.”

(Montesanti, Fausto (1954): Lineamenti di una storia del film a colori. In: Giuseppe Sala (ed.): Bianco e Nero. Il colore nel cinema. Rassegna mensile di studi cinematografici, XV,2-4, pp. 11–51, on pp. 28–29.) (in Italian)

“Die Schlussszene des Fanamet-Films Die lustige Witwe, der gegenwärtig in den Wiener Kinotheatern zu sehen ist, werden vielen Kinobesuchern insofern eine Überraschung bringen, als dieses Szenen in Farben wiedergegeben sind. Die Färbung der hervorragend wirksamen Szenen des erwähnten Films ist nach dem neuen amerikanischen Technicolorverfahren durchgeführt. Um ein Bild von dem Wesen des Technicolorverfahrens zu geben, veröffentlichen wir nachstehend die Ausführungen eines Fachmanns:

Der technische Vorgang des Technicolorverfahrens ist im Grunde genommen einfach. In der Hauptsache handelt es sich um die Aufnahme vermittels einer einzigen Linse, die indessen zwei Prismen enthält.

Vor dem ersten Bild befindet sich ein Rot-Orange- und Gelbfilter, vor dem zweiten ein Grün-Blaufilter. Der erste Filter absorbiert die Farben Rot, Orange und Geld und hält somit die Farben Grün und Blau fest, während der zweite die Farben Blau und Grün absorbiert und somit die Farben Rot, Orange und Gelb durchlässt. Hierzu ist zu bemerken, dass die Farben Rot, Orange und Gelb bekanntlich die Hälfte des Spektrums bilden, während Blau und Grün fast sämtliche restierenden Farben des Spektrums enthalten. Wenn man also diese beiden verschiedenen Aufnahmen auf einem einzigen Positiv-Bild-fenster genau übereinstimmend zusammenbringt und mit den erforderlichen Farben versieht, so enthält man eine Photographie in natürlichen Farben. Praktisch führt man das wie folgt aus:

Das verwendete Positiv ist dünner als das gewöhnlich verwendete Material und ist mit ganz besonderer Sorgfalt perforiert. Man kopiert nun die Aufnahmen abwechselnd gesondert auf je einen Positivstreifen, das heisst, die Aufnahmen in Rot, Orange und Gelb auf einem Filmstreifen, und die in Blau und Grün auf einem zweiten. Durch die mathematisch genaue Perforierung ist es möglich, diese zwei verschiedenen Aufnahmen völlig übereinstimmend aufeinanderzulegen und zwar durch eine besondere Ausdruckmaschine. In dieser Maschine wird eine Flüssigkeit benutzt, welche die Filme bis zu einem bestimmten Grad aufweicht, der ein absolut genaues und haltbares Verschmelzen möglich macht.

Das Resultat des bisher geschilderten Verfahrens ist also ein von beiden Seiten kopiertes unentwickeltes Positiv, das auf der einen Seite die blau-grünen, auf der anderen die rot-orange und gelben Schattierungen enthält. Die beiden Aufnahmen sind geometrisch genau aufeinandergelegt und stimmen in den mikroskopisch kleinsten Teilen miteinander überein.

Dieses Positiv wird nun in besonders konstruierten Maschinen entwickelt und geht dann, ebenfalls automatisch, durch chemische Lösungsbäder, welche die latent im Positiv enthaltenen Bilder in Reliefbilder verwandelt. Bei dem gewöhnlichen Entwicklungsverfahren würden diese Bilder als schwarze Silberniederschläge erscheinen, deren Dichte und Intensivität von dem Grade der Belichtung abhängen würde. Die Technicolor-Entwicklungsmaschinen haben nun die Aufgabe, die Gelatine des Filmbandes da zu erhärten, wo beim gewöhnlichen Verfahren sich derartige Niederschläge bilden würden, und es dort weicher zu lassen, wo solche Silberausscheidungen nicht stattgefunden haben würden. Ausserdem aber haben die Maschinen auch noch die Aufgabe, die weichen Stellen in der Gelatine aufzulösen. Auf diese Weise wird ein Reliefbild aus erhärteter Gelatine hergestellt, das hiesst die übrig gebliebenen Gelatine ist dort am dicksten, wo beim Schwarz-weissverfahren der stärkste Schatten gewesen wäre, dort weniger dicht, wo etwas weniger starker Schatten aufgetreten wäre usw.

