The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema 9789048532988

Citation preview

t h e co lo u r fa n ta s t i c

FRAMING

FILM framing film

is a book series dedicated to

theoretical and analytical studies in restoration, collection, archival, and exhibition practices in line with the existing archive of EYE Filmmuseum. With this series, Amsterdam University Press and EYE aim to support the academic research community, as well as practitioners in archive and restoration. s e r i e s e d i to r s

Giovanna Fossati, EYE Filmmuseum & University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Leo van Hee, EYE Filmmuseum Frank Kessler, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Patricia Pisters, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Dan Streible, New York University, United States Nanna Verhoeff, Utrecht University, the Netherlands e d i to r i a l b oa r d

Richard Abel, University of Michigan, United States Jane Gaines, Columbia University, United States Tom Gunning, University of Chicago, United States Vinzenz Hediger, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany Martin Koerber, Deutsche Kinemathek, Germany Ann-Sophie Lehmann, University of Groningen, the Netherlands Charles Musser, Yale University, United States Julia Noordegraaf, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands William Uricchio, Massachusetts Institute of ­Technology, United States Linda Williams, University of California at Berkeley, United States

GIOVANNA FOSSATI, VICTORIA JACKSON, BREGT LAMERIS, ELIF RONGEN-KAYNAKÇI, SARAH STREET, JOSHUA YUMIBE

THE COLOUR FANTASTIC Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema

a m s t e r da m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

Published Published by by EYE EYE Filmmuseum Filmmuseum // Amsterdam Amsterdam University University Press Press

Cover illustration: La Peine du talion (FR, Gaston Velle, 1906, Pathé Frères) Cover design and lay-out: Magenta Ontwerpers, Bussum Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. isbn 978 94 6298 301 4 e-isbn 978 90 4853 298 8 doi 10.5117/9789462983014 nur 670

© All authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

i n t ro du c t i o n  9

| 5



Giovanna Fossati, Victoria Jackson, Bregt Lameris, Elif Rongen-Kaynakci, Sarah Street, and Joshua Yumibe



p ro lo g u e  19 Questions of Colours: Taking Sides Peter Delpeut



n o n f i c t i o n a n d a m at e u r c i n e m a

1

Fireworks and Carnivals: Applied and Natural Colours in Italian Home Movies 31 Elena Gipponi

2

Liminal Perceptions: Intermediality and the Exhibition of Nonfiction Film 51 Liz Watkins

3

Rough Seas: The Blue Waters of Early Nonfiction Film 75 Jennifer Peterson



n at u r a l - co lo u r p ro c e s s e s : t h eo ry a n d p r ac t i c e

4

 

‘Taking the color out of color’: Two-Colour Technicolor, The Black Pirate, and Blackened Dyes 95 John Belton

6 |

5

Why Additive? Problems of Colour and Epistemological Networks in Early (Film) Technology 109 Benoît Turquety

6

Ziegfeldized Slapstick, Useful Comedy: Mack Sennett’s Slapstick Comedies under the Influence of Natural Colour 125 Hilde D’haeyere

7

Kinemacolor and Kodak: The Enterprise of Colour 145 Frank Gray



i n t e r m e d i a l i t y a n d a dv e rt i s i n g

8

Rainbow Ravine: Colour and Animated Advertising in Times Square 161 Kirsten Moana Thompson

9

Kodachrome’s Hope: The Making and Promotion of McCall Colour Fashion News 179 Natalie Snoyman

10 Chromatic Objects: Colour Advertising and French Avant-garde Films of the 1920s 195 Federico Pierotti

a rc h i v i n g a n d r e s to r at i o n : e a r ly d e b at e s a n d c u r r e n t p r ac t i c e s

11 La Ligue du Noir et Blanc: French Debates on Natural Colour Film and Art Cinema 1926–1927 219 Bregt Lameris 12 A Material-Based Approach to the Digitization of Early Film Colours 237 Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp, and David Pfluger



a rc h i va l pa n e l s

(edited

t r a n sc r i p ts )

Preservation, Restoration, Presentation, and Policy 261 with Sonia Genaitay (BFI), Ulrich Ruedel (BFI and HTW / University of Applied Sciences, Berlin), Bryony Dixon (BFI), Annike Kross (EYE), Tina Anckarman and Tone Føreland (National Library of Norway), Thierry

Delannoy and Benjamin Alimi (Digimage-Classics), Fumiko Tsuneishi (Austrian Film Archive); moderated by Giovanna Fossati Digital Restoration 272 with Michelle Carlos (National Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart), Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp, and David Pfluger (DIASTOR project, University of Zurich); moderated by Giovanna Fossati

au t h o r s ’ b i o g r a p h i e s  279



b i b l i o g r a p h y  281



ac k n ow l e d g e m e n ts  301



| 7 i n d e x  303



Introduction

This book is dedicated to colour in silent cinema before 1930, and it features a selection of essays originally presented at the conference, The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema, that took place in 2015 at EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. It was convened by Giovanna Fossati (EYE Filmmuseum and University of Amsterdam) and the Leverhulme Trust-funded research project Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts led by Sarah Street (University of Bristol) and Joshua Yumibe (Michigan State University). The conference celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the ground­break­ ing Amsterdam Workshop Colours in Silent Film by providing a new forum to explore contemporary archival and academic debates around colour in the silent era. The use of colour in silent cinema was, for many years, a neglected aspect of film history but thanks, in large part, to the 1995 workshop, the last twenty years have seen the topic receive increasing attention from scholars and archivists. During this period, the importance of colour in silent cinema and the extent of its presence have been revealed to be of a much greater scale and significance than previously thought. This book reflects on the Colours in Silent Film workshop, revisiting key topics from the original event and look­ ing at how more recent research sheds light on these issues. In addition, it considers the new directions research into silent colour has taken by explor­ ing a diverse range of archival and academic topics. The examination of colour in cinema during the silent period remains significant today, particularly in light of the digital revolution that has seen not only an explosion in colour in new digital media, but has also digitally transformed the options for preserving and restoring the chromatic elements of film and media. By examining colour in silent cinema, its uses, and the contemporary discourses surrounding colour’s power and function, we can better understand the chromatic developments of the 21st century’s digital age.

| 9

THE AMSTERDAM WORKSHOPS

10 |

Since the opening of the EYE Filmmuseum in 2012, it has provided an international forum for archival and scholarly research through its annual EYE International Conference, which hosted the Orphan Film Symposium in 2014 and The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema in 2015. The structure of these conferences has been explicitly modelled on the earlier Amsterdam Workshop programme that was initiated by Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk in 1994. These international gatherings offered an international platform for sharing ideas amongst film archivists and scholars from various disciplines on aspects of the Filmmuseum’s collections, which, up to that time, had received very little attention. The Amsterdam Workshops focussed on ‘issues and themes prominent in the museum’s preservation and programming activities, concentrating on areas that are relatively new or neglected in film history’.1 These included Nonfiction from the Teens (1994). This was followed by three additional workshops, respectively Colours in Silent Film (1995), Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film (1997), The Eye of the Beholder (1998) on film and anthropology, and Re-assembling the Programme (2004) on film programming formats in silent cinema.2 The second workshop, on colours in silent film, was held 26–29 July 1995. As ‘Disorderly Order’, the resulting book publication based on the Workshop explains, colours in the plural were conceptually very important because of: the variety of colours that adorned the films and film programmes of the silent era, by the various ways in which these colours were applied to the film material, and (no less importantly) by the various transformations these colours have undergone and are still undergoing’. Twenty years later, we still insist on using the plural for the present book: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Perhaps even more than was appreciated in 1995, the variety of colours is evident as are the different worlds with which they interacted. What emerged from the 1995 workshop has profoundly influenced colour research for the past two decades, including the work of this book’s editors. For instance, Giovanna Fossati’s involvement in organizing the colour workshop – by researching films, handbooks, and journals from the Filmmuseum’s collections and co-curating the programme – determined in part her future career as film curator, restorer, and scholar. Similarly, the workshop proceedings inspired Joshua Yumibe to take up colour in early cinema as a PhD project, which eventually culminated in his book Moving

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Color.3 The workshop has also been a guiding influence on the collaborative research project, Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts, carried out by Yumibe, Sarah Street, Bregt Lameris, and Victoria Jackson. It has also been a vital context for the illustrated publication Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema that Tom Gunning, Jonathon Rosen, Elif Rongen-Kaynakci, Guy Edmonds, Fossati, and Yumibe worked on and officially launched at the The Colour Fantastic conference.4 Indeed, what the 1995 workshop did so remarkably well was to expand and deepen the work of the famed Brighton conference in 1978, which brought together archivists and scholars to grapple together with films from 1900 to 1906.5 It is the interdisciplinarity of that collaborative and sharpening work that has guided us in how we put together both the conference and this collection of essays – moving back and forth from a historical archive of chromatic riches to our present day engagement with it – to examine both what the cultural and technological world was that produced moving colour images a century ago, and how those hues can still speak to our contemporary and increasingly digitized environment. The fantastic images of silent cinema emerged during a momentous epoch in colour history. Colour waves are cyclical, caught between the pleasures and displeasures of chromophobia and -philia. What ‘Disorderly Order’ presciently engaged was a new sense of colour’s medial life. Looking back to the intermedial media environment of silent cinema has suggested a critical pathway into the chromatic world of our shifting environment today, something that the research of the last twenty years has continued to grapple with as is evident in the pages of this current book. For a long time, the worlds of silent cinema seemed distant, almost lost, as Peter Delpeut’s film Lyrical Nitrate (1991) memorializes. But advances in the recovery, preservation, and restoration of silent films since 1995 perhaps make those worlds a little more familiar. We still have much to learn from them, but, through the work of many present in the pages of this book, we can celebrate what survives of colour’s infinite varieties. The contributions to this book are organized in the following themes.

p ro lo g u e

Peter Delpeut’s ‘Questions of Colours: Taking Sides’ revisits the turbulent years when the author was appointed as Artistic Deputy Director of the Nederlands Filmmuseum (1988–1995). In a personal style, Delpeut recalls the reasons that led a new generation of film archivists purposely to break with

I ntro d uction

| 11

archival tradition by unearthing hidden aspects of film history such as the colours of silent cinema. The author also revisits the circumstances around his seminal found footage film Lyrical Nitrate (1991) and how he aimed, with this film, to unclose the richness of silent colour films to a wider audience.

n o n f i c t i o n a n d a m at e u r c i n e m a

12 |

Elena Gipponi’s 'Fireworks and Carnivals: Applied and Natural Colours in Italian Home Movies' focusses on emerging discourses on colour cinematography in instructional manuals and handbooks for small-gauge films shot by amateur filmmakers. Drawing on examples from the surviving Italian collections of Baldassini and Portaluppi, she demonstrates how amateur filmmaking played a strategic role in technological research into chromatic reproduction processes. The films depicted spectacular events such as firework displays, carnivals, and nature, and documented the social life of the period. In ‘Liminal Perceptions: Intermediality and the Exhibition of Non-fiction Film’, Liz Watkins explores the use of intermedial colour in polar expedition films of the 1910s and 1920s. Against the frozen white landscape of the poles, colour plays a profound yet liminal role in the experience of these extreme environments, which, as Watkins traces, the multimedia spectacle of films of the time seek to reproduce. Jennifer Peterson’s ‘Rough Seas and Waterfalls: Lyrical Colors in SilentEra Nonfiction Film’ dwells on early colour films depicting water. Questions she asks are: ‘How do these films draw upon Romantic aesthetic traditions to shape a sense of water as poetic? And what is the relationship between realism and the spectator’s affective, emotional response to these films?’ For her analysis, Peterson restricts herself to one particularly strong type of water imagery: rough seas.

n at u r a l - co lo u r p ro c e s s e s : t h eo ry a n d p r ac t i c e

In ‘“Taking the color out of color”: Two-Colour Technicolor, The Black Pirate, and Blackened Dyes’, John Belton addresses the anxieties surrounding the use of two-colour Technicolor in Douglas Fairbanks’s The Black Pirate. Belton’s thorough research in the correspondence among the film’s director and Herbert Kalmus, President of Technicolor, and other parties involved, illustrates how the ongoing debate on the use of colour and its (supposedly) distracting effect on the audience led to very original and fairly subdued colour effects for this title.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

In ‘Why Additive? Problems of Colour and Epistemological Networks in Early (Film) Technology’, Benoît Turquety examines the challenges of restoring early additive colour systems by framing the historical context out of which these methods were developed. The complexity and yet popularity of these systems in the early twentieth century must be understood, Turquety argues, in relation to the technological and epistemological cultural models out of which they emerged. Hilde D’haeyere’s 'Ziegfeldized Slapstick, Useful Comedy: Mack Sennett’s Slap­stick Comedies under the Influence of Natural Colour' explores the ways in which colour was used in Mack Sennett comedies by examining three moments in the studio’s history: colour in the late silent films of the studio, in Depression-era talking films, and finally considering colour as an element of Sennett’s legacy after the closure of the studio at the end of 1933. Frank Gray’s 'Kinemacolor and Kodak: The Enterprise of Colour' compares the development of two colour systems, the additive colour system known as Kinemacolor and the subtractive colour-film processes by Kodak. He investigates both their shared vision, to bring colour to the motion-picture screen, and their very different technical solutions, business models, and commercial perspectives.

i n t e r m e d i a l i t y a n d a dv e rt i s i n g

In her essay 'Rainbow Ravine: Colour and Animated Advertising in Times Square', Kirsten Moana Thompson writes about the colourful electrical billboards, positioning them as ‘electrical animations’ that turned the sidewalks into ‘outdoor theaters with free entertainment’. Following the development of the technology and design of the neon signs through pioneers such as Oscar Gude and Douglas Leigh, Thompson discusses the mutual influence between these advertising signs and popular culture, or more specifically, the film industry. Natalie Snoyman’s 'Kodachrome’s Hope: The Making and Promotion of McCall Colour Fashion News' examines eight fashion shorts filmed in Eastman Kodak’s Kodachrome process between 1925 and 1928. Made in conjunction with McCall’s, one of the most popular women’s magazines published throughout the 1920s, the spectacular colour films feature well-known actress Hope Hampton modelling the latest Parisian fashions. Using this striking example, Snoyman examines the mutually advantageous promotional relationship between fashion, film stars, and colour film. Federico Pierotti’s 'Chromatic Objects: Colour Advertising and French Avant-garde Films of the 1920s' illustrates the possible connections between

I ntro d uction

| 13

the emerging science of advertising and a selection of French Dada films made during the 1920s. The connections between advertising and avant-garde films provide an opportunity to reflect on the function of colour and black and white in the visual culture of the 1920s.

archiving and restoration : early debates and current practices

14 |

In ‘La Ligue du Noir et Blanc: French Debates on Natural Colour Film and Art Cinema 1926–1927’, Bregt Lameris unearths a debate against colour and for black and white in late 1920s French film discourse. Promoted by the critic Bernard Brunius at the time, the polemic in part targeted the growing dominance and ‘vulgarity’ of U.S. Technicolor films and promoted a medium-specific argument about silent film being inherently black-and-white that would have a lasting effect on film preservation. Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp, and David Pfluger’s ‘A MaterialBased Approach to the Digitization of Early Film Colours’ presents three innovative research projects on colour films, which all share the interdisciplinary goal to bridge a wide variety of fields of research with different approaches and questions. These include chemistry, physics, IT, aesthetical, and historical approaches to film studies, and questions of colour perception and colour appearance. Edited transcripts of the two Archival Panels, the first on ‘Preservation, Restoration, Presentation and Policy’ with Sonia Genaitay (BFI), Ulrich Ruedel (BFI and HTW / University of Applied Sciences, Berlin), Bryony Dixon (BFI), Annike Kross (EYE), Tina Anckarman and Tone Føreland (National Library of Norway), Thierry Delannoy and Benjamin Alimi (Digimage-Classics), Fumiko Tsuneishi (Austrian Film Archive), moderated by Giovanna Fossati; and the second on ‘Digital Restoration’ with Michelle Carlos (National Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart), Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp, and David Pfluger (DIASTOR project, University of Zurich), moderated by Giovanna Fossati.

SCREENINGS DURING CONFERENCE With the Colour Fantastic conference, besides celebrating the 20th anniversary of the ‘Amsterdam Workshop 1995: Colours in Silent Film’, we also intended to revisit two aspects of that earlier workshop that have been of great importance for the collection and archival practice at EYE, namely the richness of colour present in its silent film holdings and its commitment to research and

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

restoring these chromatic works. Such commitment was advanced by the pioneering team that led the museum in the late 1980s and 1990s – in particular, former director Hoos Blotkamp, together with artistic directors Eric de Kuyper and Peter Delpeut, and curator Mark-Paul Meyer. Since then, the colour restorations carried out by the Nederlands Filmmuseum, and now by EYE, have been presented at countless festivals around the world. The films screened during the conference had been programmed from the EYE collection, primarily by Elif Rongen-Kaynakci and Giovanna Fossati, and entailed short compilation programmes ranging from 10 to 25 minutes each morning before the first panel, then, after the lunch break, and after the last panel of the day. These films, as well as Jonathon Rosen’s compilation film Bivalve Stereo-Opticon Presents: Aurora Goes to Holland (2015), were selected as they are connected to the publication Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, and they engage with the book’s themes (e.g. dreams in colour, fairy tales, metamorphoses, voyages, and our chromatic fancies). Bregt Lameris also had a hand in the programming, specifically for the films from the 1920s. A number of the films programmed during the conference were also shown during the 1995 workshop. In some cases, the same print was screened that was shown at the time. However, at other times, when a more recent restoration was available, the newer version was favored – as in the case of the digital restoration of Maudite soit la guerre. All films were screened with original – mainly Dutch – title cards.

sc r e e n i n g o p e n i n g n i g h t ,

28

m a rc h

2015

Bivalve Stereo-Opticon Presents: Aurora Goes to Holland (Jonathon Rosen, US, 2015)

s u n day ,

29

m a rc h

2015

First Screening L’Album merveilleux (FR, Gaston Velle, 1905, Pathé Frères) Het Tovertoneel [a.k.a. Les Tulipes or El Iris Fantastico] (FR, Segundo de Chomón, 1907, Pathé Frères) Visions d’art: 3. La Fée aux étoiles (FR, 1902, Pathé Frères) Second Screening Bloemenvelden Haarlem (NL, Albert & Willy Mullens, 1909, Alberts Frères) Danses Cosmopolites (FR, Segundo de Chomón, 1901, Pathé Frères)

I ntro d uction

| 15

La Peine du Talion (FR, Gaston Velle, 1906, Pathé Frères) Bits & Pieces Nr. 275: ‘Een prisma’. ([D],[1930]) Fragment from Pathé-Revue: [Hongarije] (FR, 1926, Pathé) Pathé-revue: [Mode] (FR, 1926–1927, Pathé Cinéma) Fragment from The Lady of Victories (US, Roy William Neill, 1927, MGM – MetroGoldwyn-Mayer) Evening Screening Maudite Soit la Guerre (BE/FR, Alfred Machin, 1914, Belge Cinéma)

m o n day ,

16 |

30

m a rc h

2015

First Screening Le Voyage sur Jupiter (FR, Segundo de Chomón, 1909, Pathé Frères) Second Screening Dutch Types (FR/GB, [1915], Gaumont) Bout-de-Zan et le Crocodile (FR, Louis Feuillade, 1913, Gaumont) Third Screening Les Parisiennes (US, 1897, American Mutoscope Company) [Narren-grappen] ([US], [1908], Joker Film) Les Pyrénées pittoresques a.k.a. Een Autotocht in de Pyreneëen (FR, 1910, Pathé Frères) The Beauty Thief (GB, [1920–1929], Pathé Pictures) Opus III (D, Walter Ruttmann, 1925, Ruttmann-Film) Pathé Revue no. 46: De mode der taschjes te Parijs (FR, 1924, Pathé) Fragment from The Glorious West Country (GB, [1925], HAL – Holland Amerika Lijn) Evening Screening Lyrical Nitrate a.k.a. Lyrisch nitraat (NL, Peter Delpeut, 1990, Nederlands Filmmuseum)

t u e s day ,

31

m a rc h

2015

First Screening La Chenille de carotte (FR, 1911, Pathé Frères) Le Charmeur (FR, Segundo de Chomón, 1906, Pathé Frères)

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Second Screening Conway Castle – Panoramic View of Conway on the L. & N.W. Railway (GB, William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson, 1898, British Mutoscope and Biograph Syndicate) Santa Lucia (IT, [1910 ], Ambrosio) Les Grandes eaux de Versailles (FR, 1904, Pathé Frères) Third Screening Danse des Ouled-Naïls; Danse du ventre; Danses Algeriennes (FR, 1902, Pathé Frères) Rêve à la lune (FR, Gaston Velle, Ferdinand Zecca, 1905, Pathé Frères) Buona sera, fiori! (IT, Giovanni Vitrotti, 1909, Ambrosio)

| 17

NOTES 1

Daan Hertogs and Nico De Klerk, Eds. Disorderly Order. Colours in Silent Film. The 1995 Amsterdam Workshop (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996), 5.

2

The proceedings from these workshops were published as: Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk, Eds., Nonfiction from the Teens: The 1994 Amsterdam Workshop (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1994); Hertogs and de Klerk, ‘Disorderly Order’ (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996); and Hertogs and de Klerk, Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1997).

3

Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism, Techniques of the Moving Image (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

4

Tom Gunning et al., Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015).

5

On the Brighton conference, see the materials collected in Roger Holman, Ed., Cinema 1900/1906 (Brussels: FIAF, 1982).

