Le Cinéma Inventé: ""Cinema's First Colors" (Lobster Films, 2021; U.S. version Steamboat Films, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, June 7) Turner Classic Movies was showing a series of documentaries on the history of the movie industry, including two from a 2021 French series called Le Cinéma Inventé (“The Invention of Cinema”): “Cinema’s First Colors” and “Cinema Finds Its Voice.” These were produced and originally narrated by Serge Bromberg, directed by Eric Lange and co-written by both of them, though the versions TCM was showing were American releases from 2022 with Bromberg’s French narration replaced by an English one by, almost inevitably, Leonard Maltin. These films start where virtually all movie histories start – with Thomas Edison’s invention of the motion-picture camera in 1895 and Louis and Auguste Lumière’s invention of the Cinematograph (a combination camera and projector) and first public exhibition of films in 1896 in Paris – though both stress that even before movies as we know them existed there were already attempts to reproduce motion on screen. Throughout the 19th century there were not only magic-lantern slides but animated dioramas, and starting in 1892 (a few years before movie cameras existed) there were animated films consisting of long strips of celluloid on which were painted various images of people in motion. These were projected on a screen and were essentially the first movies – so animation actually existed before live-action. What’s more, they were in color because translucent color paints already existed and could be used.

The “Cinema’s First Colors” segment dealt with the various attempts to project movies with what were called “additive” color systems – i.e., shooting separate negatives representing red, green and blue parts of the spectrum, then projecting all three at once on the same screen so the eyes of the viewer would blend them into a believable color image. The problem with additive color was the sheer difficulty of projecting it properly and in particular of getting three projectors to run at the same speed (at a time when projectors, like cameras, were hand-cranked) and getting the images to mesh properly on screen. I suspect that the reason these films so highly stress the role of French inventors and companies in the various technological developments is that they were made by French people who were clearly rooting for the home team. The most successful of the additive color process was the British Kinemacolor, which made at least one blockbuster hit film – a documentary of the 1911 “Delhi Durbar,” in which newly crowned King George V traveled to Delhi, India to be formally crowned Emperor of India. (This was a ceremony periodically held throughout the 100 years or so that Britain directly ruled India, though King George V was the only British monarch who actually attended the Delhi Durbar himself.) Kinemacolor was a simpler version of the additive process that only used two colors (red and green) instead of three, and the clips of the Delhi Durbar shown here are quite stunning even though nowhere nearly as rich and vibrant as one might expect.

“Cinema’s First Colors” was almost halfway through before the show got to what came to be called “subtractive” color processes, which are basically what we have today: two or three different images are “married” onto the same strip of film, so instead of requiring several projectors (and specially trained projectionists to make the system work), a color film can be loaded into an ordinary projector and at least theoretically shown just as easily as a black-and-white one. There was also a brief discussion of the “tinting” and “toning” processes, which came to be used nearly universally in the 1920’s, in which films were printed on color-tinted stock to correspond with when the action on them took place: amber for most daylight scenes, blue for night scenes, green for jungle scenes, red for anything involving fire. (Tinting and toning were pretty much abandoned in the early sound era, because colored film interfered with the projector sound head’s ability to record an optically recorded soundtrack – though a few films, like The Death Kiss [1933] and Mighty Joe Young [1949], used tints and tones well into the sound era.) And even before that films were often hand-colored frame by frame, at first with individual artists painting on each frame much the way the animated magic-lantern films had been done in the 1890’s; then with various forms of stenciling to apply the colors more or less automatically (an early form of colorization).

In Rochester, New York George Eastman, whose Kodak cameras had introduced still photography to the masses (his cameras came pre-loaded with film and when you were done shooting the 100 photos you could make with the supplied film, you shipped the camera to the Kodak labs and they sent it back to you with the prints and a fresh load of film), worked on color movie film, but the problem with Eastman’s various processes, Kodacolor and Kodachrome, was they were reversal techniques. They produced positive instead of negative images, fine for home movie makers who wanted to be able to load a projector with the film they had shot, but unworkable for film studios who needed to be able to print positives from negatives so they could release tens or hundreds of copies of a film at the same time. Various inventors tried to produce a subtractive color film process that could produce negatives, but the person who made it work was Herbert Kalmus, founder of Technicolor. Like Kinemacolor, Kalmus’s original Technicolor used only two primary colors, red and green (yes, I know that green is not a primary color, technically speaking, but as the color-wheel opposite of red and a color which incorporates blue and yellow it was good enough for the early color film techniques). It was definitively replaced by the three-strip Technicolor process in 1935 (this film endorses the print-the-legend story that Rouben Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp from 1935 was Hollywood’s first true color feature because it was the first one in three-strip, but the first color feature was Toll of the Sea, shot in 1922 in two-strip, and I’ve always liked the “look” of two-strip; at its best, and most well preserved, it has a harmonious, painterly elegance I find considerably more appealing than the often shrieking hues of early three-strip), but two-strip Technicolor was a workable process for 13 years and often added immeasurably to otherwise black-and-white films like the 1926 Ben-Hur, 1927’s The King of Kings, the 1925 silent The Phantom of the Opera and Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (shot in 1926 but not released until two years later).

Few filmmakers actually wanted to make an entire movie in two-strip – though Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. did so in 1926 with The Black Pirate, the first all-color film featuring a major star, and the results were stunning even if you have to live with the sky being beige and the sea being teal. For years Technicolor added immensely to the cost of making a movie – in the mid-1920’s it cost four times as much to shoot a film in color as it did in black-and-white (by the late 1930’s, the time of deathless classics like The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, the differential was down to two-to-one), and using Technicolor meant not only having to tame the huge cameras needed to expose all three strips at once and needing humongous amounts of light on your set (Shirley Temple did not make a color film until 1939’s The Little Princess because the studio was worried that a child couldn’t handle the enormous heat generated by the big lights) but having to deal with Herbert Kalmus’s estranged wife Natalie as your “color consultant.” Though this film quotes a book written by Natalie Kalmus as a guide for filmmakers to use colors carefully and with an eye towards improved storytelling, all too often Natalie Kalmus’s actual instructions to filmmakers were to use as many brilliant, vibrant colors as possible, damn the consequences. In 1952 director John Huston and cinematographer Oswald Morris shot Moulin Rouge, a biopic of artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and they drove Natalie Kalmus to distraction with their insistence that the images on their film match the color scheme of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings and posters. Then, when Technicolor was starting to face competition from rival processes like Eastmancolor and Moulin Rouge became a huge international box-office hit, Natalie Kalmus took out ads saying, “Other processes can give you color, but only Technicolor can give you Moulin Rouge color.”