Nach dem Trocknen kommt nun diese doppelseitige Reliefkopie in die Farbenbäder, und das Reliefbild nimmt je nach der Dichte die verschiedenen Farben mehr oder weniger auf. An den starken Stellen des Bandes sind also die Farben am intensivsten, an den schwachen Stellen am schwächsten. Der gefärbte Film erhält schliesslich noch eine sehr dünne Schutzschicht und damit ist das Verfahren beendet.

Zur Aufnahme des Negativs sind, wie schon gesagt, besonders für diesen Zweck konstruierte Apparate nötig. Im allgemeinen sind sie nicht grösser als die gewöhnlichen Aufnahmeapparate und auch in der Handhabung und dem Mechanismus unterscheiden sie sich nicht wesentlich von den Schwarzweiss-Aufnahmeapparaten.”

(E.o. (1926): Der farbige Film. In: Mein Film, 40, p. 18.) (in German)

“In 1958, in a discussion of the making of The Black Pirate, Herbert Kalmus, president of Technicolor, recalled contemporary complaints about filming in colour. ‘The main argument against color pictures at that time’, he noted, ‘was that they tired and distracted the eye, took attention away from the acting and facial expressions and blurred and confused the action’.¹ Kalmus referred to concerns voiced by major filmmakers, such as Cecil B. DeMille who, in 1918, had been quoted as saying that

We have come to the conclusion that color photography, in the sense of absolutely faithful reproduction of natural colors, or any method of coloring where the tints used are of the glaring variety, can never be used universally in motion pictures, for the eye of the spectator would be put to too great a strain, and the variety of the colors would distract the attention from the story values.²

As recently as 1923, DeMille complained that ‘color movies diverted interest from narrative and action, offended the color sensitivities of many, and cost too much’.³ For DeMille, colour – even ‘natural’ colour processes like Technicolor – was a veil that concealed the all-important expressions on an actor’s face. Yet DeMille was attracted to colour and repeatedly employed it in his films of the 1920s, combining tinting and toning with footage either in two-colour Technicolor or in the Handshiegl process.⁴ Douglas Fairbanks voiced a similar objection to colour, likening its use to putting ‘rouge on the lips of Venus de Milo’.⁵ Fairbanks argued that colour took ‘the mind of the spectator away from the picture itself, making him conscious of the mechanics – the artificiality – of the whole thing, so that he no longer lived in the story with the characters’.⁶ At the same time, colour motion pictures were said, by their critics, to cause retinal fatigue.⁷ Fairbanks had once written that colour ‘would tire and distract the eye’, serving more as a distraction than as an attraction.⁸

NOTES

¹ Herbert Kalmus, ‘The Adventure of Technicolor’, Journal of the SMPTE 67 (December 1958): 829.

² ‘Lasky Chiefs Working on Color Process’, Moving Picture World, 9 February 1918, 832.

³ Cited in Robert Nowotny, The Way of all Flesh Tones: A History of Color Motion Picture Processes, 1895–1929 (New York: Garland, 1983), 220.

⁴ The Handschiegl process was the invention of engraver and lithographer Max Handschiegl, who developed a matrix film that could be used, through an imbibition process, to transfer dyes to release prints. Instead of cutting stencils, Handschiegl painted over the image area to be coloured with an opaque paint. A dupe negative was then made of this version. This negative was then developed in a tanning bleach, which hardened the areas of the frame in which the image remained. These areas were so hardened that they could not absorb dye, but the area of the frame in which there was no image remained soft and capable of absorbing (or ‘imbibing’) dye. This print served as a matrix – a gelatin relief image – that could be soaked in dye, placed in exact registration with a final release print, and used to ‘stamp’ the release print with dye in the proper areas. Handschiegl collaborated with Alvin Wyckoff, DeMille’s cameraman, who used the process on films ranging from Joan, the Woman (1916), to The Ten Commandments (1923).

⁵ Dunham Thorp, ‘How Fairbanks Took the Color out of Color’, Motion Picture Classic (May 1926): 29.

⁶ Edwin Schallert, ‘Yo, Ho, and a Bottle of Rum’, Picture Play (February 1926): 17.

⁷ ‘Exploding Myths about Making Colored Pictures’, The Film Spectator (28 April 1928).

⁸ Quoted in Jeffrey Vance, Douglas Fairbanks (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 204. This was true of natural colour, and of additive colour processes, such as Kinemacolor and Prizma Color, which generated colour fringing (see Wall, 583), but these critics do not mention colour fringing. Helmholtz’s theory of colour vision associates retinal fatigue with colour afterimages, which would be a necessary feature of any motion picture in colour (see Anon, ‘Tentative Report of the Optics Committee’, 28–29.”