I ntro d uction

Prologue Questions of Colours: Taking Sides Peter Delpeut

I feel honoured to be invited for this privileged position in the programme of the conference. All the more as I am no film scholar and I have not dealt with the subject of colour in silent cinema since the end of the 1990s. Therefore, my contribution can only be personal. I hope to share memories with you that can illuminate some of the reasons why it is here in the EYE Filmmuseum that we have this conference on colours in silent cinema. More than fifteen years have passed since I made Diva Dolorosa (1999), my last film concerned with silent cinema. Even more significantly, twenty years have passed since the Amsterdam Workshop on colours in silent cinema took place, which is so vividly honoured with this conference. I was one of the instigators of that workshop. Oddly enough, it took place when I was in the process of leaving the Nederlands Filmmuseum. Being a victim of the famous sevenyear itch, I wanted to pick up my career as an independent filmmaker and start a new career as a writer. Hence, for me, the workshop was connected with a feeling of closure – the conclusion of seven years being part of the world of film archives. Seven years that had been invigorating from my first day. Looking back on them now, I think you can say these years coincided with a significant period of transition in the world of film archives, not in the least in their attitude towards colours in silent cinema. I will talk about this period as a more or less defined episode. Firstly, because I only worked in these years in the world of film archives. And secondly, and much more important, I believe that these years indeed were some kind of hinge, a chapter in the history of film-archival practices, a moment of transition between two eras. After being asked to deliver this keynote speech, memories easily came back. First of all, memories of faces: some of the people that, in the past years, sadly enough have passed away. Primarily, of course, the face of Hoos Blotkamp: she was the director of this institute from the late 1980s into the 1990s.

| 19

20 |

She died almost exactly one year ago. Without her energy and dedication, the Filmmuseum would have never got the boost that brought it to the forefront of archival practices. From the moment she entered the Filmmuseum in 1987, she was a passionate innovator who challenged her collaborators to find new ways of preservation and presentation, and – not to forget – she urged them to pull down the walls around the official canon of film history. Hoos was also a brilliant fundraiser. We should not forget that ideas are nice, but we need money to realize them. The resources she brought in were without precedent in the history of the museum and probably at that time without precedent worldwide. Without these funds, the Nederlands Filmmuseum could have never taken its central position concerning the colour preservation of silent cinema. Of course, there were more people and institutions at that time interested in preserving and presenting the colours of silent cinema. I can mention Noël Desmet in the Cinémathèque Royale in Brussels, although in the late 1980s his now famous method was mostly an idea that still needed a lot of experimentation. In an archival folder on colour I still keep, I found a very enthusiastic memo I wrote in July 1991. Together with Herman Greven, then the head of the technical department, I had visited Noël in Brussels. The conclusion of the memo is that the Desmet method is on the verge of being used on complete films, although it still needs some testing. Keep in mind that, at that time, the Nederlands Filmmuseum was already preserving 4000 metres of colour stock per week. In the late 1980s, there was also a lot of dreaming about colours in Bolog­ na. The young film buffs of the then-upcoming film archive became true allies in the defence of colours, maybe even more fanatic then we were. But it was just because we had the money and Bologna was rather poor at that time. So it is worth stressing one more time that, without the financial support Hoos Blotkamp had gathered in these years, there would not have been an Amsterdam Workshop in 1995 at all. There are more faces to remember. How about the incredibly young Giovanna Fossati, who, as an intern, played an essential part in the substantiation of the Amsterdam workshop on colour? I think we can easily say she fulfilled all the expectations we had of her. Getting into more memories, I realized my years in the Nederlands Filmmuseum easily could be characterized as a revolution. Maybe not one comparable to revolutions that change the history of countries or working classes, but, in these years, the world of film archives and film historians experienced nothing less than a landslide. And I have the impression that we are still shaking. I should stress that, in the heat of the moment, I never thought of revolution or landslide. The metaphor we mostly used to describe what we were

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

doing was: ‘cleaning up the mess’. Meaning, firstly, ‘the mess’ that our predecessors in the film archive had left behind for us, and, secondly, ‘the mess’ of film-historical writing in general. Looking back on this, I surely realize that ‘cleaning up the mess’ does not sound very sympathetic. Maybe, in the end, this slogan indeed characterizes us as true revolutionaries: fanatic, angry, emotional, and, once in a while, even believing that the end justifies the means. In short, we were people that had found ourselves a mission. Probably, this sounds rather overdramatic. But I speak of how I experienced these years. As we all know, experiences may differ deeply from how things really are, but that does not make them less real. This brings to my mind the famous opening sentence op L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953): ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. The sentence has become almost proverbial and can sound as a cliché, but, for me, it has always been an inspiring principle when looking at history. It warns me to be on guard when talking about things in the past. We have this bad habit to project our own worldview on things that might be profoundly strange and enigmatic to us. I think we should accept that, in the past, they did things differently. Our ideas and emotional responses do not always fit with them. Of course, we should try to find an understanding, but also permit the past to be the foreign country that it is. Accepting that people in the past did things differently is also comforting when it comes to my own biography. I often wonder who I was, say twenty or thirty years ago. There might be a connection between him and me, at least physical, but, was it really me who got angry so easily about what I eagerly called the great swindle of the film archives and the great fraud of film history? I vividly remember that I took it very personally that film archives had made us believe that silent cinema was black-and-white. We have to get back to the 1980s for that. The results of the still-legendary Brighton conference of 1978 had also reached the Netherlands, mainly through the pages of the film magazine Skrien. As every film buff always on the lookout for new discoveries, I followed this new discussion on early cinema; however, it was like wandering in the dark, as it was almost impossible to see films from this period. Until something unexpected happened. The Filmmuseum started to present films from the Desmet collection. 19 November 1985 was the first public presentation of films from the collection. It was curated by film historian Frank van der Made, who had recently been appointed to work on it. I suspect his appointment was instigated by Frans Maks, who, as a relative outsider, had also recently been appointed as deputy director. The films screened were in black and white. But, behind the scenes, Frank van der Made was lobbying to start with copying nitrate prints to col-

P rolo g ue

| 21

22 |

our stock. In my archive folder on colour, I found several copies of memos on the subject, dated as early as 1986. I probably dug them up while working in the Filmmuseum. In one from Emmy de Groot, then in charge of restoration projects, she urges to start with well-chosen test cases, notably with the print of the Italian movie Fior di Male. Other memos I read from her still stand out. Basically, she already knew what there was to know about establishing a plan for colour preservation. The colour print of Fior di male indeed was presented that same year in Pordenone, and, shortly after, was followed with a second programme on the Desmet collection in the cinema of the Filmmuseum. This programme included seven colour preservations. It was the programme that changed everything. At least for me. It was for the first time that I started to realize that there was more to enjoy in silent cinema than black and white. I saw very strange colours. Not the hand colouring you could see once in a while in rare Méliès shorts, but an overwhelming abundance of monochromatic colours. I had no idea what they could mean. But I instantly realized that these colours had a severe effect on my experience of the films. After the screenings, I was more or less in shock, especially when I was told that these colours were more than a rare incident. Someone then (I do not remember who) claimed that 50 per cent of the total production of silent cinema had these colours. Now we know that at least 80 per cent had colours, but the 50 per cent already felt outrageous. These screenings mark an enormous shift in perception. You could say that there was a before 1986 and an after 1986. Just recently, at the opening night of the Desmet exhibition, I asked Frank van der Made what made him decide to preserve some of these films of the Desmet collection in colour, as it was a practice hardly ever done before. His answer was both illuminating and funny. He said: ‘Because they were in colour.’ I have always looked at Frank as a rather dry historian, not particularly adventurous or wayward. But, as I see it now, this was probably exactly what was needed at that time: a very dry statement of someone not having the reputation of being particularly opinionated. These – connected with the presence of the relative outsider Frans Maks who gave the green light for the project – were the first seeds of what would become a revolution in archival practices and the perception of silent cinema. I think we should honour them, together with the relatively unknown technician of that time, Emmy de Groot, as the three silent and easily forgotten heroes of this chromatic revolution. There certainly is some irony in the fact that the Nederlands Filmmuseum was one of the first film archives to preserve and present silent cinema in colours. The ruling ideology of the museum in the first forty years of its exist-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

ence, under the management of Jan de Vaal, had been highly influenced by the Filmliga, a film club initiated in 1927 by, amongst others, Joris Ivens. It hailed film as art; promoted the international avant-garde of Russian formalism, surrealism, and absolute film; and – very importantly – it was extremely anti-Hollywood. Menno ter Braak (the Dutch Walter Benjamin, although more moralistic) more or less created a theoretical backbone. The underlying agenda of their practices and theories was to take film away, or even to safeguard it from the vulgarities of the entertainment industry. You could say that the film archives coming into existence in the early 1930s were influenced by individuals coming from film clubs such as the Filmliga. The coming of sound had made them realize an important part of cinema’s history was on the verge of disappearance. They positioned themselves as the saviours of this heritage, something for which we cannot honour them enough. But, at the same time, it soon became apparent that, in their eyes, some films were more important than others. They created a canon in which formalistic innovations and auteurist filmmakers had the lead. In their eyes, film should be solely appreciated as an art, made by artists. This created an odd discrepancy. The saviours of silent cinema were not interested in the more frivolous, entertaining parts of the art form. Cinema should be pure. And pure meant the black-and-white image. Furthermore, it was the artist who created this pure image. Hence, musical accompaniment was abandoned from their screenings, as the artists had no control over them. Likewise, applied colours were perceived as interpolations of a commercial entertainment industry – an impermissible intervention on the purity and autonomy of the artist. It became common practice in film museums and cinémathèques to screen films from the silent era in complete silence and to present black-and-white copies of the coloured nitrate prints. I am aware of the fact that my sketch is rather crude. Discourses as well as practices tend not to be pure. I am also aware that there were severe practical and financial reasons throughout most of the last century to make preservations on black-and-white film stock. However, to understand why the Nederlands Filmmuseum, under the new management of Hoos Blotkamp, adopted the idea of preserving and presenting silent cinema in its original colours so vigorously, we have to take into account how she and her new collaborators perceived their forerunners. What happened in the 1990s within the Nederlands Filmmuseum, and, in a broader sense, within the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF), was nothing less than a clash of ideologies with the past. It was a new order opposed to the legacy of groups such as the Filmliga, fought, funnily enough, with the sugar sweet colours of early cinema. For this, I have to introduce another individual that was instrumental in this clash: Eric de Kuyper. Directly after her appointment in 1987, Hoos Blot-

P rolo g ue

| 23

24 |

kamp asked De Kuyper to be her deputy director. De Kuyper is a Belgian scholar who had previously lectured on film and performing arts at the University of Nijmegen. Almost on his own, he introduced in the Netherlands the French school of film semiotics and the Freud- and Lacan-inspired film theories of Christian Metz. Moreover, he vividly advocated for taking the products of commercial cinema seriously. He lectured on the musicals of Vincente Minnelli, the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, and the male body in Westerns and in film noir. Simultaneously, he knew to combine these preferences with advocating the pleasures of experimental cinema, modern dance, opera, and theatre. He was friends with Chantal Akerman, Jacques Ledoux, Gerard Mortier, and Dirk Lauwaert. Pleasure, preferably with an erotic, as well as an intellectual angle, is surely the key concept of his attitude towards cinema. He liked to quote Roland Barthes, who insisted that we should not forget the pleasure Karl Marx and Bertolt Brecht took in smoking cigars. Whereas the Filmliga stood for purity, formalism and what we later learned to call political correctness, de Kuyper’s preferences tended towards extravaganzas, kitsch, camp (as one of his semester courses was provocatively titled), and, above all, the pleasure of intertextuality. Imaginative and fanciful colours surely belonged to these pleasures. You can say that the simple and historically indisputable observation of Frank van der Made – ‘These films were in colour’ – became, in the hands of Eric de Kuyper, a weapon to combat the (in his eyes) prudish and excessively dull attitude of the heirs of the Filmliga. Let us now go back to the first screenings of colour preservations from the Desmet collection in 1986. As I said, I remember I was really angry, almost in a pubertal sense. I immediately sensed that there was something for which to fight, which, of course, also meant there were people against which to fight, especially the ones who had kept from us the fact that silent cinema was immersed in colours. I had been a student of Eric de Kuyper in the late 1970s, before I went to the Dutch Film Academy. We had kept in contact through the years and collaborated on several projects, so it was quiet predictable that my immediate response was to blame the Filmliga ideology for this film-historical fraud. Somehow, this response fit quite well with the idea that we had to defeat the founding fathers of Dutch film culture. The forty years that the Filmliga devotees ruled over the Netherlands Filmmuseum demanded an immediate regime change. In my anger, I was hardly aware of the irony that I had just discovered these colours precisely in the fiercest stronghold of Filmliga ideology, the Nederlands Filmmuseum. We are seldom moved by rational considerations. Emotions guide us to victory, or the gutter. However, I could hardly have guessed that, within less than a year, victory

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

was ours. With Hoos Blotkamp and Eric de Kuyper taking over the Filmmuseum, the regime change was a fact. And with the fundraising abilities of Hoos Blotkamp, the preservation and presentation of silent cinema in colours (and let us not forget the musical accompaniment) gained an enormous momentum that went farther than the Netherlands. The 1995 Amsterdam Workshop on colours in silent film, was the first extensive evaluation of the years that had passed. The museum had been on a roller coaster: with lightning speed, films had been preserved. The work in the archive had brought us to unknown territories for which, to our annoyance, film history books did not give us clues. The idea of the Amsterdam Workshop was to share our wonderment about these territories with film scholars, film archivists, filmmakers, and technical experts from the film labs. Hence, an important aspect of the workshop was to create a lot of space for screenings, as our subjects were widely unknown, even to the specialists we had invited. Of course, we hoped to collect answers for the questions we had, and to gain much from the daily workshop meetings, but we also hoped scholars would find reasons to dive into these subjects, and finally to rewrite film history. Rereading the minutes of the discussions in the book that was made from it, ‘Disorderly Order’: Colours in Silent Film, I feel it is still a good read1, which is hardly surprising, of course, when you see the lineup of attendees. The list reads now as a soccer world team of film history. What is particularly stunning is the fact that most of the attendees in 1995 – eight years after the first screening of the colour print of Fior di male in Pordenone – did not know what they were seeing: they were still completely overwhelmed by the abundance of colours. Several of them had been attendants of the Brighton conference on early cinema, but they simply had no idea that everything they had seen there, and which had so energetically revamped the study of early cinema, had originally been in colour. Giovanna Fossati recently asked Tom Gunning and André Gaudreault about it and they confirmed: Brighton was in black and white. The main thing the attendees of the workshop could do was share their intuitions. Although on a very high level, everybody mostly guessed what to think and what to do about this new chromatic artefact. After two days in this ‘twenty years after’ conference, I have the feeling that we, more or less, are still guessing. However, I am extremely enthusiastic about Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe’s project ‘Colour in the 1920: Cinema and its Intermedial Contexts’ and the broader context that Vanessa Toulmin gave us in her keynote on the importance of colours in fairgrounds, variety theatres, and world fairs. I think the subject asks for this kind of research – taken away from film history as a history of aesthetics solely and the archival fetish of the film print. When I reread the discussions of 1995, I recognized a mixture of senti-

P rolo g ue

| 25

26 |

ments. First of all, there was the sheer pleasure of colours. As if we all, after a long and cold winter, stepped out of an airplane in a sunny holiday resort, the colours seemed to make most of us simply happy. It gave silent cinema, and especially its early years, a never-before-detected brightness, a lovely fresh look. It made some of the attendants sigh, to leave these colours for what they were, not to think too much of them, but just simply to enjoy them. Secondly, there was the intellectual excitement of finally knowing, but this immediately led to the conclusion that we still had a lot to study. Now that we knew, we could start with trying to understand. Starting to find out what, for instance, the technical parameters of the process of colouring were, and finding out who was in charge of these colours, a challenge Joshua Yumibe confronts in his book Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (2012). Thirdly, there was a strong inclination for interpretation. It was particularly fuelled by the desire to understand what the colours could mean within the system of storytelling. I very well understand this inclination, as I had myself struggled with it through the years. I had come to the conclusion that there was no fixed code for the colours: they easily shifted from the denotative (blue is night), to the symbolic (purple is passion), to the nondescriptive (just a shot change), to spectacle (the feast of colours). Within one film or even one scene all of these levels of meaning could occur – the spectator being the one to keep them together, easily commuting between these levels. It led to the conclusion that gave the book on the workshop its title: Disorderly Order. Looking back on this with twenty years’ distance, I am a bit confused. In these three sentiments, I recognize three parallel undercurrents that strongly rule discussions on cinema and its history, and I am not sure that they are always productive. First, we have the undercurrent of anachronistic pleasure: cinema is there to enjoy, old and new alike. Why bother? Just show. Secondly, I recognize the undercurrent that says that, once we savvy the technique, we also understand its impact. Technique is ruling the art of cinema. Thirdly, the strongest undercurrent and hardest to avoid in any discussion of film, cinema is understood as a narrative art form, and, hence, all of its elements should be interpreted within a system of storytelling. What particularly bothers me (and I also blame myself for this) is that I have the strong feeling that we do not take into account P.H. Hartley’s lesson: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’. Briefly, I want to put forward two aspects that might adjust this idea. The common practice we chose earlier for our colour preservations was to copy nitrate prints to modern colour stock. We were so eager to present colours that we very easily took for granted that we used a photographic process for preserving an artefact that, in its essence, was a combination of a photographic process and a non-photographic process, namely that of painting. I can still easily

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

defend the choice we made then: the colour stock was simply a choice that was available, manageable, affordable, and, moreover, the closest we could get to the original. The irony, of course, is that the early film archives could have said the same of their choice for black and white. With even a strong bonus argument: black-and-white stock was stable, of which we could not be sure of colour stock (ask Martin Scorsese). Still, I think we were so overjoyed with presenting colours that this unstable aspect of paint was easily forgotten. We simply created a new silent cinema within the boundaries of the cinema we knew: a photographic experience. Hence, the sheer pleasure in the reclaimed freshness of early cinema. Hence, the excessive attention for narrative codes. Neither are necessarily surprising, as these aspects fit so very well in our own experience of cinema. Looking back on it, I wonder if we were not actually claiming too easily early and silent cinema into our own perception of cinema. It hardly occurred to us that they might have done things differently then. Of course, we knew this in part and talked about the enigmatic aspect of it, but I am not at all sure we really did fathom the idea of painting. We invited German filmmaker Jürgen Reble and the Canadian filmmaker Don McWilliams (who had worked with Norman McLaren) for the Amsterdam Workshop, and I am quite sure Stan Brakhage was on our initial list. On the Internet, I found extremely moving photographs of Stan Brakhage applying paint on film stock. They reminded me of the labour involved in this practice. This is as close as I think we can come to the labour that was put in early cinema’s hand colouring, especially when we combine these photographs with the extremely moving interviews with two early film colourists Stephen Bottomore dug up for us and presented on at the conference. We are so used to seeing images like these in their photographic copy that we hardly sense a Brakhagelike addition of paint in the images. Of course, in movement, these colours jump, and we tend to find it moving and touching, but what we experience is surely not a photographic print on which paint has been added. Almost in the same way, I am confused about the monochromatic colours of silent cinema – tinting and toning. I think the addition of these kinds of monochromatic dyes was, before silent cinema, without precedent. I sense it was something new. Of course, we can say it was inspired by the effect of colour filters in front of lantern-slide projectors, or influenced by all of those coloured lights at fancy fairs and world fairs. Moreover, the photographic copy of this on modern colour stock brings it rather close to the feeling of light and filters, but I am afraid it is too close to these, taking away the awareness that we should keep in mind that we are also talking about painted strips of film. Especially when they are strong and I would almost say ‘thick’, they might create an effect of the kind of sublime experience for which Barnett Newman aimed.

P rolo g ue

| 27

28 |

Do not worry: I am fully aware of the fact that I am playing an anachronistic card here, but standing in front of a Barnett Newman painting can be an enigmatic and overwhelming experience. Maybe the understanding of this mystery could also tell us something about the experience of monochromatic colours in the era of the silent cinema. Monochromatic colours tend to have a physical effect on our bodies. When our eyes are flooded with one colour, it somehow creates a short circuit in our brain; it can make us shiver or cheer us up, not through a narrative impulse, but solely through the abundance of one narrow stimulus. There is a lot of speculation on this observation. I merely put this forward to stress the fact that we experience colours in silent films now through a photographic process, which makes us easily forget that we also have to talk about paint. A few final words on Lyrical Nitrate. I already had plans for a movie on the Desmet collection as early as 1987. I even negotiated with Frans Maks about it, just before Hoos Blotkamp took over the management. Hoos was not particularly eager to have a filmmaker in the house when she had just started ‘cleaning up the mess’. Just a year later, she invited me to work for the museum, initially for one year, which became seven. Still reluctant, she allowed me to make the film in 1989, insisting that I would only use fragments from films that were already preserved. Hence, the film was put together from a rather small corpus of films, as we were still in the process of discovering the full range of the Desmet collection. For instance, the films by Alfred Machin or Leonce Perret I had not even seen yet. This is also the reason that there is still a lot of black and white in the film, as I also resorted to earlier preservations, but I also had an urge to be in the forefront of the discussions on early cinema – impatience is surely a part of this film. The programme of Lyrical Nitrate was quiet simple. After seeing the film, the audience should understand: 1. early cinema had colours; 2. early cinema was hand-cranked and had no stable speed; 3. early cinema was more than slapstick; moreover, it should be appreciated as opera; 4. the richness of early cinema was on the verge of vanishing: nitrate could not wait. As I see it now, the film was a pamphlet, a celebration of unknown beauty, as well as an accusation of the ones that had kept this away from us. 25 years have now passed since its first screening in Pordenone in 1990.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Recently, it was digitally restored, happily enough by Jan Scholten, who, already 25 years ago, was involved in making the optical manipulations for the film. It is these kinds of collaborations stretched over so many years that have made working on films like Lyrical Nitrate such a great joy. I sense the film can still work as a promotional video for early cinema, but you might also view it as a document of a revolution. It proclaimed, ‘Colour is there and has no plans to leave’.

NOTES 1

Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk, Eds., “Disorderly Order”: Colours in Silent Film (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996).

| 29

P rolo g ue

NONFICTION AND AMATEUR CINEMA

| 31



CHAPTER 1

Fireworks and Carnivals Applied and Natural Colours in Italian Home Movies Elena Gipponi

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH01

ABSTRACT The history of colour processes cannot disregard the history of amateur cinema; on the contrary, a combined perspective foregrounds the strategic role that amateur filmmaking has played in technological research into chromatic reproduction processes, since colour films (Kodacolor, Dufaycolor, Kodachrome, Agfacolor) were first developed and released in the small-gauge versions employed by amateurs (9.5mm, 16mm, and 8mm), and only at a later stage in the 35mm version used by professionals. This contribution aims to evaluate the implementation procedures and the social uses of colour in Italian amateur cinema through the analyses of the discourses on colour in the how-to literature on amateur colour cinematography, and of the practices of colour in a sample of private collections of Italian home movies dating back from the 1920s to the 1960s. k e y wo r ds

colour, amateur cinema, Italy, home movies, small gauge

| 33

De l’écran, la couleur se glissera dans les albums de famille. Le nouveau-né nu trônera au milieu de la page, tout rose sur sa fourrure blanche. Papa fera photographier sa fille dans sa robe bleu-pervenche à l’occasion de ses dix-huit ans. Et la vieille tante d’Angers répondra par quatre pages de remontrances à l’envoi de la photo accompagnée d’affectueuses pensées. Parce qu’elle aura vu sur l’épreuve que sa nièce se met du rouge aux lèvres.1

34 |

The 1920s was a decade of pivotal technological changes in the history of cinema and moving images, marked by the introduction of sound and the launch of small-gauge film stocks. These were more lightweight and less expensive compared with the standard 35mm gauge, and their introduction marks the beginning of amateur cinema practice.2 The first gauge with a large-scale diffusion was the 9.5mm with central perforation. This was called Pathé-Baby and was marketed by the French company Pathé in 1922. It later became an extremely popular gauge in Europe at least until after World War II. Following the launch of Pathé-Baby, in 1923, a rival gauge was developed in the United States, the Eastman Kodak Company’s 16mm, a new direct-reversal safety film. In 1932, with the aim of acquiring a larger market share and as a consequence of the 1929 economic crisis, which reduced the propensity to spend money for leisure activities, Kodak launched 8mm stock that was less expensive but also had a lower resolution than 16mm.3 The 8mm film became very popular in the USA in the 1940s and in Europe after 1945, at least until the transition to video technology (it was actually still used even after the introduction of the more straightforward Super8 in 1965), thus becoming the symbol of a real mass diffusion of amateur filmmaking. The history of amateur cinema technologies, here briefly recalled, intersects with the technological history of film colour systems since early experiments in the 1920s.4 Indeed, the history of colour processes cannot disregard the history of amateur cinema: on the contrary, a combined perspective foregrounds the strategic role that amateur filmmaking has played in technological research into chromatic reproduction processes. In the history of the so-called ‘natural’ colour processes, colour films such as Kodacolor (1928), Dufaycolor (1934), Kodachrome (1935), and Agfacolor (1936) were first developed and released in the small-gauges (9.5mm, 16mm, and 8mm) and reversal5 versions employed by amateurs, and only at a later stage in the 35mm negative-positive version used by professionals and in the film industry.6 From a technological perspective, small-gauge photographic colour was an expressive resource well-suited for widespread adoption, since the new

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

colour films did not require substantial modifications of projection devices or cameras. Amateur, particularly private film production, is a key subject in the study of cinematic colour not only for technological reasons, but also for cultural ones. It is possible to ascertain a kind of intimate sensibility between home movies and the new colour films. Indeed, colour’s cultural connotations of dreamy fantasy, of giddiness and laughter, even of triviality, fit perfectly with what Richard Chalfen called the home mode, that is the tendency to stage family harmony.7 Home movies aim to celebrate the happy moments of family history, like births and birthdays, christenings and weddings, holidays and journeys, parties and merrymakings, and these special occasions are usually bright and colourful compared with everyday life throughout the rest of the year.8 This chapter aims to evaluate the implementation procedures and the social uses of colour films with particular reference to Italian private amateur cinema. This will be achieved by analysing the discourses on colour in the ‘how-to’ literature on amateur colour cinematography, and from viewing the practices of colour in a sample of private collections of Italian home movies, 1920s–1960s.9 It is worth pointing out that this study considers just one among the many possible uses of small-gauge colour films. Home movies were not the only products available: the new small-gauge colour films also had various strategic public uses and represented a valuable evolution in the fields of other nontheatrical productions, including soldiers’ filmed diaries on the frontlines of World War II, ethnographic documentaries, educational movies for schools and churches, advertisements and tourist promotional movies, scientific and medical movies, particularly of surgical procedures since colour films were able to show blood more accurately than monochrome.

ARTIFICIAL COLOURS The first discourses concerning the reproduction of colour as presented in amateur filmmakers’ manuals discuss natural colour almost in the mode of science fiction, but always as a forthcoming, unavoidable event. By way of example, in the final chapter (‘Derniers perfectionnements’) of a handbook written in the 1920s, the reproduction of natural colours and stereoscopy are prioritized over the synchronous reproduction of sound: ‘Films en relief et films en couleurs combinés formeront un spectacle intéressant que le public appréciera. On le complétera par l’adjonction du synchronisme de la parole et de la musique’.10 Another 1924 handbook, Pour bien tourner. Guide des ciné­­graphiste amateur, draws attention to the lenticular process patented by Keller-Dorian-Berthon as the most effective technique for colour filmmaking,

F ire w or k s an d C arni v als

| 35

but subsequently reduces its function to a mere temporary solution. Indeed, one of the chapters of the same guide turns to ‘L’avenir du film en couleurs’: in this case, the opportunity to film in colour is situated in the future, but is also strongly connected to recording the past as a form of preserving memories remembered as bright, colourful images: Le film en couleurs est seul le film de l’avenir, et avec lui la cinématographie atteint la perfection. Le temps est déjà vaincu, puisqu’il est possible de revivre à loisir toutes les impressions visuelles ressenties auprès des êtres chers, dans les lieux préférés du pays natal, dans les sites merveilleux découverts en vacances ou au cours de voyages. Mais il y manque la couleur, qui donne à toute chose sa valeur exacte, et fait le ravissement des yeux.11 36 |

Before the introduction of the first natural-colour films, however, small-gauge cinema experienced a short season of applied colours, attested by the circulation of numerous handbooks about techniques of applied colour such as hand colouring, tinting, and toning.12 Indeed, like professional filmmakers, amateurs were interested in colouring their films well before the introduction of colour reproduction techniques, and well after the abandonment of applied colour in the institutional cinema. By way of example, in 1931, the Italian author Ernesto Cauda in his La cinematografia per tutti: guida pratica per cinedilettanti states that, although tinting and toning had been abandoned in professional filmmaking – ‘and this is a good thing’, he adds – these colouring techniques nonetheless represented an asset for amateur cinema because they can be used to correct flaws in shots, essentially to embellish the images, to improve the appearance of the projected film, and even to ‘rescue’ an imperfect scene.13 The suggested matches between the subjects and the colour dyes seem to replicate the ones already codified in institutional cinema: green, for example, matches country or woodland settings; a blue toning is a perfect effect for shooting the seaside, sunsets, or night scenes. Other handbooks confirm these conventional associations and encourage the reader to combine tinting and toning, although advising against exaggerations. It is important to emphasize that both pre-tinted standard- and smallgauge film stocks were marketed. Furthermore, the mass production of monochrome, pre-tinted film stocks for amateurs was not suspended with the introduction of sound, as it had been in theatrical cinema because the addition of the optical soundtrack on the film print was not compatible with the chemical processes of tinting and toning. Conversely, small-gauge cinema did not suffer from this problem since it remained silent, lacking optical track for

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

the synchronous recording of sound until the 1970s, so artificial colour systems persisted at least until the end of the 1930s. During the period 1920s–1940s, however, the amateur filmmaker was not a mere end-user, but a resourceful bricoleur who contributed actively to the technical improvement of the cinematic apparatus. This artisanal attitude, and the fascination for the mechanical, optical, and chemical functioning of the cinematic machines, was also exercised through the search for effective systems for producing or reproducing colour, an ideal field for combining technical matters and aesthetical issues: ‘In comparison to other technical innovations like sound, which required an infrastructure that amateur film clubs could not easily provide, colour processes seemed made for amateur experimentation’.14 In the heydey of small-gauge cinema, the technological expertise of the average amateur filmmaker was still very close to that of professional filmmakers, as demonstrated by the amount of technical terminology used in the handbooks for amateurs. Predictably, the cases of applied colour in the Italian amateur cinema are a glaring and uncommon exception within collections produced by high-class and wealthy amateur filmmakers. For the Italian amateur pioneers, however, small-gauge cinema was not just an instrument for private communication, a mere storage device for family memories, but also a tool for visual research. One such example is Guglielmo Baldassini (1885–1952), whose collection of films, stored and preserved by the Home Movies – Archivio Nazionale del

1.1: Guglielmo Baldassini, reel 088, 9,5mm. Courtesy Home Movies-Archivio Nazionale del Film di Famiglia (Bologna, Italy).

F ire w or k s an d C arni v als

| 37

38 |

Film di Famiglia, Bologna, consists of several reels with applied colour, thus representing one of the few cases of the use of artificial colour in Italian private productions. Baldassini was a well-known Ligurian painter and etcher who specialized in urban and especially marine landscapes. His collection of Pathé-Baby films includes familiar scenes, but also several marine views. It has been argued that Baldassini, by virtue of the technique and the manual skills probably derived from his artistic and professional practice, adopted domestic toning for some of his films. This conjecture is corroborated by the fact that the images, partly deteriorated, present that ‘white and colour’ mode, which is typical of this kind of chemical operation.15 Toning seems to work as a preliminary ‘study’ of the visual and chromatic rendering of the marine landscapes, the privileged subject of his paintings. In applied colour techniques, Baldassini therefore finds an instrument truly akin to his professional and artistic identity, and thus he represents an exemplary case, emblematic in regard to the social profile and the technical knowledge of the amateur filmmaker in this first stage of the development of the small-gauge cinema.

NATURAL COLOURS The technological skills and the social profile of the average amateur filmmaker gradually changed during the twentieth century, as the technology became simpler and ‘automatic’. A key step in this process is represented by the introduction of colour reproduction. The change of the defining features of the amateur is evident if we analyse the ‘how-to’ literature. From 1938, Kodak led a new trend by publishing How to Make Good Movies, a handbook with colloquial language and illustrated with comic strips. Initially sold for two dollars, the handbook became a real bestseller, with numerous reprints (its title was changed to How to Make Good Home Movies in 1958). The ideal reader was the unskilled amateur, as the long subtitle – ‘A non-technical handbook for those considering the ownership of an amateur movie camera and for those already actively engaged in the making of home movies who want to improve the interest and quality of self-made films’ – clearly demonstrates. What kind of discourses about natural colour circulated in these publications? Generally speaking, if we look at a selection of Italian, French, English, and American handbooks from the 1930s–1960s, we can detect a significant historical and geographical continuity. From a merely technical and technological perspective, the introduction of natural colour provided an opportunity to stress the medial identity of amateur cinema: small-gauge cinema is perceived and framed as an improvement of amateur photography rather

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

than as a small-scale version of theatrical cinema. This is also the case with reference to colour cinematography: the majority of handbooks introduce the topic by highlighting that colour amateur cinema is grounded in the same basics of colour photography: ‘Les explications qui vont suivre supposent que le lecteur est familiarisé avec les principes géneraux de la photographie des couleurs’.16 The technological specificity of the first colour films as opposed to achromatic film stocks is a minor speed rating, so that the cornerstone of filming in colour is the accurate control of the camera aperture. The amateur filmmaker is encouraged to shoot in broad daylight and to avoid shooting close to dawn or sunset, in order to maintain a constant saturation and colour balance throughout the film. To support beginners, every textbook included grids, diagrams, and exposure tables to explain the different shutter speeds depending on the film stock, weather conditions, and brightness of the filmed subjects. Beyond these basic procedures, there is a second kind of discourse, which deals with colour from an aesthetical point of view. According to these manuals, what should a good home movie look like? And, more specifically, a good colour home movie? The answers are rather the same all over the world–the Western world, at any rate. The shared starting point is realism: ‘it is because colour film brings an audience closer to real life that it has become so popular’.17 The first and ‘natural’ mission of natural film processes is, of course, the exact reproduction of ‘true’ hues and shades. However, a naturalistic and faithful chromatic rendering does not exclude aesthetic experimentations: La netteté et un bon rendu des couleurs ne suffisent pas pour faire une bonne photo, mais ils en sont les conditions nécessaires. Une image floue ou ayant des couleurs manifestement faussées serait sans valeur. Du côté artistique, il faut veiller à ce que les formes et les couleurs se composent d’une façon plaisante à l’œil – c’est cela qui distingue une photographie artistique d’un instantané ‘presse-bouton’ quelconque.18 Handbooks recommend that a good colour home movie should not distance itself from standard norms and approved solutions of harmonious composition; they underline that the good amateur ought to differentiate herself from the mediocre snapshooter (presse-bouton in the French quotation) by pursuing a model of beauty and pleasantness. Furthermore, the surveyed publications – in particular the ones from the United States or, more generally, from the Anglo-Saxon areas – urge practitioners to be guided by colour restraint, just as in the classical Hollywood era of Technicolor in the 1930s and 1940s. In the following quotation, for example, the recurrence of words like ‘shock’, ‘jar’, and ‘alert’ help to build a rhetoric of danger, invoking defence strategies:

F ire w or k s an d C arni v als

| 39

in general any large areas of brilliant colours should be avoided as they are usually very distracting, and on projection are too profuse for the eye to accept comfortably. At the same time, variety is still important, but the art of the cinematographer lies in carefully moderating the colour range, and using his artistic senses to allow him to compose a scene of pleasing colour that does not jar. […] there must be no distracting backgrounds or colour confusion at the sides. […] An abrupt change of colour can also shock the audience into an alert state, but when no special effects are being created a level colour balance should be maintained. […] Never be concerned with colour alone. Find an interesting subject and the colours will look after themselves – after all, action is the main interest in a film and colour should take second place.19

40 |

To defend herself from the danger of ‘corruption’ caused by the use of colour, it was recommended that the amateur subordinated colour to the narrative and to the action. Hollywood cinema’s dominant attitude towards colour influenced amateur cinema: colour should not distract audiences from the story. In these warnings, we can undeniably detect the cultural prejudice against the subversive power of colour: amateur filmmakers should be restrained. All in all, handbooks and manuals have a strong prescriptive power: the amateur filmmaker should not try new chromatic solutions. In a sense, her creative potential is neutralized. Nevertheless, even though on an aesthetic and linguistic level these documents exercise a conservative function, they end up promoting and supporting this technological innovation at a sociocultural level. Indeed, in this third kind of discourse, colour films are described as the ideal means to convey the modernization of everyday life, which was especially evident in the 1950s–1960s period, with particular assertiveness in Italy. In fact, the new colour films allowed practitioners to reproduce the new hues and shades of new furniture and vehicles, appliances and signs, even clothes and food faithfully, as the following comment indicates: Indeed, the present age is specially colour conscious. In the home we have multiple wall colourings, exotic curtains, and even attractively coloured kitchen utensils. Industry is also competing and many psychiatrists are experimenting with specially coloured surroundings that are thought to influence the natural efficiency of the worker. Our cars are already manufactured in two or three tones, and our houses are beginning to leave the traditional schemes of brown and cream! But, of course, to the cinematographer the rapid development and popularity of colour film is possibly the most important.20

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

On the whole, the technological positivism of these manuals concerning photographically reproduced colour was a driving force in the enthusiastic acceptance of a modernity that also manifested itself through a new array of coloured goods and merchandise that broadened the chromatic range of people’s visual framework. The amateurs were invited by manuals and guides to embrace the technological progress represented by the new colour films and, in a sense, to overcome both chromophobia and technophobia, the fear of colour and of technology, but also, more broadly, the fear of the future, as if they were a sort of inner circle of avant-gardists, active protagonists of their time.

THE PRACTICES Besides the three types of discourse – technological, aesthetical, and cultural discourses – that we have discussed so far, it is important to look at the practices and at the social uses of colour films in Italy. Did Italian amateur filmmakers conform to the handbooks’ norms, or did they find new stylistic solutions and ways of using colour? When did colour films establish themselves in Italy? In order to answer these questions and to investigate the practices of colour in Italian amateur cinema, I will examine the amateur collection of Piero Portaluppi, a ‘transitional figure’ between the two phases of the amateur cinema, from the elitist activity of the pioneers and of the avant-garde to the mass practice of the post-World War II era. I will then extend my observations to include the collections held in the Home Movies archive, before proposing some quantitative considerations. Considering its chronological path, the substantial collection of Piero Portaluppi is very interesting because it allows us to measure the timing of the transition to the new colour devices with great precision. Portaluppi (1888–1967) was a renowned Milanese architect, an eclectic personality with several interests and hobbies, including amateur filmmaking, to which he devoted himself for three and a half decades, from 1929 to 1965.21 Furthermore, Portaluppi’s creative passion, combined with his obsession for order, with the meticulous cataloguing and quantification of notebooks detailing many different aspects of his daily routine, included his activity as an amateur filmmaker. The Fondazione Portaluppi, in fact, has two notebooks in which, between 1929 and 1965, Portaluppi wrote down valuable information and technical details about his film shoots. As the note on both of the notebooks’ covers explicitly states, Portaluppi filmed in 16mm with a Paillard Bolex during the whole period. Each page of the notebooks is divided into different columns indicating the progressive number of the reel, the date or the time span of the shooting, subjects and locations filmed, an acronym for the brand of

F ire w or k s an d C arni v als

| 41

42 |

the film stock, and the length of the reel loaded into the cartridge. The archival base of Portaluppi’s films – partly lost – is very rich: basing our calculation on his filmic notebooks, in 35 years he must have shot approximately 645 reels, for a 17000m length. The impressive data immediately suggests the amount of resources, including economic, on which Portaluppi had to rely to foster his passion. Even the choice of shooting in 16mm well after the introduction of the cheaper 8mm gauge proves his ‘aristocratic’ extraction: 16mm was a more expensive and better gauge that guaranteed clearer and more defined images thanks to the wider surface of the film frame. As for the subjects of his films, they belong to the typical subgenres of the home movie: films about weddings, christenings and family reunions, holiday movies, travel and tourist films, and also a fiction film. Portaluppi shot his first reels in colour in 1930: they are respectively the 54th, 55th and 56th, since he bought the Bolex and started filming, and, in all three cases, using a Kodacolor 15m film (‘KC15’). The subjects of the films are the garden of S. Maria delle Grazie, in Milan, some fabrics, and his wife and daughter in their garden. This is one of the rare examples of the use of Kodacolor film – the first colour emulsion launched on the market in 1928, an additive (lenticular) system, while all the following systems were subtractive – in Italy.22 Two years after its introduction, Portaluppi already owned it, thus confirming his status as a ‘man of the future’, always attracted to the new discoveries of modernity. This data, though isolated, is also indicative of the speed of penetration of Kodacolor in the Italian market, and it also contradicts the information reported in an Italian handbook of 1930, whose author claimed that Kodacolor had not yet been introduced in Italy.23 A simple calculation shows the incidence of colour films in Portaluppi’s overall pre-War production: in 1930, of a total of 77 reels used, twelve are colour reels. In 1933 the footage in colour is still a small percentage (slightly above 6%) of the total amount. Starting from 1934, and up to the beginning of the 1950s, the amateur output of Portaluppi decreased. Two data are significant in regard to this phase’s production: the almost complete absence of colour films (with the exception of a ‘AK30 in colour’, which we may assume is a German Agfacolor) and the almost exclusive presence of the acronym F30, which stands for the Italian film stock company Ferrania. The use of Ferrania is mentioned for the first time in February of 1939 and it soon monopolizes Portaluppi’s films – and presumably of the majority of the Italian amateur filmmakers – due to the blocking of imports of Anglo-American photosensitive materials and the autarchic politics of the promotion of national ­products. However, in conjunction with the massive restart of Portaluppi’s amateur practice, in 1951 Kodachrome is mentioned for the first time in his notebooks. Confronted with the almost immediate adoption of Kodacolor, the transition

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

to Kodachrome is very belated if we consider that this type of film was already available in 1935. The first reel, indicated as ‘Kcol15’ – an acronym soon changed in ‘KC’ – shows a ‘horse ride in colour’ and few Austrian landscapes. From the beginning of the 1950s the presence of Kodachrome colour reels grows very fast, until they completely replace black-and-white in 1955. With this late adoption of Kodachrome Portaluppi aligned himself with many other Italian amateurs, now a small army of bourgeois and petty bourgeois people who were attracted to this ‘new’ hobby and to the ‘new’ images in colour. In fact, although subtractive colour reversal films were launched in the middle of the 1930s, in Italy their widespread availability was evident only from the 1950s onwards, as the examination of a corpus of private collections held by Home Movies demonstrates. Generally speaking, the changeover from black-and-white to colour was irreversible: once colour was experienced, the Italian amateur filmmakers did not revert to black-and-white (unless in some ‘experimental’ films). Many beginners who bought small-gauge cameras in the mid-1950s shot in colour straightaway. This gradual substitution of blackand-white images with colour contributed to the construction of a new ‘régime perceptif’, as named by Pierre Sorlin.24 So, if colour moving images were quickly becoming a new visual standard, how did Italian amateur filmmakers use colour in their home movies? From the analysis carried out it can be observed that a shared and widespread chromatic style existed: favourite and recurring subjects include landscapes and flowers, flags and parrots, balloons and toys, kites and Christmas trees. Furthermore, the small-gauge filmmakers were especially attracted to two iconic events, thanks to their chromatic values: Carnivals, with their multicoloured children in dress costumes and parade floats, and fireworks, which on colour film looked like abstract colour light shows on a black background. In this regard, Portaluppi’s collection represents, once again, the quin­ tessential case. As well as meticulously cataloguing his life on notebooks and bloc-notes, Portaluppi used cinematic language to compose a visual archive and organize actual catalogue-films. Over the decades he assembled, through montage, thematic inventories about specific subjects or categories: the city of Milan, his grandchildren and grandnephews, and Great Personalities (‘Grandi Firme’), a montage of hundreds of famous people he had the chance to film (Benito Mussolini, Joachim von Ribbentrop, cardinal Schuster, Le Corbusier, Eugenio Montale, Tazio Nuvolari, etc.). Even colour becomes a category for Portaluppi to record. The movie Kodachrome, started in 1953, is the umpteenth catalogue, this time of the occurrence of coloured items, objects and scenes filmed for their chromatic value, beginning with the title, composed of magnetic letters, and followed by coloured balloons, by the detail of a wall painting, by a rainbow, by some sail boats, by buildings mirrored in water, by

F ire w or k s an d C arni v als

| 43

1.2-1.5: Piero Portaluppi, Kodachrome, 16mm. Courtesy Fondazione Portaluppi (Milan, Italy).

flowers, by a sunset, by a Carnival, by a sky with clouds, by flags, swans, and then again sunsets, flags, etc. Chosen with the aim to convey the polichromy of the spectrum, all these subjects have an exemplary and reiterative value also with reference to the other collections of our corpus. As Odin argues, ‘An image from a home movie, precisely because it is a condensed form, a crystallization of a hundred, a thousand analogous images, has an extraordinary exemplifying strength’.25 Indeed, the repetition of the same coloured objects, subjects, and situations confirms the stereotypical features of this kind of cinematic production, and raises further reflections upon the commonality, among the amateur filmmakers, of a shared gaze at reality and, above all, a shared attitude towards the new technology. If handbooks insist on the congruity between the new coloured goods and the colour-film stocks, thus on the new on a sociocultural level, the new item that actually interests the amateur filmmakers is precisely the colour image. The amateurs, in fact, were also interested in including colour images in their films, as demonstrated by the abundance of ‘images that frame other coloured images’ that can be found in the examined collections, such as postcards and tour guides used as the opening title of holiday movies, but also the presence on-screen of comic books, magazine covers, or coloured posters. By contrast, the audiovisual production of Italian media 1930s–1960s is almost completely dominated by black-and-white images: colour images are still the exception, they are only used to signal a ‘festive’ occasion. So they constitute an irresistible lure for small-gauge cinema enthusiasts whose films focussed on the important and festive moments of life and in a family’s history. More generally, and beyond their merely informative content, the colour images produced by amateurs configure themselves as attractions, meaning that they are pure visual expressions of the technological innovation, released from any narrative order, as in Portaluppi’s catalogue Kodachrome. It is important that home movies should be considered as part of the lineage of early cinema. As Frances Guerin argues in a recent study on the amateur cinema of the Nazi period, ‘Tom Gunning’s notion of the cinema of attractions has become synonymous with the uniqueness and appeal of early film as a series of visual spectacles in which cause-and-effect narrative development was secondary to the display of technological wizardry’.26 The analogy between amateur cinema and early cinema, after all, has already been proposed by, for example, Alexandra Schneider, who has drawn a connection between amateur films, newsreels, and trick films.27 Both amateur and early cinema are essentially nontheatrical forms of spectacle: the amateur filmmaker acts both as an early cinema exhibitor, composing ‘in the moment’ a programme made of fragments, and as a film lecturer, usually arranging for a live commentary

F ire w or k s an d C arni v als

| 45

to accompany the projection. The most attentive amateur filmmakers would also insert intertitles in order to give some essential information. According to this assumption, amateur cinema belongs to the cultural series of ‘early cinema’ in opposition to what became ‘institutional’ cinema. If this connection is applicable in general, it is even more appropriate in the case of colour processes: although Kodacolor, Kodachrome, Agfacolor, Ferraniacolor, etc. are natural, indexical colour systems rather than artificial and applied ones, these new colour films function as ‘attractions’, because of the foregrounding of colour technology in amateur cinema. This involved privileging the means of production over content, expressing a fascination with the medium and thrill at exploring the technical possibilities offered by the new colour films. This ‘attractional’ use of colour in the Italian home movies of the 1950s and 1960s proves once again how slowly perceptual regimes change. As Richard Misek has noted: 46 | cinematic style has historically been slow to change, with many contemporary films still following visual codes established nine decades ago. Once a use or meaning is established, its dominance becomes self-perpetuating. New uses of a particular style legitimate themselves by referring back, with or without irony, to its previous uses and meanings.28 It is precisely for this reason that Pierre Sorlin and other scholars, such as Patrice Flichy in his Une histoire de la communication moderne29, embrace the idea of a long nineteenth century, which actually expands into the first half of the twentieth century. I would like to conclude with a final remark about the uncanny relationship between these movies and early cinema. Although, strictly speaking, colour home movies appeared well after the silent era, the movies under consideration are actually a kind of silent cinema, as I have already remarked. In fact, unlike colour, sound was adopted by amateurs much later. Oddly enough, then, these mute and colourful scenes seem once again very close to early cinema’s earliest attractions and its ‘silent’ colours.