(Belton, John (2018): ‘Taking the Color Out of Color’. Two-Colour Technicolor, The Black Pirate, and Blackened Dyes. In: Giovanna Fossati, Victoria Jackson, Bregt Lameris, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi and Sarah Street (eds.): The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 97–108, on p. 99.)

The Black Pirate (USA 1926, Albert Parker)

“This essay looks at the anxieties that surround the introduction of a new motion-picture technology – in this case, two-colour Technicolor – in terms of its potential threat to the aesthetic norm of black-and-white cinematography and at the ways in which those anxieties are managed. Inasmuch as colour provides the potential of spectacle, its status as spectacle enables it to disrupt a film’s narrative flow, diverting the spectator’s attention from the world of the narrative to the means of that world’s representation. A tension exists in every film and at every moment within every film between the spectator’s belief that she is in the world of the film and her knowledge that she is not, between inhabiting the film and watching it from outside of it, between immersion in the narrative and awareness of its operations. This tension tends to find its ‘equilibrium profile’ as the new technology, which initially foregrounds itself in the display of itself as spectacle, begins to lend itself to narrativization and its elements of novelty disappear into narrative practice. But when that technology is inherently flawed, as was the case with two-colour film processes, which can never achieve the more accurate colour rendition of three-colour processes, the struggle for normativization can be particularly neurotic, as the story of the repression of colour in The Black Pirate (1926) illustrates. From its initial conceptualization in preproduction, to its production and postproduction phases, the film’s producers sought to ‘take the color out of color’, as its director, Albert Parker, famously put it.

[…]

Indeed, before deciding to make The Black Pirate in two-colour Technicolor, Fairbanks hired two USC professors, Drs. A. Ray Irvine and M.F. Weyman, to conduct a series of tests to ascertain the relative amount of eye fatigue (as well as nausea and headaches) generated by viewing black-and-white vs. colour films. Fatigue was calculated in terms of the decline in the viewer’s visual acuity as a result of these screenings. Those results were then, in turn, compared to the loss of acuity resulting from reading a book.⁹ These researchers discovered that viewers experienced a greater drop in visual acuity after viewing black-and-white as opposed to colour films – and that reading, for half the time spent watching a film, resulted in even greater eye strain.¹⁰

Technicolor was so pleased with this report that its head of research in Boston, Leonard Troland, quoted it in an essay he wrote in an effort to combat arguments associating colour film with retinal fatigue.¹¹ Arguing that ‘natural colors [are not] any more responsible for ocular discomfort on the motion picture screen than [are colors] in every-day life’, Troland pointed out that colour motion pictures actually reduced eye strain in comparison with black-and-white motion pictures.¹²

The test conducted by Fairbanks’s eye doctors assuaged his doubts about making a film in colour. In spite of his initial reservations about colour, Fairbanks felt that a pirate film ought to be made in colour, arguing that ‘color is the very theme and flavor of piracy’.¹³ Even so, before Fairbanks began actual shooting on The Black Pirate, he conducted a series of colour tests that lasted for six months and cost over $125,000.¹⁴ The tests included filming a series of sets painted in different colours, ranging from blue, green, and pink to lavender, orange, and mauve to see how they would look in two-colour Technicolor. Similar tests took place to gauge the colour of costumes and makeup.¹⁵ It was during this period that Fairbanks hired Drs. Irving and Weyman to conduct their experiments on colour film and eyestrain. Fairbanks also engaged in lengthy discussions during preproduction with Kalmus regarding various colour keys in which the film might be shot. Each key represented a different degree of colour saturation from highly desaturated to highly saturated.¹⁶ Fairbanks chose to employ a highly restrained (i.e., desaturated) colour key. Fairbanks’s director, Albert Parker, explained the rationale behind this. From a study of Dutch paintings from the late seventeenth century – the era in which the film was set–,¹⁷ they concluded that the so called ‘color harmony’ that the paintings possessed resulted from no one colour standing out in relation to the other colours. All the colours worked together in harmony. In other words, they sought a colour quality that was more monochromatic than polychromatic. Fairbanks was also influenced by the colour illustrations in Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates (1921).¹⁸ Pyle’s drawings were also the inspiration for the sketches made by Swedish landscape artist Carl Oscar Borg that were used to design the production.¹⁹

Fairbanks understood the limitations of two-colour technology and that also played a major role in this decision. The inability of two-colour Technicolor to reproduce the full colour spectrum, in particular, its inability to reproduce blue, purple, or yellow, was in itself a narrowing of the colour range. Two-colour Technicolor was limited to red and green. Fortunately, red and green were able to reproduce acceptable flesh tones, a factor that somewhat compensated for the problems cited above.