Translated from the Italian by Chiara Grizzaffi. A special thanks to Mara Logaldo for her final reading.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

NOTES 1

‘From the screen, colour will slip in the family albums. The naked newborn will sit enthroned in the middle of the page, all pink-skinned on his white fur. The dad will have pictures of his daughter in her periwinkle-blue dress taken on the occasion of her eighteenth birthday. And the old aunt from Angers will answer with four pages of complaints when she will receive a snapshot coupled with loving thoughts. Because she will then have the proof that her niece wears lipstick.’ Translation by author. René Barjavel, Cinéma total. Essai sur les formes futures du cinema (Paris: Denoël, 1944), 39.

2

Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: a Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995); Melinda Stone and Dan Streible, Eds. ‘Small-Gauge and Amateur Film’, special issue, Film History, 15.2 (2003); Dan Streible, Martina Roepke, and Anke Mebold, Eds. ‘Nontheatrical Film’, special issue, Film History, 19.4 (2007). For further readings, see http:// amateurcinemastudies.org/, with a regularly updated bibliography.

3

Indeed, the production of colour film was considered a strategic factor and was one of the options to deal with the dramatic decline of camera and equipment sales – due to the Great Depression – and to recapture customers: ‘three factors galvanized demand for amateur equipment: the availability of color film, the introduction of moderately priced 8mm cameras, and “the development of many new accessories that give the ‘professional’ touch to home made movies”’, Zimmermann, Reel Families, 62.

4

This overview is limited to the amateur gauges and to the film stocks used for recording. For an accurate reconstruction of the amateur shooting and projection equipment, see Alan Kattelle, Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897–1979 (Nashua, NH: Transition Publishing, 2000).

5

The reversal film is the other expedient introduced with the aim to reduce the costs, and it has immediately become one of the main technological features of amateur cinema. The reversal film is a negative film chemically converted into a positive one ready for projection, without the need for an extra film print. This also means that every movie shot on reversal film is a unique specimen, whose preservation is, therefore, extremely important.

6

See Steve Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Color (London: Basingstoke-Macmillan Education, 1985) and Leo Enticknap, Moving Image Technology: from Zoetrope to Digital (London-New York: Wallflower Press, 2005). For a detailed chronology of colour-film processes see the Timeline of Historical Film Colors, http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/.

7

Richard M. Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987).

F ire w or k s an d C arni v als

| 47

8

See Roger Odin, Ed. ‘Le cinéma en amateur’, special issue, Communications, 68 (Paris: Seuil, 1999); Roger Odin, Ed. Le film de famille: usage public, usage privé (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1995); Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann, Eds. Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into History and Memory (BerkeleyLos Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2001).

9

On amateur cinema in Italy, see Luisella Farinotti and Elena Mosconi, Eds. ‘Il metodo e la passione. Cinema amatoriale e film di famiglia in Italia’, special issue, Comunicazioni sociali 3 (2005); Alice Cati, Pellicole di ricordi. Film di famiglia e memorie private (1926–1942) (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2009).

10 ‘Stereoscopic movies and colour movies together will shape an interesting show that the audience will appreciate. The show will be completed by the addition of synchronous music and dialogues.’ Translation by author. Jacques Faure, L’entretien et l’exploitation du cinéma. Comment on tourne, comment on fabrique, comment on exploit un film (Paris: Éditions de ‘Sciences et Voyages’, [192?]), 96.

48 |

11 ‘The colour movie is the movie of the future, and through it cinema (nearly) achieves perfection. The flow of time is already defeated, since it is possible to relive leisurely all the visual impressions experienced with the loved ones, in the favourite places of the hometown, in the wonderful sites discovered on vacation or during travels. But it lacks colour, which gives everything its true value, and makes the delight of the eyes.’ Translation by author. Duclair-Northy, Pour bien tourner. Guide des cinégraphiste amateur (Paris: Lemonnier, 1924), 122–123. 12 For example, Rodolfo Namias, La tecnica e la pratica dei viraggi moderni nelle prove su carta, nei film cinematografici e nelle diapositive per proiezione fissa, stereoscopia e ornamento (Milan: Il Progresso fotografico, 1928) and J. Henri-Robert, La pratique de la cinématographie d’amateurs. De la prise de vues à la projection (Paris: Publications photographiques et cinématographiques Paul Montel, 1930). 13 Ernesto Cauda, La cinematografia per tutti: guida pratica per cinedilettanti (Roma: A.C.I.E.P., 1931), 156–159. 14 Kaveh Askari, ‘Early 16mm Colour by a Career Amateur’, Film History, 21.2 (2009): 157. On amateur colour cinema in the 1930s, see also Charles Tepperman, ‘Color Unlimited: Amateur Color Cinema in the 1930s’, in Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive, edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins (New York-London: Routledge, 2013), 138–149. 15 Philippe Dubois, ‘Hybridations et métissages. Les mélanges du noir-et-blanc et de la couleur’, in La couleur en cinéma, edited by Jacques Aumont (Milan-Paris: Mazzotta-Cinémathèque française, 1995), 74–92. For an exhaustive analysis of Baldassini’s collection, see Mirco Santi, ‘Petit, simple, bon marché. Storia, tecnologia e pratiche d’archivio del Pathé Baby’ (Doctoral thesis, International Research Doctorate in Audiovisual Studies: Cinema, Music and Communication, University of Udine, 2010–2011).

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

16 ‘The following explanations assume that the reader is familiar with the general working principles of colour photography.’ Translation by author. G. Gronostayski, Le cinéma substandard. Muet, sonore, en couleurs, en relief (Paris: J. de Francia Editeur, 1938), 183. 17 Derek Townsend, Filming in colour (London: Fountain Press, 1960), 9. 18 ‘Sharpness and a good colour rendering are not enough to make a good photo, but they are the necessary conditions. A blurred image or an image with noticeably distorted colours would be worthless. From an artistic perspective, we must ensure that the forms and colours are arranged in a eye-pleasing mode – this is what distinguishes an artistic photograph from any unrefined snapshots.’ Translation by author. Russell Langley, Le guide du Kodachrome (Paris: Éditions Prisma, 1967, 4–5. 19 Townsend, Filming in colour, 33–34. 20 Townsend, Filming in colour, 9. 21 For an account on Portaluppi and his many ‘secondary’ activities, see Luca Molinari and Fondazione Piero Portaluppi, Eds. Piero Portaluppi: linea errante nell’architettura del Novecento (Milan: Skira, 2003). For his cinematic activity, see Luisella Farinotti, ‘Piero Portaluppi’, in Il cinema degli architetti, edited by Vincenzo Trione (Milan: Johan & Levi Editore, 2014), 182–185. The Portaluppi Foundation is depositary of the filmic heritage of the architect. Furthermore, L’amatore (Maria Mauti, 2016) is a movie which illustrates the figure of Portaluppi by re-using its amateur footage. 22 The reel has been lost, or it has not been decoded. On Kodacolor in the amateur production, see also Marsha Gordon, ‘Lenticular Spectacles: Kodacolor’s Fit in the Amateur Arsenal’, Film History, 25.4 (2013): 36–61. 23 Rodolfo Namias, La fotografia in colori. L’autocromia, i processi fotomeccanici in colori, la cinematografia in colori (Milan: Il Progresso fotografico, 1930), 265. 24 Pierre Sorlin, Les fils de Nadar. Le ‘siécle’ de l’image analogique (Paris: Nathan, 1997). 25 Roger Odin, ‘Il cinema amatoriale’, in Storia del cinema mondiale. Teorie, strumenti, memorie. Parte I, edited by Gian Piero Brunetta (Turin-Milan: Einaudi-Il Sole24ORE, 2009), 330. Translation by author. 26 Frances Guerin, Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 179. 27 Alexandra Schneider, ‘Die Stars sind wir’: Heimkino als filmische Praxis (Marburg, Germany: Schüren, 2004). 28 Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 108. 29 Patrice Flichy, Une histoire de la communication moderne. Espace public et vie privée (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).

F ire w or k s an d C arni v als

| 49

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Elena Gipponi is a postdoctoral fellow at Iulm University of Milan, where she obtained her PhD in ‘Communication and New Technologies’, with a thesis that explores the use of colour in Italian home movies and amateur cinema. Since 2008, she has collaborated with Iulm’s courses of History of Cinema. She has published many essays, particularly on contemporary Italian cinema and on the transition from black and white to colour in the Italian media landscape. She is on the editorial staff of Cinéma & Cie. International Film Studies Journal, and of Cinergie. Il cinema e le altre arti.

50 |

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

CHAPTER 2

Liminal Perceptions Intermediality and the Exhibition of ­Nonfiction Film Liz Watkins

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH02

ABSTRACT Colour in early 1900s nonfiction films was designed to be viewed sensuously (Yumibe, 2012; Peterson, 2014), a practice that persisted in the public exhibition of scientific expedition photography. An analysis of polar expeditions, contemporary to the emergence of cinema, reads references to colour (sunrise, sunsets, Aurora Australis) recorded at a specific time and place as coordinates mapping the interactions of body and environment. Liminal perceptions, signalled through a configuration of references (sketches, journals, photographs), trace a combination of interests in the scientific study of landscape and its elaboration as spectacle in modern visual culture. In exhibition, the sensual appeal and connection of technologies and subject matter in visual display (Gunning, 1991) conveyed what eluded direct registration: chroma, sound, touch, odour. k e y wo r ds

Ponting, Wilson, exhibition, lantern slides, Antarctic, scientific expedition, colour, performance, script, photography, Hurley

| 51

LIMINAL COLOURS

52 |

The colours of early 1900s fiction films – although variously elusive in their photographic registration – were designed to be viewed sensuously, a practice more recently linked to nonfiction works.1 Colour, although complicated by the technical limits of photographic technologies, was a topic of concern for the scientific study of Antarctic wildlife, the landscape, and the chromatic effects of meteorological phenomena during the Heroic Age of Polar Exploration (1897–1922), thus contemporary with the emergence of cinema. Experiments with ‘natural colour’ processes, deemed unsuccessful or lost, can be tracked throughout expedition records from notes regarding Reginald Koettlitz’s colour still photographs, produced on the Discovery expedition (1901–1904), to Herbert G. Ponting’s Autochromes on Scott’s fated South Pole expedition 1910–1913.2 In this context, Ponting’s work formed the first cinematographic record of the Antarctic for which the colours of the landscape were predominantly mediated through black-and-white images to be evoked through the descriptions given by explorers and lecturers and the combination of different media (lantern slides, film, sketches, watercolours, text) in public exhibition. The narratives and pictorial display of material from these scientific expeditions were elaborated by use of applied colour processes, including tinting, toning, and painting by hand. Natural phenomena such as the uncertain movement of a storm at sea could offer an enchanting spectacle and, as Gunning suggests, even in films with little narrative to discern, ‘colour seems to function as an attraction, a very direct visual stimulus. It’s something to look at, something to surprise you, to amaze you’.3 The representation of colour in the photographic records of polar expeditions had a sensuous appeal, but can also be linked to the temporality of the Antarctic (sunrise, sunsets, the height and movement of the Aurora Australis) as a dramatic display that entangled technology and spectacle with nonfiction film. The sensuous colours of early fiction film persist in the theatrical presentation of expedition photographs and film for public entertainment. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Royal Geographical Society invested in the lantern-slide lecture as an educational model able to entice and entertain public interest: in popular exhibition, sensationalism and geography were already linked. An analysis of the exhibition and performance of the photographic and cinematographic materials produced by Herbert G. Ponting on Captain R. F Scott’s4 fated British Antarctic Expedition (1910–1913) and in reference to Frank Hurley’s work on Earnest Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914–1916) indicates that, although colour eluded direct registration by any single medium (photography, film, sketches, watercolours, journals, meteorological notes), its recurrence in narratives and representa-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

tions of the Antarctic for public exhibition is significant. Colour was evoked through the combination of media in ‘synchronised lecture entertainments’ as both a spectacle and as a referent in the depiction of landscape and the formation of narratives intended for public consumption.5 In expedition records, colour and photography, although not a primary focus, play a significant role as a subject of experimentation and as a method of noting scientific studies and geographical features of the landscape. The ‘atemporal white space’ of cartographic studies of the region were gradually refigured in the public imagination as the photographic records of expeditions began to visualize the Antarctic interior.6 In public exhibition, the area, with little cartographic definition, was imaged as a white expanse, which gradually became entangled with references to colour. Each photograph, sketch and note, recorded at a specific time and place, formed coordinates in the mapping of the interactions of body and environment. Notes on colour and photography can be read as a record of the sensory perceptions of the explorer and ‘camera-artist’, which become part of a broader discourse of spectacle and display in modern visual culture. In exhibition, the sensual appeal of a ‘cinema of attraction’ could convey, through description and varying combinations of media, what eluded direct registration by any single medium: chroma, sound, touch, and odour.7 The association of the body – its senses and perceptions of the landscapes of expedition narratives – with spectacle in exhibition, in the midst of social and technological change, finds expression in narratives of the Aurora Australis, corona, and halos that encircle the sun as the colour effects of light refracted by the ice and blizzards that erode the visual delineation of landmarks from sight. Liminal colours describe those that were not directly registered by photographic technologies available to Ponting, Koettlitz, and, later, Frank Hurley, but were signalled through a configuration of different references: notes from sketchbooks and journals, photographs and cinematography traced a delicate combination of interests in the scientific study of landscape and its elaboration as spectacle in the exhibition of early nonfiction film.8 The Royal Geographical Society founded their photography collection in 1884 as a resource for education and the promotion of exploration; the subsequent decades saw the illustrated lantern-slide lecture became a popular form of entertainment. Whilst short lantern-slide lectures combining photographs and illustrative slides prepared from sketches of the Arctic expeditions led by Nansen and Amundsen were available, Ponting’s work as camera artist for Scott’s 1910–1913 South Pole expedition was innovative in its inclusion of cinematography. As an experienced travel lecturer, Ponting was familiar with a dependence on visual media and its potential for conveying the work of an expedition. In scripting a ‘cinema lecture’, Ponting organized lantern slides and film into a form able to underscore selected aspects of written texts.9

L i m inal P erceptions

| 53

54 |

Dixon finds a similar approach in his study of Frank Hurley’s ‘synchronised lecture entertainments’ and observes that, on return from Shackleton’s expedition in 1916, Hurley attended four of Ponting’s cinema lectures remarking on the aptitude of the camera artist in the performance of his work.10 Hurley comments that Ponting’s ‘manner and delivery is excellent’, the lantern-slide lectures forming combination of images and texts that ‘gives the impression the penguins were actually performing to his words’.11 Hurley relates a day spent with Ponting discussing his work and the purchase of 80 lantern slides from Scott’s expedition with rights to perform Ponting’s lecture in Australia alongside the tale of his own work for Shackleton and Mawson.12 The documentation of the polar expeditions consisted of scientific and artistic studies, producing materials that were then combined into a narrative of their work presented in multimedia forms. The narratives were elicited in exhibition from a complicated arrangement of photographs, the projection of film and lantern slides, the performance of guest speakers, the presentation of artefacts, and the accompaniment of live music. The scripts written by Ponting for his ‘cinema lectures’ relate the sonorous and chromatic qualities of the Antarctic landscape – the sound of conversation carried across a sparse icescape and the green lights of the Aurora Australis, tinged with red, moving across the sky, and the effects of light refracted by ice as a spectrum of colours – and offer directions for text to be spoken only when the auditorium lights were dimmed.13 The text and instructions for the performance of Ponting’s script are theatrical, emphasizing the spectacular aspects of the landscape: its colours, unusual auditory qualities and the behaviours of Antarctic wildlife. Captain Scott relates the ‘vivid descriptions’ given in Ponting’s lantern-slide lectures onboard the expedition ship, the Terra Nova, as attentive to variations in sound and silence, colour, and movement: senses and perceptions that were mediated through a combination of technologies and performance.14 The integral, yet sublimated, role of the body, its senses, and perceptions – colour, sounds, touch – in historiographies and media archaeologies of early-1900s expeditions was entwined with the encoding and interpretation of landscape. As a subject of study for the expedition, and tempered by their indirect registration, such sensory perceptions seem liminal to expedition records, yet they offer a vivid aspect of the images and narratives of early-1900s Antarctic exploration. Liminal colours – interpreted from monochrome pencil notes, sketches, and photography – recalled in performance, are accessed and imagined in revisions of images and texts toward the formation of a nuanced narrative: a discourse which appeals to the spectator through memory, expression, and sensation in early nonfiction film.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

PONTING, PHOTOGRAPHY, AND COLOUR News reports published in 1910, prior to the departure of the expedition, indicate Ponting’s plan to ‘secure good colour effects of the Antarctic icescape by means of new autochrome cameras’15 and ‘in true natural colours’.16 Photography and colour were integral to the identification of wildlife, but were also intended to facilitate the study of meteorological effects such as solar corona, paraselena (fig 2.1), iridescent cirrus clouds, and the refraction of colour by frozen crystals of water. The intention to record different effects of the light and atmospheric phenomena including that of the Aurora Australis is underscored by Ponting’s handwritten notes: details of the time, date, and location signal the intersection of scientific study with an attention to the pictorial aesthetic of images required for lantern-slide lectures. Scott’s journal entries for September 1910 refer to the use of colour screens for still photography as ‘an extraordinary addition to one’s powers’17 and com­ment that, should Ponting be ‘able to carry out the whole of his programme, we shall have a cinematograph and photographic record which will be absolutely new in expeditionary work’.18 Although the Aurora Australis (fig. 2.2) and parhelion had been observed and sketched by Edward Wilson on Scott’s British National Antarctic Expedition 1901–1904, descriptions of a display of the Aurora Australis over Mount Erebus trace the transience of colour and movement. Scott writes of a brightness across a ‘curtain’ of ‘light […] a palish green colour’, which fluctuates with a distinctly ‘red flush preceding the motion of any bright part’;19 his reference to a ‘green ghostly light’, which ‘seems suddenly to spring to life with rosy blushes’, becomes a hypothesis playful with ideas of spiritualism: infinite suggestions in this phenomenon, and in that lies its charm; the suggestion of life, form, colour and movement never less than evanescent, mysterious –no reality. It is the language of mystic signs and portents – the inspiration of the gods – wholly spiritual – divine signalling. Remindful of superstition, provocative of imagination. might not the inhabitants of some other world (Mars) controlling mighty forces thus surround our globe with fiery symbols, a golden writing which we have not the key to decipher?20 Scott’s sense of wonder at the visual phenomena of the Antarctic landscape is tempered by the difficulties encountered by Ponting in producing a photographic record: a journal entry for 25 April 1911 notes that ‘Ponting has taken some coloured pictures, but the result is not very satisfactory and the plates are much spotted’.21 Descriptions of the Aurora Australis as fluvial sheets of

L i m inal P erceptions

| 55

Top: 2.1: Edward A. Wilson, 13 May 1911, 8am. Paraselena, Cape Evans, McMurdo Sound. Watercolour. (555mm x 405mm). Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, with permission.

Left: 2.2: Edward A. Wilson, Aurora and sunset seen across McMurdo Sound from Hut Point. Mount Lister in centre. 1910–1913. N1389. Watercolour (272mmx 362 mm). Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, with permission.

light emphasize colour and movement as characteristics of the phenomenon, which eluded direct photographic and cinematographic registration by any single medium.22 In a letter to Edward Wilson, Ponting expresses ‘there are two regrets about the work I did. One is that I was unable to get any aurora pictures and the other that I was done out of the Western trip’.23 The fleeting effects of these meteorological phenomena are recorded in retrospect through written accounts, sketches, and watercolours to be evoked through Ponting’s curiously curatorial approach to the exhibition of still and moving images in his lantern-slide lectures.

SCREENING THE ANTARCTIC: PERFORMANCE AND MEDIA The camera negatives of 1910–1913 expedition were initially processed by Ponting in the Antarctic and returned to the UK in separate consignments to be screened in two parts under the title With Captain Scott R.N., to the South Pole (1911 and 1912). Ponting subsequently reedited his film footage of the expedition across an initial twenty-year period, leaving numerous prints in circulation, including The Great White Silence (1924), which was coloured (tinting, toning, hand painting) and formed the focus of the British Film Institute National Archive’s 2010 conservation and digital colour restoration. Ponting’s subsequent revision, 90º South (1933), was technological and textual, with the addition of synchronized sound track and newly commissioned material (maps and animated sequences to illustrate the progression of the Southern Sledge journey). Ponting’s correspondence with the Royal Geographical Society in 1917 indicates a performance of With Captain Scott to the Antarctic as a scripted configuration which combined performance with ‘images, both moving and still can be projected at their best. The lecture lasts for two hours, and it is a continuous series of pictures. Many beautiful pictures will be presented for the first time, in addition to the main scenes that were originally shown’.24 The film footage and selected photographs of the expedition were initially registered in black and white; in exhibition, however, as with Hurley’s work, sections of film and lantern slides were coloured using tinting, toning, and painted by hand.25 The addition of colour to still and moving images may introduce a layer of artifice in keeping with the entertainments of a ‘cinema of attraction’ and yet, in Ponting’s work, the use of colour can be linked to his descriptive recollection of the chromatic effects of light refracted by the Antarctic ice. Ponting’s photographs and film footage of the Terra Nova seen through an ice cave can be linked to his written account of the expedition, The Great White South, through his attention to colour: ‘During this first and subsequent visits, I found the colouring of the grotto changed with the position of the sun;

L i m inal P erceptions

| 57

thus sometimes green would predominate, then blue, and then again it was a delicate lilac’; a ‘myriad of crystals’ that ‘decomposed the rays into lovely prismatic hues, so the walls appeared to be studded with gems’.26 Ponting’s script for With Captain Scott in the Antarctic includes lantern slides of this cavern in a section that emphasizes the chromatic effect of light refracted by ice: SLIDE 30 Interior of the cavern. Here it is. The entrance to it was fringed with great icicles and millions of ice crystals clustered about the walls. The sunlight reflected into these crystals was split up into all the colours of the prism, so that the walls gleamed as though they were covered with myriads of gems. The place was a veritable wonderland of beauty and it was the most remarkable work of Jack Frost that was seen during the expedition. This grotto was christened Aladdin’s cave.27 58 |

The description of colour in the text and as the subject of his speech in the performance of the lantern-slide lecture coalesces with the photographic in a combination of still and moving images to evoke the decomposition of the

2.3: Herbert G. Ponting, Arch Berg, The Great White Silence. British Film Institute National Archive’s 2010 digital colour restoration.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

ice. Notes on changes in ice formations and sensory perceptions – odour, colours of refracted light, coldness – present sources of wonder in the extremes of the Antarctic landscape that can be traced across Ponting’s cinema lecture script, his correspondence with other expedition members, and in his written account, The Great White South. A similar practice is encountered in The Great White Silence (Ponting, 1924) as still images of the cavern taken a year apart are intercut with sections of film (Fig 2.3). The curation of images and text into a lecture utilizes practices that can be likened to the photographic effects of the film: from the sequencing of lantern slides and moving images that Ponting likens to time-lapse photography – a shorthand for the duration of change such as that used to show a gull chick hatching – to the manipulation of auditorium lights and sequences that ‘must be run slower than usual’ for dramatic effect.28 Dixon’s analysis of Hurley’s travel lectures finds that the interconnections of written and visual media trace a ‘presentational aesthetic, the collage and the dissolve’ in a process of ‘synchronisation’ for exhibition that incorporates special effects that are associated specifically with photographic technologies.29 In Ponting’s work, this interrelatedness of image and text can be traced most vividly in his attention to colour and sound as sensory perceptions that are integral to his recollection of the polar landscape and his narration of the expedition for public exhibition. Hurley’s attention to colour echoes that of Ponting, his diaries noting the refraction of light in the southern skies of Antarctica as ‘prismatic, with a faint blue horizon blending into a pink tint in which stood a silver moon, glowing like a halo’ before ‘the horned moon dipped below the horizon, a faint orange blush suffused its path, which broadened and glowed till dawn spread the sky with tints of pink and blue’.30 Ponting interweaves these visual effects with the dramatic potential of theatrical lighting: the exhibition notes of his cinema lecture, With Captain Scott, signal words to ‘speak in the dark’, which are to be followed by a series of slides dedicated to the effects of light on cirrus clouds.31 These slides are purposeful in their elaboration of colour: Slide 35 ‘When the daylight is beginning to fail there are frequently the most beautiful cloud effects to be seen. There were the most remarkable “cirrus” clouds that any member of the expedition had ever observed in any part of the world, they were stained all pink by the afterglow, and looked exactly like flames.’32 These descriptions, like the use of applied colour for selected lantern slides, photographic prints, and film, offer a layer of interpretation over the ‘subtle shadows of the snow and […] wonderful transparent texture’ that Scott notes

L i m inal P erceptions

| 59

2.4: Herbert G. Ponting, ‘Taking in fish trap -40º’. Black-and-white lantern slide with details hand-painted in yellow. RGS-IBG 834/77. Courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society, London.

of Ponting’s black-and-white photography.33 The chromatic is not directly registered, but always encountered through recollection, revealing a layer of interpretation: the liminal colours of the landscape and transient effects of meteorological phenomena emerge through the intermedial practices of representation. Colour recurs in relation to a combination of natural and artificial light in a subsequent image labelled ‘Slide 38 Fish Trap’, which details the work of the expedition drawing fish to the surface of the sea ice in the darkness of the polar night. Ponting remarks that the photograph of Atkinson and Clissold in -45F was taken by flashlight. A glass lantern slide held at the Royal Geographical Society is in keeping with this image and its annotation – ‘Taking in Fish Trap’.34 Yellow dye is hand-painted across a select area of the photographic composition signifying light falling from a lantern set on the ice (fig 2.4), a use of colour that again visualizes the description in Ponting’s lecture. As a camera artist, Ponting’s notes on the exhibition of his photography are exemplary, indicating the perceptions that remain beyond the technical limits of direct registration for the expedition records. The lecture script

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

infers a sensate meaning through the sequencing and timing of still images and films in performance, that certain instances – words to be spoken in the dark and the shift to the lantern slide of a cirrus clouds noted for its elaborate hues – underscore. Sound and its silences are noted as integral to a spatial sense of the Antarctic underscoring the imaged expanse of the landscape: the prospect that opened out was of arresting grandeur […] it was not so much the austere beauty of the scene that so dominated me, as its utter desolation, and its intense and wholly indescribable loneliness. I stood awhile beneath the shivering stars, with every sense alert, striving to detect some sound; but the stillness about me was profound. Concentrate the faculties as I might, I could hear nothing but the beating of my heart.35 Through silence, Ponting finds the sonority of his body intense; other sounds that resonate across the vast landscape and distant voices are heard all the more acutely. For his lecture, With Captain Scott in the Antarctic, Ponting writes that ‘in these lonely regions. On a calm day human voices in ordinary conversation can be heard a mile or more’ and ‘whales breathing at a distance of seven or eight miles away’.36 The phenomena of the landscape – its desolation marked in contrast with sensory perceptions such as the ‘spray and a very oily odour’ of the whales – interlink sensationalism and geography in exhibition.37 The ‘ability to show something’, to demonstrate it, in Tom Gunning’s sense, is characteristic of the cinema of attractions that connects technologies and subject matter in a visual display, which is formulated to elicit a sensual response from the spectator.38 Ponting’s lantern slides emphasize colour and display in performance, including what can be read as a reflexive note regarding the practice of exhibiting work from his earlier travel photography in the Winter Base Hut in Antarctica. A lantern slide of Ponting lecturing was made from a combination of images: a smaller imprint of a Japanese woman seated and holding a musical instrument is superimposed onto a picture of a blank screen set before a group of expedition members. This ‘composite photograph’ combines two photographic negatives to produce a single image (fig 2.5), which visualizes Ponting’s narration of his lectures in the Antarctic.39 This lantern slide – ‘Herbert G. Ponting Lecturing’ – held at the Royal Geographical Society is handpainted (fig 2.6): the expedition members are in dull blue and grey-brown colours, hues that are similar to the darkness of the room and so frame the image that Ponting projects onto the screen. The cone of light cast from the projector is sketched – painted on – in translucent layers of white, directing the viewer’s attention toward the picture superimposed on to the screen: the

L i m inal P erceptions

| 61

2.5: Herbert G. Ponting, Lanternslide lecture, 16 October 1911. Black-and-white photograph. Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, with permission.

2.6: Herbert G. Ponting, ‘Herbert G. Ponting Lecturing’. Lantern slide coloured using hand painting. RGS-IBG Collections [LS/834], courtesy of the Royal Geographical Society, London.

image of a woman that forms the focus of display is coloured in pinks, yellows, and bright blue against a pale sky-blue background. The composition of the image and the use of colour contrast emphasizes a link between the chromatic and spectacle, which connects with photographic technologies as both the subject of his images and texts.40

NOTES ABOUT COLOUR The 1914 exhibition of With Captain Scott in the Antarctic at the Philharmonic Hall in London included a display of photographic prints. The practice of combining different media to convey a sensate perception of the landscape that was not directly recorded included plans to exhibit Ponting’s photographic prints alongside sketches and watercolours by the expedition’s Chief of Scientific Staff, Edward Wilson. In a letter of instruction regarding a package of 100 watercolours that were returned to England in 1911, Wilson wrote that Ponting and I should exhibit together, an arrangement I like, especially if the exhibition comes off when we all return […] If Ponting thinks that the colour in my things would in the least help his beautiful photos, then I should like them to be shown.41 Wilson articulates the potential of the watercolours to supplement the photographic record of the landscape by utilizing a combination of materials that, in their assemblage, visualize the colour effects that were otherwise lost from direct registration in the Antarctic. The colours and sounds of the environment were recorded in notes to be interpreted through a process marked by delay and memory toward the formation of landscape for public exhibition. The execution of the paintings, like the photographs, was tempered by its technical limits: ‘as regards colour one can do nothing out of doors. Chalks are possible but impracticable’, thus his work was marked by the freezing of his hands as they recovered ‘again and again and at last produced an untidy and dirty but truthful rough sketch with notes scribbled all over it’ to facilitate the reproduction of a coloured image (figure 2.7).42 The extremes of this practice are highlighted in the catalogue for an exhibition that combined Wilson’s sketches and watercolours: ‘owing to the very low temperature it was impossible to use water colours out of doors in the Antarctic. Dr Wilson therefore made careful pencil notes of the outlines and colour of hills and clouds’.43 Wilson’s sketchbooks from the Southern Sledge Journey include pencil ‘note sketches’ made from direct observation and ‘memory sketches’ drawn from recollection; each annotates geographical features and meteorological

L i m inal P erceptions

| 63

2.7: Edward A. Wilson, ‘colour note’ pencil sketch of parhelion, Southern Sledge Journey Sketchbooks MS7971, vol 1-2, BJ, p. 92. Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, with permission.

effects with references to colour, orientation, and date.44 Wilson’s sketches privilege tonal values – the line and form of the landscape as an aesthetic of objective practice, over an attention to hue as a more subjective record – an approach that is in keeping with his study of The Elements of Drawing during the expedition.45 The delicate outline of a horizon sketched across two pages occasionally continues on a third, the connecting features marked by a symbol like a cross in an act of mapping the terrain. The vast expanse of the horizon reaching beyond the pages of the book and continuing across an additional section that unfolds from its edges. The notes on colour regard the appearance of rocks protruding from the ice and the halo and ghosting effects that encircle the sun (parhelion) and the moon (paraselene). Wilson’s observations, as his practice adapts to the effects of working in an adverse environment, initially seem to accord to the history of artistic practice in Western culture that associates colore with artifice and subordinates it to the objectivity and logic that are linked in disegno (drawing).46 In differentiating disegno from colore in his practice, Wilson remarks upon the significance of the fleeting effects of light refracted by clouds of ice crystals and the shifting formations that trace the effects of weather and the morphology of the Antarctic. Wilson finds that the seemingly superficial effects of light disallow a general approach to sketch a landscape ‘which is gone as you look at it [and] which you will never see again. Cloud. Sunset lights’ necessitate attention to the ‘small differences of shade [and] colour which make up all the contours of a place like this.’ 47 Working between science and artistic practice, it seems that, for Wilson, colore is integral to noting the physics and wonder of the environment. Colour, for Wilson, remains an uncertain yet significant characteristic in the perception of the landscape, obfuscating and mediating landmarks in an environment that continually alters. The history of colour as an ‘amalgam of theories and practices’ persists in theories of intermediality and the practices of recording and exhibiting images of the Antarctic.48 The study of colour traces a material and cultural history through the mediation and interpretation of interactions of body and environment, which underlie the formation of narratives and visual records of the landscape. The annotation and later addition of colour to sketches and film, recalled from a configuration of notes, sketches, and photographs, is caught between memory and an effect that, as Gunning notes, leaves it to ‘shimmer on top of things […] this kind of weird insubstantial quality […] is part of its joy in the silent era’.49 In the exhibition of early-1900s nonfiction film, applied colours utilized by Ponting are embedded in a discourse of exploration, which interweaves the effects of memory with the interpretation of the Antarctic as landscape, a process of mapping and understanding that persists in the formulation of materials for public display.

L i m inal P erceptions

| 65

In this instance, applied colours, which Gunning suggests do not ‘necessarily carry any decodable meaning, any paraphrasable meaning, but is purely a kind of sensuous play’ indicate the intersections of body, technology, and environment that are particular to the combination of interests found in the work of the expedition members, from the scientific study of landscape to its elaboration as a narrative, education, and entertainment in exhibition.50 The intermediality and performance of early cinema saw colour take on a ‘lyrical’51 or expressive function that diverges from the subordination of applied colouring within

66 |

the dominant discourse on color cinema [which] subsumes its aesthetics to the telos of realism and privileges the development of natural color cinematography. Applied coloring has been denigrated in this logic as a primitive attempt to simulate reality before technology evolved enough to reproduce the indexical hues of reality.52 The liminality of colour in landscape is linked with spectacle and geography in exhibition as the cultural ordering of an unfamiliar territory otherwise visualized as an abstract and atemporal white space.53 The mediation and expression of the Antarctic environment for a Western audience, combined with the interpretation and performance of its sensate aspects such as the fleeting effects of colour, express the temporality of the landscape. The combination of different media and texts and the manipulation of specific images gradually forms an iconography of the explorer that is translated across different institutional and commercial domains.54 Ponting’s articulation of the body as the mediation of perception of the landscape is integral to the expedition narrative, from the superimposition of a figure to exemplify the daunting scale of a mountain, to a written description of a sense of vulnerability against the amorphous glacial formations that emerge and deteriorate as temperatures alter. Whilst photography and sketches form an aspect of scientific work, recording details of the Antarctic environment and wildlife, the special effects that Dixon has identified in the presentational aesthetic of Frank Hurley’s photographs and films – superimposition, the dissolve, combinations of still and moving images – offer an additional perspective. In his cinema lectures, Ponting interlinked a configuration of images with performance to evoke the physical and cognitive vulnerabilty of the explorers. The use of colour in the depiction of artificial and natural light signal inhabitation and the temporality of a landscape subject to change, offering a less often considered dimension of expedition narratives. Each script is interwoven with the question of perception, that is both physiological and cognitive. Ponting reviewed and reedited the film footage over a period of twenty

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

years in keeping with technical developments, from the incorporation of intertitles, newly commissioned film of dioramas, a visual effect of the sun rising after months of darkness in the Antarctic winter, and an animation of the Southern Sledge Journey for The Great White Silence (1924).55 A synchronized sound version of the film, 90˚ South, was produced in 1933. In correspondence with Frank Debenham, a geographer on the expedition, regarding a map of the region that was to be edited in to 90˚ South, Ponting notes his decision to omit information that is ‘only of interest to scientists’ whilst exaggerating the scale of Mount Erebus to offer ‘a remarkable idea of the kind of terrain in which the expedition operated’.56 This compromise in accuracy marks the continuation of Ponting’s interest in linking sensationalism and geography through a combination of media, performance, and narrative. Ponting’s revisions are in keeping with a gradual and discontinuous shift from the ‘cinema of attractions’ as a display of curiosities linking spectacle with natural phenomena to one of ‘narrative integration’ in which experiment and fascination with film form were subordinate to character and story.57 However, the organization of still and moving images in the script for Ponting’s cinema lecture With Captain Scott in the Antarctic underpins the structure of his feature film The Great White Silence (1924): select visual effects are retained and the fascination with the chromatic manifests through instructions for colouring the film using fourteen different combinations of hand painting, tinting, and toning.58 The legacy of the cinema lecture persists in the configuration of materials that form Ponting’s 1924 film. The applied-colour processes used in The Great White Silence and simulated in the digital restoration are distinct from what might be considered a ‘natural colour’ image, yet their function in the film echoes those of the cinema-lecture script. In this sense, spectacular aspects of the landscape are evoked, not in ‘natural colour’, but through a combination of intertitles and applied colours, which signal the occurrence and temporality of fleeting effects of light on ice. Scott’s reference to the ‘Arch Berg’, a specific formation of ice that, in Ponting’s iconic image, frames the expedition ship, the Terra Nova, is particularly attentive to colour: Ponting has been ravished by a view of the ship seen from a big cave in an ice berg, and wished to get pictures of it […] I had rarely seen anything more beautiful than this cave. It was really a sort of crevasse in a tilted berg parallel to the original surface; the strata on either side had bent outwards; through the back the sky could be seen through a screen of beautiful icicles – it looked a royal purple, whether by contrast with the blue of the cavern or whether from an optical illusion I do not know. Through the large entrance could be seen also partly through icicles, the ship, the Western Mountains, and a lilac sky; a wonderfully beautiful picture.59 L i m inal P erceptions

| 67

68 |

The lantern slide and notes on colour, which formed a focus for Ponting’s cinema lecture are articulated in The Great White Silence to track the deterioration of the ice across a series of still and moving images.60 Ponting describes the Arch Berg as an ‘ice grotto’ and ‘Aladdin’s Cave’, an act which is territorial in the naming of an uninhabited region. The interpretation of the landscape through a cultural reference is interwoven with the colour and framing of the image. The intersections of technology and landscape in representation are also typified in the later image of the explorers departing on the Southern Sledge Journey and as their silhouettes are gradually eroded by a landscape of light and ice. In this section of film, photographic effects, cinematography, icon, and medium converge to enact a visual effect: that of the expedition members enveloped by the Antarctic environment. The visual erosion of a detailed image composition begins to function on a more affective level as it aligns geography and spectacle in an iconography of exploration and the unknown; the irresolute loss of the expedition members – Scott, Wilson, Oates, Evans, and Bowers – on their return journey from the South Pole. Liminal colours – through their indirect registration and as a focus of recollection in performance – link memory and expression with sensationalism in the cultural interpretation of a landscape in which colour, between nature and artifice, indicates a historiographic practice that is inflected with imperial acts of naming and mapping in response to the shifting morphology of the Antarctic. The colour effects of meteorological phenomena and variations in light – sunrise, sunset, the months of darkness that characterize Antarctic winters incurring the use of flashlight photography – are associated with the temporality of the region and signalled by shifts in colour in The Great White Silence. This practice indicates a sensuous use of colour more frequently associated with fiction film, which Peterson61 links to early-1900s nonfiction educational films and which can be extended to the theatrical presentation of the photographic documentation of scientific expeditions for public exhibition. The use of flashlight photography focusses on the work of the expedition – raising fish traps, meteorology, Ponting in his darkroom, Wilson painting, and Scott writing at his desk – the fall of light visualizing the enclosed spaces of inhabitation. The use of this technique for exterior shots is organized around specific features of the landscape where an uneven circumference of artificial flash of light is quickly dispersed into the environment. Ponting’s assertion that ‘it’s only the pictorial prints that pay’62 coalesces with the use of the superimposition of a more dramatic sky or a figure to emphasize the desolation of the glacial plains as cultural form of interpretation and a move toward public exhibition.63 The intonation of colour can be tracked through the cultural organization of images and texts – from the architectural description of the Arch Berg, also named as an Aladdin’s Cave and Ice Grotto to the

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

reference to the ‘Charlie Chaplin’ of the penguin colony – that embed the film in a context of commercialism, education, imperialism, and entertainment to the organization of a symbolic landscape.64

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research forms part of a British Academy Small Research Grant. With thanks to the British Film Institute National Archive, Thomas H. Manning Polar Archive and Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, the Royal Geographical Society, and The Alexander Turnbull Library Collections at the National Library of New Zealand.

| 69

NOTES 1

Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New BrunswickNew Jersey-London: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Jennifer Peterson, ‘Lyrical Education: Music and Colour in Early Non-fiction Film,’ in Performing New Media 1890–1915, edited by Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe (John Libbey Publishing 2014), 186–192.

2

Aubrey A. Jones, Scott’s Forgotten Surgeon: Dr Reginald Koettlitz, Polar Explorer (Dunbeath, Caithness, Scotland: Whittles Publishing, 2011). Jones writes that Koettlitz’s colour photographs ‘would have made a wonderful addition to Dr Wilson’s superb sketches’ (Jones 2011, 163) in visualizing the hues of sunsets, the midnight sun, and cloud effects. Edward Wilson accompanied Scott on the Discovery (1901–1904) and Terra Nova (1910–1913) expeditions to the Antarctic. Ponting’s Autochromes, which are of sunsets, are held at the National Gallery of Australia. Black-and-white photography was used to record Norwegian Arctic expeditions led by Fridjof Nansen (1893–1897) and Roald Amundsen, as well as those led by Carsten Borchgrevnik (1898- 1901) and Amundsen (1910–1912).

3

Tom Gunning, ‘A Slippery Topic: Colour as Metaphor, Intention or Attraction?’ in Disorderly Order: Colours in Silent Film, edited by Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996), 40–41. Colour in such films can be linked to transient effects, such as flowers opening, sunrises and sunsets in landscapes of travel films.

4

Robert Dixon, ‘What was Travel Writing? Frank Hurley and the Media Contexts of Early Twentieth-Century Australian Travel Writing’, Studies in Travel Writing, 11 (2007): 59–60.

5

Dixon, ‘What was Travel Writing?’ 59, 63.

L i m inal P erceptions

6

Kathryn Yusoff, ‘Configuring the Field: Photography in Early Twentieth-Century Antarctic Exploration’ in New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century, edited by Simon Naylor and James R. Ryan (London-New York: I B Tauris, 2010), 52–77, 72.

7

Yumibe, Moving Color, 9; Adrian Bernard Klein, Colour-Music, the Art of Light (London: C. Lockwood, 1926). The broader cultural context of public entertainment in which travel films were seen included experimentation with the chromatic, traversed the theatrical use of light projected through coloured gels onto the diaphanous materials of a performer’s costume, musical instruments that projected a variation of coloured light according to a chromatic score, and the elaboration of landscapes in the production of lantern slides using applied colours (tinting, toning, painted by hand).