Troland discussed two-colour Technicolor’s rendition of flesh tints as one of its chief virtues, giving it an edge over black and white:

Another important case in which color adds realism is one which is practically universal in motion pictures. This consists in showing flesh tints in their normal hues and saturations. It is needless to say that proper rendering of flesh tints is a primary requisite of any color process, whether it use the two or three-color principle. In practice it is not difficult to get theoretically perfect flesh values on a two-color basis; in fact, it is much easier technically than in the case of a three-color system. Of course, there are many different flesh tints, ranging from the darkest negroid to the palest Caucasian, and this variation of flesh color is by no means without bearing upon the story-telling aspect of the pictures. The black and white picture is powerless to show the significant difference between the deep bronze tan of a rough outdoor character and the delicate bloom of the ideal heroine’s cheeks. It cannot show a man either as red-faced or as ‘getting red in the face’. The fact that we can witness a motion picture presentation without being positively annoyed by the imperfection and unnaturalness of black and white flesh values bears witness to the extent to which mental adaptation is possible.²⁰

Indeed, Technicolor’s initial efforts at both two-colour and three-colour motion pictures displayed its ability to capture a variety of skin tones, ranging from the Chinese-American colouring of Anna May Wong in The Toll of the Sea (1922) to the Latin look of Stefi Duna in La Cucaracha (1934).²¹

The inability of two-colour Technicolor to render blue or yellow, however, remained a problem, especially in a film that required extensive shots of the sea and the sky. Fairbanks decided to work within Technicolor’s more limited palette by using primarily brown and green shades and avoiding the brilliant greens or reds that were possible with Technicolor.²² Blue skies were impossible, so Fairbanks and his art director opted for white skies with ‘a tinge of warm brown’.²³ The seas were green. Red was kept to a minimum – there was a flash of red when one of the powder magazines exploded.²⁴ As Parker said, these decisions to narrow the colour palette amounted to ‘taking the color out of color’.²⁵

The first step in attempting to control the film’s colour involved limiting the range of colour placed in front of the camera. In a memo to Troland, Arthur Ball, head of research for Technicolor in Los Angeles and a colour cameraman on the film, explained that ‘in the case of the Black Pirate the pressure from [Fairbanks] was all to remove color from in front of the camera’. Ball went on to point out

that many directors are afraid of color, feeling that it presents too many additional problems in composition, good taste, etc. This frame of mind is greatly eased if the maximum obtainable color is not excessive. It gives them the feeling that they can’t go far wrong. I am quite persuaded that at the present time dilution of color as a motive in itself is correct. As color gets more and more used so that we no longer have to contend with the novelty reaction and when producers get greater familiarity with it and lose their fear, we can then, of course, afford to raise the limits gradually.

Though Technicolor was delighted to have a major filmmaker such as Fairbanks make a big picture in their process, they clearly worried that, by ‘taking the color out of color’, Fairbanks was engaging in a ‘dilution’ of their product, a point about which Troland voiced concern.

The next – and final – step in controlling the film’s colour came in the printing process, in which Ball pioneered the use of so-called ‘blackened dyes’, colour dyes that had been mixed with black dye to ‘modulate’ or limit their brilliance. Troland initially objected to the dilution of colour that resulted from this procedure. Ball wrote to Troland to explain his use of blackened dyes to provide Fairbanks with the colour key he desired. ‘In the general matter of color dilution,’ he writes,

I personally do not like the Black Pirate as well as I would if more color had been used; however, we must admit that it is the first color picture which has not raised the hue and cry that color interfered with the drama. It is very important to have cut under this criticism and to build up under it gradually. If, however, the Black Pirate had not taken at the box office we would, indeed, have been undone.²⁶

Kalmus also wrote to Troland, making the case for blackened dyes. Kalmus points out that