8

Yumibe, Moving Color, 6; Sarah Street and Josh Yumibe, ‘The Temporalities of Intermediality: Colour in Cinema and Arts of the 1920s’, Early Popular Visual

70 |

Culture, 11, no. 2 (2013): 140–157; Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-garde’, Wide Angle, 8.3/4 (1986): 63–70. 9

Herbert G. Ponting, ‘Mr Herbert G. Ponting’s Cinema Lecture “With Captain Scott in the Antarctic”‘, MS-papers-1225, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand; Liz Watkins, ‘Herbert G. Ponting’s Materials and Texts’, Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive, edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins (Routledge; New York and London, 2013), 230–242. Ponting’s film footage and lantern slides were in circulation from 1911. Although Ponting held the rights to the expedition stills photography, it was not until 1914 that the Gaumont Company agreed to his purchase of his cinematographic records. Ponting briefly began a programme of cinema lectures, incorporating still and moving images, at the Philharmonic Hall in London, which was discontinued with the outbreak of the Great War. In 1918, Hurley purchased rights to exhibit the lantern-slide lecture in Australia. With Scott to the South Pole was screened with a lecture by Walter Searle in Dunedin in New Zealand in 1920 (Otago Daily Times, 24 March 1920). Ponting resumed his lecture programme in 1919 whilst planning to reedit the material into a cinematic feature The Great White Silence (1924). The Great White Silence (1924) was exhibited internationally, including in France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

10 Dixon, ‘What was Travel Writing?’, 59, 63. Frank Hurley, The Diaries of Frank Hurley 1912–1941, edited by Robert Dixon and Christopher Lee (London: Anthem Press 2011), 107. 11 Hurley, Diaries, 18 November 1916. 12 Hurley, Diaries, 28 July 1918. On 3 August 1918, Ponting accompanied Hurley to Fenchurch Street Station as he departed for Tilbury Docks. In 1918, Hurley negotiated the Australasian exhibition rights for a combination of three films: The Home of the Blizzard (Hurley, 1913), which was based on Douglas Mawson’s Australasian

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Antarctic Expedition 1911–1914; In the Grip of the Polar Pack Ice (Hurley, 1917) from Shackleton’s 1914–1916 expedition; and Ponting’s With Captain Scott in the Antarctic (Dixon, 2007; Hurley, Diaries, 17 July 1918). 13 Ponting, Cinema Lecture, MS-papers-1225. 14 Robert Falcon Scott, Journals, Captain Scott’s Last Expedition [1910–1911], edited by Max Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Herbert G. Ponting, The Great White South [1921] (New York: Cooper Square, 2000)). 15 ‘Captain Scott’s Men. Science with the Camera. Terra Nova’s Start Tomorrow’, Daily Mail, 31 May 1910, MS1453/39/1-2 Thomas H. Manning Polar Archive, Cambridge. 16 The Times, (May 1910): 8. 17 Scott, Journals, 287. 18 Scott, Journals, 293. 19 Scott, Journals, 200.

| 71

20 Scott, Journals, 200. 21 Scott, Journals, 178. Scott’s journal corresponds with the date of Ponting’s Autochromes of sunsets, including ‘Afterglow 6.00pm April 1, 1911 from Camp Evans’, which is held at the National Gallery of Australia. 22 The expedition meteorologist, George Simpson, refers to Professor Störmer’s photographs of the Aurora Borealis in Norway, but does not suggest that these images were in colour (Scott, Journals, 200). 23 Ponting, Letter to E. A. Wilson (27 October 1912), MS964/12; D. Edward A. Wilson was Chief of Scientific Staff and a zoologist on the British Antarctic Expedition 1910–1913. Ponting returned to England in 1912 and continued to write to Wilson and Scott prior to news of the fate of the Southern Sledge Party reaching the UK in 1913. The Western journey was to Cape Crozier to collect Emperor Penguin eggs. 24 Ponting, Letter to Mr R. Hinks, Royal Geographical Society (7 December 1917), MS 964/10/6; Ponting, Cinema Lecture, MS-papers-1225. The duration of the lecture noted in Ponting’s letter to the Royal Geographical Society (1917) corresponds with ‘cinema lecture’ script, which is held in the Alexander Turnbull library in New Zealand. The script is undated, its title resembles that of the 1911–1912 screenings, yet it narrates the fate of the expedition, news of which reached England in 1913. Ponting purchased the film negatives from the Gaumont Company in 1914 and is listed as copyright holder of the cinema lecture script (MS-papers-1225). The two-hour duration of Ponting’s cinema-lecture script corresponds to that of his 1924 film, The Great White Silence. The organization of still and moving images in the Cinema Lecture script is not identical to and yet underpins the form of the 1924 release. 25 Dixon, ‘What was Travel Writing?’, 66. 26 Ponting, Great White South, 68.

L i m inal P erceptions

27 Ponting, Cinema Lecture, MS-papers-1225, 35. 28 Ponting, Cinema Lecture, MS-papers-1225, 40, 16. 29 Dixon, ‘What was Travel Writing?’ 66. 30 Hurley, Diaries, 23, 39. 31 Ponting, Cinema Lecture, MS-papers-1225, 44. 32 Ponting, Cinema Lecture, MS-papers-1225, 44. 33 Robert Falcon Scott cited in Ponting, The Great White South, xv. 34 Herbert G. Ponting, Lantern Slide Collection, Royal Geographical Society, RGSIBG, LS/834/77. This collection of lantern slides was purchased by the Royal Geographical Society from Ponting’s estate in 1936, following his death in 1935. The collection includes more items than the 80 lantern slides purchased by Hurley in 1918 or the 85 listed in Ponting cinema-lecture script, although the latter does include ‘interval slides’. 35 Ponting, Great White South, 149–150.

72 |

36 Ponting, Cinema Lecture, MS-papers-1225, 17. 37 Ponting, Cinema Lecture, MS-papers-1225, 17. 38 Gunning, ‘Cinema of Attraction’, 64 and 66; Dixon, ‘What was Travel Writing?’, 66. 39 Ponting, Cinema Lecture, MS-papers-1225, 49. Ponting, Lantern Slides, RGS-IBG, LS 834/96. Ponting, The Great White South, illustration 135. The caption for this image in Ponting’s written account of his work on the expedition indicates this process of editing images into an illustration (‘The Author Lecturing on Japan (A Composite Photograph)’, xxxi). 40 Ponting refers to the use of flashlight photography and includes images of himself filming and photographing his own endeavours as well as those of the other members of the expedition. The depiction of light from the projector shown in the lantern-slide image is hand-painted; variations in the density of paint, produced by the brushstrokes, would modulate the intensity of light that reached the screen when the lantern slide itself was projected, giving an atmospheric effect. 41 Edward A. Wilson, Letter to Mr and Mrs R J Smith, 19 October 1911, MS.559/142/9 Thomas H Manning Polar Archive, University of Cambridge. 42 Wilson, Lecture Notes 1910–1913, MS1225/3, Thomas H Manning Polar Archive, University of Cambridge. 43 Exhibition Catalogue, City of Hull Municipal Art Gallery, 1914. 44 Wilson, Southern Sledge Journey – sketchbooks (1911–1912) MS797/1-2; BJ, Thomas H Manning Polar Archive, University of Cambridge. 45 John Ruskin, The Elements of Drawing; in three Letters to Beginners (London: Smith, Elder & co., 1857); Wilson, Lecture Notes 1910–1911, MS1225/3. 46 Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color, Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age [1989], trans.lated by Emily McVarish (Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford: University of California Press, 1993),5–6.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

47 Wilson, Lecture Notes 1910–1911, MS1225/3. 48 John Gage, Colour and Culture, Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Thames and Hudson, 1993), 8 49 Gunning, ‘A Slippery Topic’, 40. 50 Gunning, ‘A Slippery Topic’, 41. 51 Peterson, ‘Lyrical Education’, 186. 52 Yumibe, Moving Color, 6. 53 Yusoff, ‘Configuring the Field’, 72. 54 Dixon, ‘What was Travel Writing?’, 61. 55 Watkins, ‘Materials and Texts’, 230–242. 56 Ponting, Letters to Frank Debenham, 20 May 1933; 30 October 1931; 15 August 1933, MS/280/28/7. 57 Tom Gunning, D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (Urbana-Chicago: University of Illinois, 1991).

| 73

58 Watkins, ‘Materials and Texts’, 230–242. 59 Scott, Journals, 75. 60 Ponting, Cinema Lecture, MS-papers-1225, 35. 61 Yumibe, 2012; Peterson ‘Lyrical Education’, 186–192. 62 Ponting, Letter, 17 December 1913, MS559/102/2. 63 The superimposition of two negatives, one of a storm-swept sky and the second of a figure traversing an expanse of ice by sledge, is evident in images held at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge: Glass plate negative P2005/5/606, November 1911 and a variation P2005/5/1554, 1911. 64 Watkins, ‘Materials and Texts’, 230–233.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Liz Watkins is based at the University of Leeds. Her research interests include film theories of sexuality and gesture; theories and philosophies of colour and perception; historiography and the fantastic in narratives of early 1900s scientific expedition films and their public exhibition; the archival life of film. Her publications include articles in Screen, Paragraph, and the Journal for Cultural Research. She has co-edited books on Gesture and Film: Signalling New Critical Perspectives (Routledge 2017) and Colour and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2013). Her monograph Film Theories and Philosophies of Colour (Routledge) traces colour and its visual effects as a cinematographic movement of perceptions that are liminal, yet integral, to theories of subjectivity, memory and meaning in narrative cinema.

L i m inal P erceptions

CHAPTER 3

Rough Seas The Blue Waters of Early Nonfiction Film Jennifer Peterson

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH03

ABSTRACT Images of rough seas – waves crashing against the seashore, sea storms, or shipwrecks – were one of the most potent visual tropes of the silent era. Rough seas appeared in numerous fiction films and were a staple of early nonfiction actualities, travelogues, and nature films. These and other water images were also frequently coloured with the applied hues that were common in the period: not just blue, but also green, orange, yellow, and pink tinting, toning, and stencil colouring. While the rough seas topos emerged in the Romantic era, this essay explores how it became a commercial style in silent cinema. Colour, with its contradictory tension between realism and sensation, functioned as an important part of this commercial transformation. k e y wo r ds

sublime, Romantic, lyricism, nonfiction, water

| 75

‘I’m walking along the beach in a howling gale Another year is passing In the roaring waters I hear the voices of dead friends.’ – Derek Jarman, Blue (1993) ‘Colors soothe us and give poetry to the commonplace.’ – Louis Reeves Harrison, Moving Picture World (1912)

76 |

Colour is a tricky question for film history, spanning as it does the broad topics of science, technology, and aesthetics. As colour in silent-era cinema has become a newly important topic of research, scholars and archivists have made great strides in exploring its technological and industrial history in the late nineteenth and early 20th century,1 but the aesthetic questions raised by colour in cinema remain complex. Building upon recent work by Joshua Yumibe, Tom Gunning, and others, this essay explores the aesthetic dimension of colour in a handful of nonfiction films from the silent era.2 Specifically, I explore the depiction of water, which was a topic of fascination in its own right during this period. In my book, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film, I began to explore water as a common subject matter of early nonfiction.3 What is remarkable about early films featuring water – including rivers, waterfalls, oceans, fountains, ice, mist, and rough seas – is how frequently they display the colour processes of the era, including both applied colours and early photographic processes such as Kinemacolor and Prizmacolor. More often than not, colours are used in these watery shots to enhance tone, emotion, and mood. How do these films draw upon Romantic aesthetic traditions to shape a sense of water as poetic? And what is the relationship between realism and the spectator’s affective, emotional response to these films? In order to gain perspective on this large topic of water, colour, and aesthetics in silent-era cinema, I will restrict my analysis to one particularly potent type of water imagery: rough seas. Although the presence of colour in silent cinema is becoming more recognized with each passing year, there remains a persistent and mistaken belief that early nonfiction films were mostly black-and-white. Even Richard Misek, in his otherwise excellent 2010 book Chromatic Cinema, incorrectly writes that ‘Naturally coloured phenomena – trees, rivers, rocks, sky, etc. – typically remained uncoloured’ in the silent era.4 In fact, my research suggests just the opposite: colour was a particularly crucial component of early nonfiction genres, especially travelogues and scenic films. In the heyday of the single-reel era (1907–1915), nonfiction films very frequently received the lush colour treat-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

3.1: [Rotsen en golven] (Gaumont, circa 1911). Frame enlargement. Courtesy EYE Film Institute Netherlands.

| 77 ments of the period.5 Applied colour processes such as tinting, toning, and stencil colouring were a crucial part of early nonfiction film’s commercial viability and popular appeal. As one commentator wrote in 1911: There are many patrons of moving picture theaters who are attracted more by colored films than by the finest masterpiece in purely dramatic or comedy lines. […] [S]pectacular and scenic films […] have hitherto constituted the bulk of the colored releases in America.6 Rough seas have been part of cinema from the start; it is my contention that they were particularly significant in the silent era, and that colour functioned as an integral part of this significance. The silent-era films in which rough seas appear are not generally well-known today, but a quick scan across film history demonstrates the resilience of this particular topos. Rough seas appeared at the dawn of moving pictures with Rough Sea at Dover (Birt Acres and R. W. Paul, 1896), and flourished in the single-reel era in films such as Storm at Sea (Gaumont, 1912) and Rocks and Waves (Gaumont, c. 1911), both of which feature colour tinting and/or toning. Rough seas continued to appear in fiction films throughout the silent era in films such as The Sands of Dee (D.W. Griffith, 1912), Dark Road (F.W. Murnau, 1921), The Sea Beast (Millard Webb, 1926), and The Yankee Clipper (Rupert Julian, 1927), the last of which survives today with blue tinting. Rough seas persisted well past the silent era; Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948) even features a rough sea sequence using the by-then-archaic process of green tinting.7 The trope continued: The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz,

R ou g h S eas

78 |

1981) uses the rough-sea topos as a key visual element, even in its posters; Derek Jarman refers to rough seas in his moving, magisterial 1993 film Blue, as quoted in the epigram above. Films about global warming and rising sea levels arguably constitute a new version of the topos today. Rather than explore the various iterations of rough seas across film history, this essay remains focussed on the silent era and its unique use of applied colour. The rough seas of silent cinema remediate Romantic aesthetics in the context of early twentieth century seaside tourism. These rough seas were frequently coloured with the applied hues that were common in the period: mostly blue, but also green, orange, yellow, and pink tinting, toning, and stencil colouring.8 Images of water in motion are, of course, highly cinematic. The mechanically reproduced movement of water rolling, crashing, splashing, and shimmering produces a strongly affective experience for the spectator, and when colour is added to the experience, the films reach a kind of lyrical affective peak. In this article, I argue that the materiality of applied colour – literally, aniline dyes applied to individual celluloid prints – can be seen as an apt extension of the already materialist fascination with oceans evident in the rough seas topos.

ROMANTICISM, NATURE, AND THE SUBLIME Images of rough seas – waves crashing against the seashore, sea storms, or shipwrecks – depict wild nature in contact with frail humanity. Pictures of oceans and storms have always been made, but the ‘rough seas’ topos emerged in the Romantic era. The pictorial and symbolic density of the trope arises from a new appreciation for nature (and new ideas about humanity’s relationship to nature) that emerged at this time. As numerous scholars of Romanticism have pointed out, Romantic aesthetics involve a reverence for nature and wilderness that was produced in part by a reaction against the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution. Crucially, however, this Romantic reverence was ambivalent from the start. According to Mario Praz, ‘romantic’ initially had two meanings: one a sense of exaggeration and ridiculousness derived from the old Romantic literary genre of chivalrous and pastoral romances, the other a link to the setting of these stories: ‘Side by side with the depreciatory use of the word in relation to the events and sentiments of the old romances, “romantic” came to be used also to describe scenes and landscapes similar to those described in them, and this time without any note of scorn.’ Castles, mountains, forests, and seas all fit into this category of Romantic settings, which came to express ‘more and more the growing love for wild and melancholy aspects of nature’.9 It is important to emphasize that not all Romantic

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

settings produce the same effects: while mountains have been analysed for their production of a ‘magisterial gaze’, seascapes are most often rendered as uncontrollable, threatening, and vast.10 These are all, of course, key characteristics of the sublime. What I aim to explore here is the way rough seas were transformed from a Romantic aesthetic to a commercial style in film. While an account of rough-sea imagery in the Romantic era is beyond the scope of this short essay, it is useful to briefly consider how the topos looked when it first developed. Rough seas are plentiful in the shipwrecks of the nineteenth-century sea painting tradition; think of Theodore Gericault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1819), J.M.W. Turner’s A Disaster at Sea (1835), or Winslow Homer’s The Gulf Stream (1899). These three famous paintings all depict a larger dramatic narrative frozen in a moment of time, and all use the deeply saturated hues of oil paint to produce intense and even terrifying effects. Resisting the temptation to analyse these paintings here, I want simply to observe that, while each features a different colour palette, in general the colours are dark hues of blue, brown, and black, with some brighter colours used for contrasting details (red and yellow) in each. Seen in the context of a long history of visual imagery, the specificity of the medium (oil painting, still image) and the material quality of the oil paint contribute to the singularity of these three ‘rough seas’ as much as the individuality of the artist and the historical moment each work exemplifies. While blue had traditionally been used as the colour for the Virgin Mary’s dress in Renaissance painting, the colour took on a melancholy and otherworldly cast in the Romantic era. The figure of the blue flower became a kind of Romantic totem in the nineteenth century.11 Goethe wrote at length about blue in his landmark book Theory of Colours, praising its ambiguity: ‘Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose’.12 Moreover, in this period, new blue pigments became available: cobalt blue was discovered in 1802 and the less-saturated cerulean blue became widely available for oil paint after 1860. The blue aniline dyes used for film tinting often fall into the cerulean range of hues.13 As demonstrated by each of these three paintings, one of the main cultural functions of the rough sea topos is to dramatize human suffering by locating it in the setting of a turbulent ocean. Rough-sea images can thus be understood as a projection of human subjectivity and emotion onto the external world, as though the water mirrors the state of the humans. The idea that nature reflects, complements, or brings out the human is deeply anthropomorphic, but it also gestures towards a sense of the interrelatedness of the human and the natural realms. This relationship between interior and exterior – or the human and nature, or subjectivity and setting – is a key dimension of Romantic aesthetics, in which individual experience was elevated over and against traditional

R ou g h S eas

| 79

80 |

Classical ethical and aesthetic values. In the rough seas trope, humans are not the only living force present, and sometimes not even the most important force present. In rough seas imagery, the human realm and nonhuman nature contend with each other for importance. Rough seas thus possess at least two of the four elements that Lawrence Buell claims ‘might be said to comprise an environmentally oriented work’: first, ‘The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history’, and second, ‘The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest’.14 While Romanticism is a historical sensibility, it has found a long and rich life in modernity and postmodernity, and it has proved to be an adaptable mode in mass culture. Cinematic rough sea images are particularly linked to the technology with which they are produced. In other words, the technology of silent-era cinema (specifically mechanically reproduced movement and applied colours) produces a particular kind of rough sea in this period. In order to explore this history, we must adopt a materialist historiographical perspective in which colours applied to the surface of the image are just as important as the image itself. I argue that the development of rough seas into a commercial trope was partly effected through the use of colour in magic lantern slides, postcards, and films. The deep colours used by Romantic artists producing sublime seascapes bear the weight of carefully considered decisions. Colours in early cinema, in contrast, fit the needs of an industrialcommercial mode of production. While early cinema’s applied colours were hardly unsystematic, they have a more arbitrary and ornamental function than the colours of handcrafted artworks. That is to say, although the sublime emerged as an aesthetic philosophy in the fine arts, it quickly gained influence in mass culture, though it changed in the process of its commercial reimagining. What was once intensely terrifying became instead soothing and beautiful. An aesthetic that once bore world-historical significance came to take on meaning for personal and even touristic experience. In fact, colour is often associated with the commercial, the lurid, and the feminine, as David Batchelor has discussed in his influential book Chromophobia. It is worth considering which colours in particular have been gendered, how, and when. Not all colours are the same, and the different hues of rough seas in different art forms and media can illustrate the changing function of the trope over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Edmund Burke, one of the key Romantic theorists of the sublime and the beautiful, colours fit into different aesthetic categories depending on their intensity. Burke writes that ‘darkness is more productive of sublime ideas than light’.15 In contrast, he finds that ‘the colours of beautiful bodies must not be dusky or muddy, but clean and fair […] they must not be of the

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

strongest kind. Those which seem most appropriated to beauty, are the milder of every sort; light greens; soft blues; weak whites; pink reds; and violets’.16 One might imagine that Burke would have labeled the blues of early cinema merely beautiful rather than sublime, but I would argue that they serve as a commercialized version of the sublime, something more akin to what Laura Mulvey has described as the cinema’s ‘clumsy sublime’. As Mulvey writes, ‘the image of a cinematic sublime depends on a mechanism that is fascinating because of, not in spite of, its clumsy visibility’.17

CINEMATIC ROUGH SEAS: REALISM + SENSATION Like all topoi, which are intermedial by nature, the topos of ‘rough seas’ can be found not just in early films, but also in a broad range of other media including painting, photography, literature, postcards, and more. The trope appears frequently in nineteenth-century magic lantern slides, such as this image from the slide set A Ballad of the Sea (Bamforth & Co., 1892). (See Figure 3.2) Early films were frequently coloured by the same companies that made lantern slides; the British Bamforth & Co. produced a number of early films in colour, and they also manufactured a series of ‘saucy seaside’ postcards. The cinematic iteration of the rough seas topos, however, displays specific technological effects. Rough seas were a particularly potent image in the silent era because they combine two of the most remarked-upon aspects of cinema in the early years: movement and colour. Film’s ability to present physical reality in the most trivial detail – and in movement – produces the sense of actuality that was fundamentally important in early cinema. But the use of applied colour processes in all their glorious technological-historical specificity foregrounds colour’s nonrealistic potential, adding a kind of emotional overlay to images of actuality. This is, in effect, a cinema-specific iteration of the age-old artistic distinction between disegno and colore – or line drawing and colouring-in – in which line drawing in black and white is favored as more intellectual, rational, and well-suited to represent form (as in the line drawings of Michelangelo), whereas colour is viewed as vibrant, lifelike, and expressive, but also secondary, an addition, ornamental. Cinematic rough seas particularly embody this push-pull between actuality and emotional expressiveness. Rough Sea at Dover was one of the most popular moving-picture subjects of 1896–1897. Indeed, it became so legendary that an early historian of film wrote in 1922, ‘a rough sea at Dover [has] come down to us as part of film history’.18 The film’s first viewers made note of the combination of verisimilitude and sensation in the film:

R ou g h S eas

3.2: A Ballad of the Sea (Bamforth & Co., 1892). Lantern slide. Illuminago Collection – reproduced by permission. Digital image © 2006 Ludwig VoglBienek / Media Studies, Universität Trier. Lucerna Magic Lantern Web Resource.

the most successful effect [of the kinetoscopic work], and one which called forth rounds of applause from the usually placid members of the ‘Royal’, was a reproduction of a number of breaking waves, which may be seen to roll in from the sea, curl over against a jetty, and break into clouds of snowy spray that seemed to start out from the screen.19 This reviewer particularly remarks upon the movement of the images – the waves roll, curl, break, and ‘seem to start out from the screen’.20 At the same

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

time that cinema perfects a kind of objective visual perception, it also has the power to foreground the sensational, embodied experience of that perception. Rough Sea at Dover’s kinetic, three-dimensional effects are therefore both realistic and sensational. Early nonfiction embodies the contradictory appeal of realism and sensation, even before the application of colour. Rough Sea at Dover was a black-and-white film; or rather, it survives today as a black-and-white print, and I have found no evidence (so far) that colour prints circulated. In the earliest years of cinema, watching the movement of natural phenomena was captivating in and of itself. I refer here to the celebrated ‘wind in the trees’ effect, noticed immediately by early film audiences who commented on the leaves fluttering in the background of the Lumière Brothers’s film Feeding the Baby. Half a century later, D.W. Griffith lamented the loss of this element in film, remarking in a 1948 interview (a few months before his death), ‘What the modern movie lacks is beauty – the beauty of moving wind in the trees’.21 The ‘wind in the trees’ is a wonderfully evocative phrase that sums up cinema’s unique ability to represent the materiality of the physical world, or what theorist Jane Bennett calls ‘vibrant matter’. In film landscapes, nature appears as a material presence with a force of its own, only to disappear again with the evanescence that is the hallmark of this time-based medium. Just as much as the wind in the trees, rough seas can serve as a potent metaphor for cinema’s singular ability to produce pathos out of realism. Although the topic might not seem to lend itself to remakes, rough seas continued to appear regularly in early cinema. The Edison Manufacturing Company quickly produced several rough seas films of its own: Surf at Long Branch (1896), Surf at Monterey (1897), and Storm at Sea (1900). Indeed, films showing all different kinds of moving water – not just rough seas but also waterfalls, rivers, lakes, and fountains – were some of the most common subjects in early cinema.22 Although surviving copies of these very early rough seas films are not coloured, this does not mean that coloured versions were not shown. At this time, however, I have not been able to find any evidence to support this hypothesis (the Edison films mentioned above are paper prints, which means that colour – which would have been hand painted on individual prints at this early date – would not have been preserved in any case), so, for now, I must restrict myself to speculation about their colour possibilities. While dance films were at first the most frequently coloured film subjects, the earliest hand-painted nonfiction films that survive such as Conway Castle (British Mutoscope & Biograph, 1898) indicate that actuality subjects were also considered worthy of applied colour in the 1890s. By the turn of the century, there was an established tradition of coloured water shows in Europe: fountains illuminated with coloured lights had become a special attraction in the late nineteenth century and were featured in the Exposition Universelle

R ou g h S eas

| 83

84 |

in Paris in 1889 and 1900. A surviving film in the EYE collection, Les grandes eaux de Versailles (Pathé, 1904), demonstrates just this effect, with hand-painted pastel colours glistening atop the fountain’s water. In the United States, Niagara Falls was illuminated by coloured electric lights in the 1890s, and the Yosemite firefall was established in the 1870s, in which burning embers were shoved over the side of Yosemite Falls at night to create a lighted waterfall effect. So while the hand-painted colours found in so many early dance films were influenced by the live coloured light dances of Loïe Fuller, it stands to reason that there may have been some hand-painted colour water films in the first decade of film history, even though these colours have mostly not survived to the present day.23 Seascapes lend themselves to extreme long shots, and the tradition of rough seas in silent-era cinema is filled with long shots and horizon lines that emphasize the integrity of space, in opposition to tighter shots of human subjects that rely on montage, fragmenting space. Rough seas thus figure into a larger discussion about cinematic realism along the lines of André Bazin’s theory of deep focus and the long take.24 The revitalization of the ontological realism debate today can be extended to new questions about cinema’s relationship to materiality: not just the material, nonhuman world of water, trees, mountains, and animals represented in film, but also the materiality of celluloid itself. While additive colour would seem to detract from cinematic realism, since it is so patently non-naturalistic, it is most certainly a material aspect of film, and thus it has a role to play in discussions about the ontology of cinema.