The flesh tints seem to have an added smoothness and a better color value because the overall redness is entirely or largely removed. This triple transfer product does have the reddish and purplish hue removed, is not less sharp in detail than the best double transfer IB thus far received and altogether indicates the characteristics which the black dye gives to the regular process. In fact, we are considering showing Mr. Fairbanks this triple transfer product to the exclusion of everything else for the present… Another point which is very striking to me is the extreme difference in clearness of facial expression on the screen between two prints, both made by the regular process at about the same time, but from different negatives. I have just viewed some […] scenes recently photographed here, which were printed using the new black dyes, and which show a lack of graininess, a smoothness of texture and an apparent sharpness and clarity of faces which is highly satisfactory, although the faces in question are for the most part not large close-ups.²⁷

The ‘triple-transfer process’ that Kalmus mentions above is a reference to experiments that Troland conducted in the Boston lab, which involved his use of Ball’s new blackened dyes in imbibition printing. Though imbibition printing [IB] had not yet been perfected, Troland had made a few IB prints of The Black Pirate that were comparison-tested with the cemented prints (which also involved the use of blackened dyes). Ball and Troland referred to the use of black dyes for imbibition printing as the ‘triple transfer process’. To the standard dye transfer process, a third step was added. In addition to transferring the appropriate colour dyes onto blank film using the ‘red record’ and ‘green record’ matrices, one of those matrices was used to transfer black dyes onto the blank as well, functioning both to improve the definition of the image and to darken it at the same time.

After the release of The Black Pirate, Ball sought to reassure Troland that his goal to achieve accurate colour reproduction was shared by Kalmus and himself and that the use of blackened dyes was a necessary step in the process of converting a major filmmaker such as Fairbanks to Technicolor. Ball explained that

it is impossible to interest anyone in Hollywood in making a picture entirely in color in the key which you and others in Boston like. There is an important difference in the point of view. You are looking at pictures as things in themselves, whereas producers, directors and other people out here look at our pictures as a means of conveying dramatic expression. The reaction on this point is so general throughout the industry that it must be recognized; it certainly cannot be ignored. The problem has been to find a superior method to that employed by Fairbanks. I am sure we have that in the color modulation principle. [i.e., the use of blackened dyes, ed.] At any rate, you must bear in mind that you and Kienninger and Oates are looking at color pictures continually and analyzing them for their color effect alone, whereas people out here in the industry and, to even a greater extent, the public see color pictures only occasionally and they look at all pictures (except scenics and the like) for the purpose of absorbing their dramatic content or of judging them as conveyors of dramatic interest. Possibly you realize all this, but perhaps you argue that there is no real psychological connection between the two. To this I would reply that, while we are in the novelty stage, there is at least an apparent psychological connection and that the industry is so conscious of it that it must be recognized.²⁸

Admitting that colour dilution might hamper efforts to display the full range of colour that Technicolor could handle, Ball argued that blackened dyes were a necessary step to reach their ultimate goal.

[…]

Although the restrained palette of The Black Pirate earned it singular praise from critics and from members of the film industry, Technicolor quickly reverted to what Scott Higgins, in his book on 1930s Technicolor, referred to as the ‘display mode’, which was designed to display what the process could do by showcasing its full range of hues and saturations. In its return to a display mode, two-colour Technicolor necessarily continued in its novelty phase. As long as it remained incapable of reproducing one-third of the full colour spectrum and as long as Hollywood continued to resist the conversion to colour, two-colour Technicolor would remain nothing more than an occasional attraction in an industry that was becoming a montage of attractions with its ongoing experiments involving the combination of silent black-and-white images with those in sound, colour, and widescreen.

Debates over colour aesthetics were not the only problems faced by Technicolor during this period. Technological problems also made producers reluctant to use the process. Several major problems hampered the release of The Black Pirate. Laboratory capacity limited the number of prints that could be made available, thus reducing profits. Laboratory costs remained quite high, cutting into any profits a Technicolor film might make. For example, although The Black Pirate did quite well at the box office, earning over $1.73 million, it proved to be the second weakest-performing Fairbanks picture (after the exorbitantly expensive Thief of Baghdad), due to the added expenses of colour. Cemented two-colour prints (i.e., release prints created by cementing green- and red-dyed positives together) ran about sixteen cents per foot.³⁰ It would not be until the widespread use of imbibition printing in 1928 that this price could be brought down to about eight to ten cents per foot. As a consequence of Fairbanks’s decision to shoot in colour, the film’s budget came to $676,886, with individual prints costing three times that of black-and-white prints.³¹

At the same time, cemented prints, which were thicker than normal prints, suffered from emulsion scratches and cupping. Since the emulsions were on the surface of both sides of the film, they could be more easily scratched than black-and-white film. In dry or wet climates, the cemented prints separated or cupped, which caused them to go out of focus. Cupped prints had to be returned to the laboratory for re-humidification, a process that de-cupped the print.³² This problem would also only find its solution with the advent of imbibition printing.