NONFICTION AND THE SENSUAL REALISM OF COLOUR Both Gunning and Yumibe have discussed colour in silent-era films in terms of two opposing traditions: sensual colour vs. indexical colour.25 We might also characterize this opposition as lyrical vs. educational, fantastical vs. naturalistic, or emotional vs. realistic uses of colour. But while these categories make sense for fiction films and the hand-tinted trick films of early cinema, I want to suggest that these two traditions are not opposed in quite the same way in nonfiction. Rather, silent-era nonfiction films bind the sensual together with the indexical or realistic. Indeed, in the most lyrical early nonfiction film genres such as scenic and nature films, and even some science films and industrials, it is precisely this joining of the fantastical and the real that functions as the films’ attraction. Given that nonfiction films lay a claim to indexical realism as their very reason for being, the question of realism is never absent when considering

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

these films, but the interplay between colour’s sensuality and colour’s realism formed a different set of tensions in nonfiction than in fiction films of this period. Generally speaking, nonfiction film colours were marketed as – and praised in terms of – their relative level of realism. A reviewer of Gaumont’s A Stormy Sea writes in 1909, ‘The toning in some of the scenes is exquisite and faithfully reproduces the appearance of the water and foam’.26 While the presence of blue toning in a rough sea film might seem to make sense from the standpoint of realism, the monochromatic saturation of everything in the frame that occurs with blue toning exceeds the pretense of realistic blue water. Colour in early nonfiction foregrounds the sensational or emotionally affective dimension of supposedly realistic educational subjects. Colour is an important part of nonfiction films’ lyrical, sensual dynamic. In fact, applied colours are anything but naturalistic. Stencil colouring was generally promoted as ‘natural colour’ in nonfiction films, as seen in Pathécolor or the stencil colouring by Gaumont in films such as Cascades of the ­Houyoux,27 but stencil colouring processes are dominated by pastels, and present a limited palette of a few colours at a time, creating an effect very unlike the colours of human vision. Colour tinting and toning were ubiquitous in nonfiction films, and their historical function is perhaps the most confounding of the early colour processes to understand today. Nonfiction film can help us to unravel the historical significance of tinting and toning. The monochromatic colours produced by tinting and toning processes bathe the film’s diegetic world in a single non-naturalistic hue such as red, pink, yellow, or blue. Of course, we can point out when there is a discernable logic to colour tinting, as when water shots are tinted blue or fire shots are tinted red, but even then, the monochromatic nature of the colour is non-naturalistic, for humans do not see the world as though it were dipped in a dye bath. What does it mean when an image of the ocean is tinted red, or green, or orange, as we see in numerous surviving examples? I want to push another interpretation of monochromatic colouring, and consider its function not as an auxiliary of realism, but in the service of the unreal. Seen in a single still image, the colour seems somehow to float above or beyond the continuum of realism/non-realism. Monochromatic applied colours have psychological resonance; they produce surprising and unpredictable responses in the spectator. With colours freed from the burden of indexical referentiality, a blue-tinted mountain landscape or a green-tinted mushroom seen in close-up edges towards abstraction, at the same time that it retains its indexical referentiality as a mountain landscape or a mushroom. Understood in this way, the monochromatic tinting/toning aesthetic feels profoundly modern, foregrounding as it does an aesthetic experience that pushes toward abstraction. Whether colour tinting and toning were understood in this way at the time is another question. Certainly, colour’s function in silent nonfiction was

R ou g h S eas

| 85

not fixed or systematic across all film production companies and national cinemas. Nicola Mazzanti has claimed that film colouring could be changed for different audiences in different countries (although this has yet to be substantiated by archival evidence); if true, this would support the argument that the monochromatic colours of tinting/toning processes were not understood as realistic, but as unreal or ornamental.28 Moving Picture World commentator Louis Reeves Harrison, one of the foremost writers on film aesthetics in the early period, clearly appreciated the aesthetic dimension of applied colours, and monochromatic colours in particular. He writes,

86 |

I love the variety of low-toned, deep-toned and rich-toned pictures. I do not mean the calico-colored daubs, but bluish-green depths in the marines, mellow lights like those of Titian and Rembrandt where tints are applied to interiors, where the reds glow softly, and rosy dawns, because what is generally appropriate in tint, though it may be uniform, is refreshing to the eye. Colors soothe us and give poetry to the commonplace.29 Seen in movement, the role of colour tinting and toning takes on even more complexity as the colours flicker and change from shot to shot. The first shot of the 1912 Gaumont film Storm at Sea, which is toned blue, gives us the perspective of a sailor looking out the prow of a ship. The blue here certainly makes sense from the perspective of realism. Even when a later shot in the film is tinted a pinkish red, this colouring might be rationalized as a sunset shot, in which case it can be seen in line with realism once again. Two points can be made here. First of all, just as much as this film shows us a series of seascapes (with shifting horizon lines), this film functions as a procession of a series of colours: blue, orange, pinkish red, orangeish red. It would be hard to imagine a fiction film using colour tinting and toning in quite the same way, changing colours in every sequential shot. This has much to do with the way nonfiction films were edited differently than fiction films of this period, following a principle of ‘one shot per topic’ or what I have elsewhere called the ‘string of pearls’ principle of editing.30 This film that flickers across a range of colours can thus be seen as an aesthetic experience just as much as an educational experience. Perhaps, even, this film is more about aesthetics than any particular ship or sea or sailing subject. In fact, the Gaumont company specialized in just this sort of generalized scenic subject. In the years 1910–1913, Gaumont’s film titles include: A Sea of Clouds; Sunset; O’er Crag and Torrent; O’er Hill and Vale; Autumn Leaves; By the Sad Sea Waves. Although we can find these titles and some reviews of these films in the trade press – and even some advertisements – the only extant print I have found (so far) is

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Storm at Sea, so it is unfortunately impossible to study this group of films as a series. Rough seas continued to serve lyrical purposes in numerous other early nonfiction films. In the West of England is one of several ‘Stereo-Scenic’ films made by the Hepworth company in the mid 1910s.31 These films were not actually stereoscopic, but In the West of England does feature compositions in depth and planar compositions that emphasize a sense of deep space.32 A review of a different Hepworth Stereo-Scenic from 1915 describes the effect this way: A Ramble in the New Forest. – A demand for scenic pictures had sprung up even before the Hepworth Stereo-Scenics appeared, and their arrival quickened this demand immensely. Their brightness, variety, and

| 87

3.3: In the West of England (Hepworth, 1917). Frame enlargement. Courtesy EYE Film Institute Netherlands.

3.4: In the West of England (Hepworth, 1917). Frame enlargement. Courtesy EYE Film Institute Netherlands.

R ou g h S eas

wonderful quality made them so different to anything that had been produced before. This picture is a good example of what a stereo-scenic should be, and has for its subject that interesting and beautiful spot the New Forest, ‘the hunting-ground of England’s Kings.’ –Hepworth StereoScenic, 400 feet (June 14).33

88 |

Every shot of In the West of England features movement. The first few shots of this six-minute film show scenes along the Devon coast (in what is now Exmoor National Park) taken from a moving railway car. This portion of the film, which shows cottages, a river, and trees, is first tinted a very light brown and then tinted amber. At the town of Lynmouth, the shot is tinted blue, and a panning/ tracking shot, clearly taken from a moving vehicle, shows us the ocean and then the town situated at the mouth of the River Lyn. The final shots of the film shift to the southwest of England, showing ‘A Stormy Day. Lyme Regis’ (Figure 3.3), first in a shot tinted grey-blue and finally ending with a blue-green tinted shot of a placid ocean after the storm with heavenly sunlight shining down on the sea (Figure 3.4). This concluding two-shot pattern is a ‘rough seas’ convention: after a portrayal of nature’s fearful power, these films tend to end on a positive note with a display of God’s beneficence in nature. We might assign various meanings to the grey-blue and blue-green colours used for these two concluding shots: they are both melancholy, not comforting but chilly, and suggest a larger narrative significance. Not only does the grey-blue signify a storm, but the location itself, famous to many as the location in which the concluding scenes of Jane Austen’s 1818 novel Persuasion are set, signifies not seaside leisure, but seaside melancholy.34 Most of all, what is striking is that these seascapes are rendered in colour at all, for the world does not actually exist in a glowing grey or a glowing green monochromatic tint. The non-realism of colour tinting produces the lyrical or sensual element of colour in nonfiction film. While I do not analyse any films made with early photographic colour systems such as Kinemacolor or Prizma Color in this essay, it is worth mentioning that such systems were often promoted with just this combination of realism and sensation that I have discussed, as can be seen in a Kinemacolor advertisement pronouncing: ‘It’s just as if you were actually there’.35 In this and many other advertisements for early colour systems, colour adds both realism and sensation at the same time: it is as if to seem realistic, a film has to make the viewer feel something. According to this notion, realism is defined as a sensory experience. In this way, colour underscores nonfiction film’s role as a form of what Vanessa Schwartz calls ‘spectacular realities’. In defining realism as sensation, early cinema produces a decidedly commercial defini-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

tion of realism with distinct aesthetic values: sensation-as-realism is a potent aesthetic experience that is accessible to the masses. This is Romanticism remediated in a more commercial form. In Romantic aesthetics, the viewer’s feelings are projected onto the landscape. It is as if nature exists as an empty vessel to be activated by human emotion. This is a profoundly anthropomorphic way of understanding the world. To return to Praz and his analysis of Romanticism, I would like to conclude by bringing this discussion of rough seas back to a larger sense of the trope’s function as expressing the unexpressible – in great part through colour. Praz writes, The word ‘romantic’ thus comes to be associated with another group of ideas, such as ‘magic’, ‘suggestive’, ‘nostalgic’, and above all with words expressing states of mind which cannot be described such as the German ‘Sehnsucht’ and the English ‘wistful […] The essence of Romanticism consequently comes to consist in that which cannot be described’.36 Natural settings, with their mute expressivity, function perfectly as just this sort of ‘suggestive expression, which invites much more than it states’.37 What, then, could be more romantic than rough seas, a nonhuman plane of existence which suggests and evokes moods not through words, but through movement and colour. Rough seas, as depicted in films, photos, postcards, and magic lantern slides of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, offer a chromatic refraction of modern experience.

NOTES I would like to thank the EYE Film Institute Netherlands, and especially Elif ­Rongen-Kaynakçi, for assistance in obtaining much of the media necessary for this article. 1

See the Timeline of Historical Film Colors, an online database developed by Bar-

2

See Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New

bara Flueckiger at http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/. Bruns­wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012) and Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati, and Jonathon Rosen, Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). 3

See Jennifer Lynn Peterson, Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 197 –201, 246.

R ou g h S eas

| 89

4

Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Colour (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 16.

5

In addition to the films I discuss in the body of this essay, numerous other films held in the EYE Film Institute’s collection contain significant coloured water footage, including Aan de Kust van Groenland (Pathé, c. 1920); Aan de oevers der Pescara, Ascension du Pic du Midi de Bigorre (Gaumont, c. 1914); Binnenland van Africa (Éclair, c. 1910); Cataract Island, De Pescara (Ambrosio, 1912); De Rivier Velino (Cines, 1912); Descente en Barque à travers les gorges de l’Ardèche (Gaumont, c. 1910); Les Environs de Luchon (Gaumont, c. 1912); From Pau to Cauterets (Lux Film, 1913); Geographie les bords de l’Yerres (Gaumont, c. 1912); L’Orne (Gaumont, 1912); Le Niagara, Les Gorges de Sierroz (Eclipse, 1913); Het Nationaal Park in Amerika, Les Roches et grottes de Baume (Eclipse, 1913); Rotsentgen van de Ardeche, Sur la Mer Caspienne (Gaumont, 1912); Visscherij in de Poolstreken. (Production company and date listed when known.)

90 |

6

Jas S. McQuade, ‘Chicago Letter’. Moving Picture World, 9 September 1911, 698.

7

The use of colour tinting in Portrait of Jennie remains to be explored, but I believe the colour in this sequence functions as a reference to the silent era in which the rough seas trope flourished, since the narrative involves a plot in which the main character travels back in time.

8

For a useful overview of applied colour processes, see Yumibe, Moving Color, 3–6.

9

Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony. 2nd Edition, translated by Angus Davidson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 12, 13.

10 Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting c. 1830–1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian University Press, 1991). 11 The blue flower emerged from the 1801 Novalis novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, then circulated in the extremely popular 1818 poem ‘Die blaue Baume’ by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorrf. Even Goethe searched for the blue flower while on a trip to Palermo, and Walter Benjamin later referred to it in his work. On G ­ oethe’s search for the ‘primordial plant’, see Johannes Endres, ‘“Primordial Plant” and “Blue Flower”: Goethe and Romanticism’, in Goethe e la Pianta. Natura, Scienza e Arte. (Covegno, Palermo: Università degli Studi di Palermo, University Lübek, 2006), 93–100. 12 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours [1810], translated by Charles Lock Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1840), 311. 13 See Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 14 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 7. 15 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [1757] (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), 80. 16 Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 117.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

17 Laura Mulvey, ‘A Clumsy Sublime’, Film Quarterly 60, no. 3 (spring 2007): 3. 18 Mary McKenzie French, ‘The Motion Picture: Yesterday and Today’, Visual Education 3, no. 4 (April 1922): 242 (italics and capitalization of film title missing in original). 19 ‘Novelties at the R.P.S.’, Photogram, 1896. 20 ‘Novelties at the R.P.S.’, Photogram, 1896. 21 Ezra Goodman, ‘Flash-Back to Griffith’, in D. W. Griffith Interviews, edited by Anthony Slide (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 217. 22 See Ivo Blom, ‘“Comme l’eau qui coule”: les filmes des rivières de Gaumont dans la collection Desmet’, 1895, 18 (1995): 156–163. 23 On colour in early dance films, see Yumibe, Moving Color, 52. 24 See Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Dudley Andrew, Ed., Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 25 Tom Gunning, ‘Colourful Metaphors: The Attraction of Colour in Early Silent Cinema’, Living Pictures, 2 (2003): 4–13; Yumibe, Moving Color. 26 Review of A Stormy Sea, Moving Picture World, 3 April 1909, 404. 27 Frames from this 1911 film can be seen at the Timeline of Historical Film Colors: http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/timeline-entry/1218/#Cascades_of_the_ Houyoux_(1911). 28 Nicola Mazzanti, ‘Colours, audiences, and (dis)continuity in the “cinema of the second period”‘, Film History, 21, no. 1 (2009): 67–93. 29 Louis Reeves Harrison, ‘Studio Saunterings’, Moving Picture World, 17 February 1912, 557. 30 See Peterson, School of Dreams, 149, 199. 31 Although the film is dated 1923 in the EYE database, the film was made at least six years earlier; it was exhibited at a theatre in Richmond Australia in 1917. Richmond Theatre programme listing, Richmond Guardian 17 February 1917. 32 Rachel Low, The History of British Film 1914-1918, vol. 3 (New York: Routledge, 1997), 145. 33 Pictures and the Picturegoer, 1915, 218. 34 Lyme Regis is also the setting of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, which, as mentioned earlier, is a key 1980s example of the rough seas topos. 35 Kinemacolor advertisement, 1911, National Media Museum, Bradford, UK. My thanks to Oliver Gaycken for bringing this ad to my attention. 36 Praz, The Romantic Agony, 14. 37 Praz, The Romantic Agony, 15.

R ou g h S eas

| 91

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jennifer Peterson is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). She has published articles in Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, The Moving Image, the Getty Research Journal, and numerous edited book collections. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Woodbury University in Los Angeles.

92 |

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

NATURAL-COLOUR PROCESSES: THEORY AND PRACTICE

| 95



CHAPTER 4

‘Taking the color out of color’ Two-Colour Technicolor, The Black Pirate, and Blackened Dyes John Belton

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH04

ABSTRACT In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille complained that ‘color movies diverted interest from narrative and action, offended the color sensitivities of many, and cost too much’. Douglas Fairbanks voiced a similar objection, arguing that color 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’. This paper explores Fairbanks’s efforts in The Black Pirate (1926) to control the colour, putting it to the service of the film’s narrative and relying, in part, on ‘blackened dyes’ to desaturate the film’s color. k e y wo r ds

Two-Colour Technicolor, The Black Pirate, Douglas Fairbanks, Herbert Kalmus, Leonard Troland, Arthur Ball

| 97

98 |

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.

4.1: ‘Taking the Color out of Color’. Illustration courtesy of Motion Picture Classic.

This resulted in the subdued colour palette that distinguishes this film from other two-colour Technicolor films of this period. 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 twocolour 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 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

‘ T a k in g the color out of color ’

| 99

100 |

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-andwhite 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.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

4.2: An example of skin tone in two-colour Techni­ color: Fairbanks as the Black Pirate. Illustration courtesy of United Artists.

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

‘ T a k in g the color out of color ’

| 101

102 |

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,

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

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 over- all 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 pro-

‘ T a k in g the color out of color ’

| 103

cess of converting a major filmmaker such as Fairbanks to Technicolor. Ball explained that

104 |

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. After the film was completed, Ball reported that Fairbanks’s approach to the matter has been entirely reversed; whereas, in the case of the ‘Black Pirate’ the pressure from him was all to remove color from in front of the camera, he is now [in his colour tests for The Gaucho] putting color into the scene. This insures that color values get into the negative. The extent to which these color values will be restrained in making the prints is then open to discussion and experiment. Furthermore, it eases up the production problem in that color can be used more freely in the scene, which is quite essential in the type of picture he is now planning. It will further enable him to possibly adjust the key of color in different sequences as he would the tempo of action. In summary then, Fairbanks, instead of approaching the matter with a negative and critical manner, approaches it in a positive and enthusiastic

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

manner with full confidence in our ability to control the situation as he may desire. The importance of this cannot be over-stressed. I think we now have a good chance of landing his next picture; whereas, without the blackened dye control we would have had a rather small chance.29 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 greenand 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

‘ T a k in g the color out of color ’

| 105

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.

106 |

Initial research for this paper was conducted at George Eastman Museum in May of 2014. I would like to thank James Layton, former assistant archivist at GEM and curator of the Technicolor Collections there, for his help in guiding me through those collections. John Belton teaches film at Rutgers University; in 2008, he received an Academy Fellows grant to research a book on motion-picture colour.

NOTES 1

Herbert Kalmus, ‘The Adventure of Technicolor’, Journal of the SMPTE 67 (Decem-

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 Pic-

ber 1958): 829.

ture 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).

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

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.

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.

‘ T a k in g the color out of color ’

| 107

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. 8

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.

108 |

ABOUT THE AUTHOR John Belton teaches film at Rutgers University and is the author of five books, including Widescreen Cinema, winner of the 1993 Kraszna Krausz prize for books on the moving image, and American Cinema/American Culture. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005) and an Academy Fellows Grant (2008). He edits a series of books on film and culture for Columbia University Press (1989–present), is a former member of the National Film Preservation Board (1989–1996), and is a former Chair of the Archival Papers and Historical Committee of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (1985–1996). He is an associate editor of SMPTE’s Motion Imaging Journal.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

CHAPTER 5

Why Additive? Problems of Colour and Epistemological Networks in Early (Film) Technology Benoît Turquety

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH05

ABSTRACT The first commercially exploited ‘natural colour’ processes in the cinema industry have been based on the additive synthesis of colours. They were complex systems, involving very heavy economic constraints and, today, specific restoration problems. This contribution describes the particular case of the 2008 reconstruction of 1908 Kinemacolor films at the Screen Archive South East (Brighton, UK). In retrospect, additive processes have appeared to historians as an obviously bad solution to the ‘natural colour’ problem. But, if this was such a wrong direction, then why was it dominantly adopted at the time? Technological reasons alone cannot account for this choice; it is rather related to the circulation of technological and epistemological models between media or, on a wider scale, between industries. k e y wo r ds

film colour; technology; Kinemacolor; film restoration; digital cinema

| 109

110 |

Most of the early ‘natural colour’ processes in film technology were based on the additive synthesis of colours, meaning that the final colours were obtained by mixing primary-coloured lights during projection. That is a strange historical fact. In particular, the processes that reached the stage of commercial exploitation, Kinemacolor and Chronochrome, were all additive. Kinemacolor was patented in Great Britain in 1906, based on research that had already led to a patent in 1899, even though that first process had remained unsuccessful. 1 It was exploited from 1908 to about 1915, with notable success. Several years after the first Kinemacolor events, Gaumont started to organize commercial projections of its own process, Chronochrome.2 Still, in 1917, the first process proposed under the name Technicolor by Herbert T. Kalmus and his collaborators was, again, an additive one – as opposed to anything that Technicolor later developed. 3 By comparison, the first natural-colour photographic process having known an industrial level of distribution, the Lumière Autochrome, exploited from 1907 onwards, was also an additive system. Additive processes can be very different from one another, but they have common characteristics. Whereas the subtractive synthesis of colour is based on the mixing of light-absorbing pigments from three well-chosen primary colours that filter the final coloured image as inscribed on paper or filmstock, additive synthesis works by mixing three modulated coloured lights, of different primary colours, to produce the final coloured image during projection. Concretely, this implies that, in subtractive systems, the ‘original’ tints are inscribed materially on the celluloid – or paper, textile, etc., depending on the medium – while, in additive systems, they are recomposed only during the viewing experience. Such common features define, for these processes as a whole, a coherence that has theoretical grounds, but also technical and perceptual implications. As we are today also in a transitional phase regarding colour, moving from film to digital, restoration and reconstruction tactics regarding these early systems are revelatory of both the coherence of the original technical structure and the way it echoes current problems.