But The Black Pirate remains an outstanding milestone in the history of colour filmmaking. It provides a stunning example of a studio-produced film that was designed with colour in mind in which colour was not thought of as an attraction or employed to display colour as such, but was carefully integrated into the story. In these respects, the film was years ahead of its time, anticipating the ‘restrained mode’ about which Scott Higgins writes in connection with certain Technicolor films of 1936 and later. Though its dilution of colour through the use of blackened dyes ran counter to Technicolor’s eagerness to display the full spectrum of colour of which its two-colour technology was capable, it demonstrated that colour could be made subservient to story and thus paved the way for colour’s gradual evolution from novelty to norm.

NOTES

⁹ James Layton and David Pierce, Dawn of Technicolor: 1915–1935 (Rochester, NY: George Eastman Museum, 2015), 128–129. See original in Kalmus, 570. The black-and-white film used in the test was a recent Fairbanks film, Don Q, Son of Zorro [1925], which was presumably tinted in the normal way; the colour film was Paramount’s first full-length, two-colour Technicolor feature, Wanderer of the Wasteland [1924]; the ‘book’ was a local newspaper.)

¹⁰ A. Ray Irvine and M. F. Weyman, ‘The Effect on Visual Acuity of Viewing Motion Pictures’, Journal of the American Medical Association (October 1926): 1123.

¹¹ L.T. Troland, ‘Some Psychological Aspects of Natural Color Motion Pictures’, Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers XI, no. 32 (1927): 693.

¹² Troland, ‘Some Psychological Aspects’, 693.

¹³ Layton and Pierce, Dawn of Technicolor, 128.

¹⁴ Thorp, ‘How Fairbanks Took’, 29. Layton and Pierce, Dawn of Technicolor, 129, 30.

¹⁵ Schallert, ‘Yo, Ho’, 17.

¹⁶ Kalmus, ‘The Adventure’, 570.

¹⁷ David Pierce, The Black Pirate entry, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 33, Pordonone (4–11 October 2014): 102.

¹⁸ Layton and Pierce, Dawn of Technicolor, 129.

¹⁹ Layton and Pierce, Dawn of Technicolor, 131.

²⁰ Troland, ‘Some Psychological Aspects’, 687.

²¹ Duna was not Latin but Hungarian by birth. Duna’s co-star, Don Alverado, was an American of Mexican extraction.

²² Schallert, ‘Yo, Ho’, 17. See also Thorp, ‘How Fairbanks Took’, 28.

²³ Thorp, ‘How Fairbanks Took’, 28.

²⁴ Thorp, ‘How Fairbanks Took’, 87.

²⁵ Thorp, ‘How Fairbanks Took’, 28.

²⁶ Ball to Troland, 5 January 1927, Troland memos, Technicolor Corporate Archive, George Eastman Museum.

²⁷ Kalmus to Troland, 19 January 1927. Troland memos. The ‘triple transfer process’ refers to a special dye-transfer process in which a ‘third’ matrix with black dyes on it is added to the standard red- and green-dyed matrices. Dye-transfer printing resembles lithographic printing; individual colours are imprinted on blank film stock one by one. The dye-transfer process was not commonly used for striking release prints until 1928, so the prints referred to here were produced primarily for experimental purposes. But blackened dyes were used in the printing process of the cemented prints generated for the theatrical release of the film.

²⁸ Ball to Troland, 13 July 1927. Troland memos.

²⁹ Ball to Troland, 18 March 1927. Troland memos. Fairbanks ultimately decided to film The Gaucho in black and white, not in colour, ed.

³⁰ Layton and Pierce, Dawn of Technicolor, 105.

³¹ Layton and Pierce, Dawn of Technicolor, 170.

³² Layton and Pierce, Dawn of Technicolor, 140–141.”

(Belton, John (2018): ‘Taking the Color Out of Color’. Two-Colour Technicolor, The Black Pirate, and Blackened Dyes. In: Giovanna Fossati, Victoria Jackson, Bregt Lameris, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi and Sarah Street (eds.): The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 97–108, on pp. 98–108.)