FROM ADDITIVE TO WHAT? THE STRANGE CASE OF KINEMACOLOR AND ITS RESTORATION STRATEGIES The first ‘natural colour’ process – as that was the expression used at the time to distinguish these systems from those based on the ‘artificial’ colouring of black-and-white photographic images – that was commercially exploited, Kinemacolor, was indeed based on a peculiar set of principles, and produced a quite remarkable ‘chromatic world’. Shot at twice the usual speed – about 32

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

5.1: Drawings by George Albert Smith, US Patent n° 941 960, Kinematograph Apparatus for the Production of Colored Pictures, 1907.

| 111

frames per second – through alternating red and green filters, the film was then projected in a similar way. The colours were recombined in the spectator’s perception in the theatre by what was then thought of as ‘persistence of vision’. This belief that the principle responsible for the illusion of movement could also and simultaneously produce the synthesis of colour was the first strange idea at the basis of Kinemacolor. The filters were adapted to the camera and the projector’s shutters, which required only limited and quite easy alterations of the apparatus. This was particularly important for projectors, which had to be made easily compatible between Kinemacolor and black-and white film. The machines having at the time external shutters, the transformation did not require much time or work. Chemically, panchromatization – which rendered the emulsion sensitive

Wh y A d d iti v e ?

112 |

to red – was the only treatment involved. Thus, there is no colour on the celluloid: Kinemacolor film is black-and-white; colour happens only through and during the projection performance. That is a common feature of all additive processes in film. Kinemacolor was the first two-colour process, the second strange feature that was proposed by George Albert Smith as an improbable solution to an otherwise apparently intractable problem. In that, it opened a path that would later be followed by the first three Technicolor processes, making two-colour systems the dominant ‘natural colour’ of chromatic worlds from 1909 to the beginning of the 1930s.4 Chronochrome had opted for three-colour additive synthesis, but, at the cost of a technical apparatus so peculiar and complicated, that it prevented widespread diffusion. So Kinemacolor required a modified projection apparatus. That, of course, makes it a challenge to show these films to an audience today. Several strategies have been employed, three of which I would like to describe here, as they involve specific understandings of the original process, and of its relevance in our contemporary time of transition between analogue and digital cultures. That transition is of particular importance here, as the turn to digital involves a return to an imagery massively grounded in the additive synthesis of colour. In this context, each concrete restoration workflow chosen by an archivist in a certain context articulates an implicit epistemological comment on the relative status of colour synthesis and quantification, on the question of the necessity of technological continuity, on the importance or non-importance of the viewing process for the coherence of a given work, etc. The first restoration has been undertaken by David Cleveland and Brian Pritchard in 2008. It consisted of recreating the technical process as a whole, projecting the black-and-white film through red and green filters with an original projector.5 This meant taking risks with old and precious archival artefacts, as well as having to estimate, for instance, the exact original tints used for the projecting gelatine filters as they appeared in 1908,6 and finding usable lamps that could produce the same colour temperature as was dominant then. Moreover, the results could be seen only during the event itself and were neither recordable nor reproducible in their true form, which, from an archival point of view, is rather problematic. A few years before, Nicola Mazzanti had also organized a similar projection during the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, this time by ‘modifying a modern projector’,7 mainly in order to produce a visual basis for a usable reconstruction of the Kinemacolor films that had entered the collection of the Cineteca. After that event, the reconstruction process chosen by L’Immagine Ritrovata consisted of extracting, from the original print, two black-and-white duplicate negatives, each bearing one every two frames. Thus, frames taken

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

| 113

5.2: Banks of the Nile, 1911 Kinemacolor film, reconstructed by L’Immagine Ritrovata / Cineteca del Comune di Bologna.

behind a green filter would end up on one of the duplicate negatives, while frames taken behind a red one would be assembled on the second duplicate negative. The process had to be closely watched, because a missing frame on the print – due to some break or other defect – would cause a subsequent redgreen inversion, but once successfully managed, the film was then carried on two separate colour selections. These negatives were then printed successively on the same positive colour stock, through red- and green-coloured lights simulating the original Kinemacolor filters. This procedure allowed for grading by altering the light in one or the other printing passage. As Nicola Mazzanti summarized: ‘In practice we did reproduce the Kinemacolor system at the printing stage, instead of the projection stage’.8 From archival and theoretical points of view, this strategy has many advantages: first, it is based on a purely analogue, film-based workflow, which guarantees a certain aesthetic and perceptual coherence. Second, it produces the best possible preservation masters, that is, two black-and-white duplicate negatives. On the other hand, as Nicola Mazzanti himself noted: ‘we were turning an additive colour process into a subtractive process’.9 Indeed, the result-

Wh y A d d iti v e ?

114 | 5.3: George Albert Smith experimental Kinemacolor film, 1908, reconstructed by Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton.

ing object was a ‘classical’, Eastmancolor-type print, in which colours were synthesized by the superimposition of colour pigments through a subtractive process. In 2012, Brighton’s Screen Archive South East produced a reconstruction of some of the first Kinemacolor experimental films, shot by George Albert Smith in that same city in 1908. Their approach was, in every respect, opposed to L’Immagine Ritrovata’s, firstly because they opted for a purely digital simulation. Nicholas Clark, who was in charge of the process, aimed to respect Kinemacolor’s structural characteristics.10 He applied alternating red and green digital filters every other frame, and ran the result at 32 frames per second. However, he found that this did not in fact work on a perceptual level for the spectator. On his digital screen, the colours would not blend, and the flicker effect was extremely strong and disturbing. That is another strange fact. According to Clark, the reason why it worked in the early twentieth century and would not work now may be connected to the fact that computer screens are backlit and not based on reflected light as with movie screens. The differences in intensity, contrast, and overall relation to the images made the difference between a working process and a useless one. In any case, Clark decided to approach the problem differently by creating a composite image that could then be displayed in a ‘normal’ way on any

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

screen, whether white or backlit. Thus, instead of exhibiting 32 black-andwhite (or monochrome) frames per second, the final digital file presents sixteen images per second, each of which carries the final synthesized colours. Clark, in a way, had to normalize the process to make it visible within the digital technological and perceptual system. Introducing an editing phase within the process, the archivist cut out every other frame, to create two image layers in Final Cut Pro. Then, each layer was colour-corrected, one for red and the other for green, and the two layers were then mixed. That first set of operations is quite similar to L’Immagine Ritrovata’s separation of the original negative into two different colour selections. According to Clark, that produced a very yellowish image, as can be expected when trying to synthesize the whole colour spectrum with only two primary colours. As opposed to the first ‘defect’ of excessive flicker and lack of colour blending, this predominance of yellowish tones and a lack of perfect whites was a well-known characteristic of the process that had been discussed at the time, at least in technical sources. Of course, the exact quality of this yellow overtone depends directly on the precise shades of red and green that were chosen as bases for the colour correction, just as it also depended on the exact colours of the material chosen for the filters on the cameras and on the projectors when the process was originally in use. So, after this step of colour synthesis by combination of the two layers, a second phase of colour correction was applied in order to colour-balance the whites. This step of ‘classical’ colour grading corresponds to an active intervention with regards to the visual result that, in principle, would have been impossible with the original apparatus. In fact, as Clark also raised, there had been attempts by George Albert Smith to correct the colour balance of his process. In 1908, he proposed adding to the red and green lights coming from the filtered images ‘by means of a supplementary shutter just those proportions of violet and blue required to make a pure white when all are mixed’.11 The operation of ‘introduc[ing] the missing beams of violet and blue into our projection instrument’ is roughly equivalent to Clark’s second phase of colour correction. These two reconstruction tactics by Mazzanti and by Clark have some similarities: both produce final objects presenting sixteen coloured frames per second instead of the original 32 black-and-white ones, thus regulating the system and reducing the ephemeral quality of the colour synthesis. However, these two approaches are, in fact, diametrically opposed, which is our concern here. Whereas the Bologna version maintained a coherent film workflow but turned from additive to subtractive colour synthesis, the Brighton strategy transformed the original film into a different medium – digital cinema, with its own perceptual as well as archival implications –, but remained within the

Wh y A d d iti v e ?

| 115

116 |

realm of additive systems. The technological connection between early colour systems and the most contemporary ones here finds itself concretely embodied in the pragmatic archival paradoxes every Kinemacolor – or Chronochrome etc. – reconstruction faces. Another aspect should be mentioned here. All of these simulations or reconstructions – as well as the others proposed, for instance, by the British Film Institute – have produced very different Kinemacolor worlds. Colour balance as well as saturation vary significantly with each version. Tints are sometimes desaturated to the point that there seems to be barely any colour left on the screen, while Nicholas Clark confirmed to me that desaturation was not a characteristic of the Brighton films, and he did not feel the need to accentuate the saturation of his images. These disparities in Kinemacolor worlds result, of course, from dissimilarities between the restoration principles adopted in each institution, as well as from the state of the original material. But they also correspond to a fundamental trait of additive processes: variability. Whereas subtractive processes (such as Technicolor n° 4 or Eastmancolor) are storagemedium dependent, additive processes (such as Kinemacolor or Chronochrome, but also digital technology, our contemporary screens and projectors being also based on that principle) are viewing-device dependent. As colours were in fact produced by the projection system, the rendition depended on each screening situation: which filters were used, which lamp was in the projector, the distance between the machine and the screen, which magnification ratio was used, etc. Kinemacolor, as with all additive processes, required specific projection apparatus, often expensive and technically difficult to operate, while providing a significant lack of control. This, as is well known, also characterizes digital culture: variability implying, for instance, that no two computer screens will display the same Kinemacolor file (or even the latest Star Wars film) in the exact same manner. As is also well known, these considerations led Herbert T. Kalmus, founder of Technicolor, to make a decisive move after a first try at an additive process: During one terrible night in Buffalo, I decided that such special attachments on the projector required an operator who was a cross between a college professor and an acrobat […]. Technicolor then and there abandoned additive processes […]12 This Technicolor decision, so the traditional historiography of film colour goes, marked the beginning of two decades of unrivalled success in the field. And indeed, having the colours on the film itself, which can be controlled within the laboratory and then be projected with standard projectors, sounded then like a better option in every respect.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

WHY THEN, WHY NOW? So this brings us back to that strange fact and to my initial question: why, then, were the first ‘natural colour’ processes primarily additive, when it appears as such an obviously bad option in retrospect? Why have these additive systems appeared as the solution to the ‘natural colour’ problem in cinema? Answering this question requires that, as Gaston Bachelard suggests, we ‘make an effort to visualise ourselves through thought in front of the problem as it offered itself to primitive observation’.13 The history of technology here cannot be understood without turning to a history of the problems faced, a history not of finished objects, but of projects and processes, of desires and obstacles. Such an approach implies understanding the conditions in which the problem was elaborated, the concepts that were used to formulate its elements, thus moving to an epistemological level. Regarding the history of the ‘natural colour cinema’ problem, proposing an answer to the ‘why additive?’ question implies taking into account a complex network of reasons at various levels of pragmatic, historical, and epistemological thinking. A first level of explanation must refer to apparently pragmatic aspects. Tempting though it may have been to find ways to have colours inscribed on or within the celluloid film itself through a subtractive process, the problem thus formulated was, in fact, a chemical one. As it happened, the men who turned to the cinema business as ‘inventors’ in the days before its industrial institutionalization were dominantly mechanical engineers rather than chemists, or, at least, better educated in mechanics than in chemistry. This was likely a consequence of the way the general, scientific, and technological culture was organized at the time, and particularly of the epistemological status of cinema within this culture. Indeed, the cinema was then perceived as belonging to the realm of mechanics rather than chemistry, or, to phrase it differently, that the problems related with the invention of cinematic processes appeared as mechanical ones rather than chemical ones. That is revealing: cinema belonged to the mechanical episteme. This is not an obvious fact, since, for instance, photography was seen, on the contrary, as a chemical phenomenon rather than a mechanical one: it was born with the addition of chemical discoveries to the classical camera obscura, and the nineteenth-century photographer had to deal mostly with chemicals, not with mechanics. Of course, photographers needed to know about lenses, which implies some mechanical work, but the real required expertise was in elaborating baths and emulsions. Photography was optics and chemistry; from these fields, the cinema moved into mechanics, and, as such, its inventions were described mainly on the mechanical level – the shape of the cam, the structure of the intermittent motion, etc. The mechanical properties of the Lumière Cinématographe are

Wh y A d d iti v e ?

| 117

118 |

as well known today as the chemical constitution of the Lumière film emulsion – or the characteristics of the Cinématographe lens – still remain virtually unknown. This mechanical framework of the cinematic apparatus implied that the solutions to the ‘natural colour’ problem were pursued initially in the mechanical domain of cameras and projectors, shutters, and frame rates, rather than in the chemical field of emulsions. A second level of explanation must be a historical one. The experiment proposed by scientist James Clerk Maxwell in an 1855 paper at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and realized by him with the help of photographer Thomas Sutton at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1861, was a decisive moment in the history of ‘natural colour’ photography. In order to prove Thomas Young’s theory of colour perception, Maxwell imagined a photographic dispositive. He photographed a ribbon of tartan three times, placing a different filter – red, green, and violet – in front of the lens each time. He then projected the photographs with three magic lanterns – or a three-lensed one – fitted with the same filters matched to their photographic records, superimposing the three colour selections. Then, he writes in 1855, ‘a complete copy of the landscape, as far as visible colour is concerned, will be thrown on the screen’.14 This system was based on the additive synthesis of colour, and, as it was also based on projection, it must have appeared to later researchers as a potentially productive direction towards a solution of the colour problem in cinema. Of course, it had to be adapted mechanically, since Maxwell’s successively taken photographs were incompatible with a moving object. A third level of explanation involves the epistemological context of the time. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a new conception of colour that emerged in the scientific field and then progressively permeated all domains of culture. In this episteme, colour and movement were deeply connected. They were two forms of a single, fundamental phenomenon. Colour was redefined as vibrations of specific frequencies, and so colour was understood as grounded mentally in movement; whereas, conversely, movement could be turned into colour, as exhibited by some optical toys and apparatuses particularly popular at the time. According to art historian Georges Roque, ‘from the 1880s onwards […] the rotating colour discs constituted […] the big thing of the time, of a whole generation’.15 Colour tops were then used everywhere, and materialized for that episteme the fact that moving a coloured object could alter its very colour. Speed would turn a disc bearing primary colours into a white circle or produce a great variety of variations from differently coloured bases. Based on the additive synthesis of colour, these colour discs were born in the eighteenth century, and diffused at an ever-increasing scale all through the nineteenth, in a great variety of versions. Typical apparatuses of what was then beautifully called ‘experimental philosophy’, the colour discs

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

were made by scientists – such as, again, James Clerk Maxwell – and then sold by the thousands as educational toys. The influence of these devices can be measured by the role they played in the birth of abstraction, through the works of Robert Delaunay or František Kupka. For Delaunay, colour was motion more profoundly than cinema was; whereas movement in film was only illusory, colours were actual vibrations, and colour composition, through the use of simultaneous contrast, could produce real motion, the ‘movement of colour’.16 Moving coloured discs were made in versions for the magic lantern, notably the Chromatrope, invented by the English painter Henry Langdon Childe at the end of the 1830s. The connection between colour and motion at the beginning of the twentieth century also appeared in the form of the colour symphonies developed by many artists as a new medium, for instance by Alexander László, by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack in the context of the Bauhaus, and through the ‘Absolute Film’ movement.17 That is, of course, a different cultural level from the context in which G.A. Smith worked at the elaboration of Kinemacolor in 1906 Brighton,but the Kinemacolor shutter was a rotating colour disc, in which speed allows for colour synthesis, and in which persistence of vision was thought as a possible common solution to both the motion and the colour problem in photography. This implies that, somehow, colour and movement were thought of as two different materializations of the same basic phenomenon. Art was not the only area in which this connection between colour and movement could be observed. In 1911, American engineer Frank B. Gilbreth published Motion Study: A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of the Workman, a very important treatise in the history of scientific industrial management, particularly in relation to motion pictures. Gilbreth advocated that proper colouring of the worker’s tools could increase his or her productivity: In our work we have to deal chiefly with color as a saver of motions. Color can be seen quicker than shape. Therefore, distinguishing things by their color is quicker than distinguishing them by the printing on them.18 Colour was here again connected with motion, speed, and modernity, though on a very different level than with educational toys of the nineteenth century. Such a use involved a distribution of coloured objects in the workspace, which was instigated by the massive diffusion of cheaper chemical pigments from the late nineteenth century on. These efficiency-oriented colours, to achieve their aim, had to be of a specific kind, not subtle, pastel tints, but bold, highly saturated, primary ones. Colour in the early twentieth century thus became part of our everyday lives, not only as an object of aesthetic experience, but also as a disciplinary instrument. This same period saw the progressive diffusion

Wh y A d d iti v e ?

| 119

120 |

of traffic lights in major Western cities. After a few attempts with gas traffic lights at the end of the nineteenth century, the first two-coloured lights – red and green, again, as in Kinemacolor and early Technicolor processes – were introduced in 1914 in the USA, on the initiative of policemen who were also inventors.19 Traffic lights then appeared in Paris at the beginning of the 1920s and in several other of the great metropolises of the time. The dissemination of this invention transformed the morphology and rhythm of urban life, and also affected the cultural connotations of red and green in the visual culture of the era. Later, in a 1957 interview, Jean Renoir expressed his hatred for red lights. People like him, he said, had known Paris before it became regulated by them, a time when ‘a certain indiscipline of bodies was still possible’.20 In 1924, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth published two articles in Management and Administration in which they proposed a decomposition of all workers’ movements in seventeen basic elements, which they ‘elegantly’ called the ‘therbligs’ – their name, Gilbreth, spelled backwards.21 Interestingly, these ‘therbligs’ were all attributed a specific colour, and presented as a colour wheel. This deep connection in the imaginary and episteme of the time between colour and movement is necessary to understand how a process like Kinemacolor can have been imagined. Only in this precise cultural and epistemological context can it be supposed that the process that allows for the synthesis

5.4 & 5.5: ‘Therbligs’ chart and wheel, from Frank B. and Lillian Gilbreth, ‘Applications of Motion Study: Its Use in Developing the Best Methods of Work’, Management and Administration, 8:3 (September 1924), 295.

of movement through still images – then formulated as persistence of vision – could also, and simultaneously, produce the synthesis of natural colours through successive selections along the primary colours. That was a strange idea.

ADDITIVE RETURNS Natural colour seemed to have become cinema-compatible, in other words, marketable, only when inventors turned to subtractive synthesis with the development of the Technicolor and the Eastmancolor systems. Today, however, whether through the backlit screens of monitors or the reflected light of projectors, electronic imagery has reversed that history: subtractive colour appears as a parenthesis in the longer history of ‘natural colour’ animated pictures. This surprising return, which massively comes into play within the diversity of recent restoration workflows, partly revives old problems, whether economic or technical: for instance, as additive colour is viewing-device dependant, all apparatuses and workflows have to be made coherent through painstaking and costly procedures that bolster but cannot guarantee uniformity. It also revives epistemological questions that have to do with the status of colour in the network of concepts within which we think about moving images today. Interestingly, additive and subtractive terminologies, as describing colour processes, are in fact trans-media categories. Subtractive systems can be four-colour printing on paper as well as classical film photography, but film can also be additive, as television and digital imagery are. For that reason, colour processes are particularly interesting case studies for contemporary archival strategies, which have to deal with these transmedial circulations of images. Each family of processes implies specific perceptual as well as technical and economic aspects. Each also inscribes itself within a specific genealogy, and a specific technical field and episteme – the chemical, the mechanical, the electric, or the digital. The complex and retrospectively strange technical constitution of Kinemacolor involves an intricate architecture of concepts, connecting colour and movement into a singular epistemological network, aesthetics, and discipline into a singular chromatic world. That architecture is certainly no less intricate in the case of digital colour, and probably no less strange.

Wh y A d d iti v e ?

| 121

NOTES 1

See Edward Raymond Turner and Frederick Marshall Lee, British Patent no. 6202, 22 March 1899, ‘Means for taking and exhibiting cinematographic pictures’; George Albert Smith, British Patent no. 26’671, 24 November 1906, ‘Improvements in & relating to Kinematograph Apparatus for the Production of Coloured Pictures’.

2

On the Chronochrome, see, among others, Léon Gaumont, ‘Gaumont Chronochrome Process Described by the Inventor’, Journal of the SMPE (January 1959) in A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television, edited by Raymond Fielding (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 65–67; Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: An Introduction (London: Bfi, 2000), 29–31; and ‘Le miracle du Chronochrome’, Cinémathèque 3 (Spring-Summer 1993): 83–91.

3

122 |

See James Layton and David Pierce, The Dawn of Technicolor, 1915–1935 (Rochester: George Eastman Museum, 2015).

4

That is echoed in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004), evoking 1920s Hollywood

5

See Victoria Jackson, ‘Reviving the Lost Experience of Kinemacolor: David Cleve-

through a digital simulation of a two-colour process. land and Brian Pritchard’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 7:1 (April 2010): 147–159. 6

Their gelatin filters were chosen for their closeness to a Kinemacolor projector seemingly still fitted with its original red and green screens at the Media Museum at Bradford – also assuming their colours had not altered with time.

7

Nicola Mazzanti, ‘Raising the Colours (Restoring Kinemacolor)’, in This Film is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film, edited by Roger Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec (Brussels: FIAF, 2002), 123.

8

Nicola Mazzanti, email to the author, 31 January 2016.

9

Nicola Mazzanti, email to the author, 31 January 2016.

10 This information was given to me by Nicholas Clark during a Skype conversation on 12 February 2015. 11 George Albert Smith, ‘Animated Photographs in Natural Colour’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 57:2925 (11 December 1908): 74. 12 Herbert T. Kalmus, ‘Technicolor Adventures in Cinemaland’, Journal of the Society of Motion Pictures Engineers (December 1938) in A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television, edited by Raymond Fielding (Berkeley -Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 52. 13 Gaston Bachelard, Étude sur l’évolution d’un problème de physique. La propagation thermique dans les solides (Paris: Vrin, 1927), 7. 14 Richard C. Dougal, Clive A. Greated, and Alan E. Marson, ‘Then and Now: James Clerk Maxwell and Colour’, Optics and Laser Technology 38 (2006): 215. 15 Georges Roque, ‘La Couleur: simultanée et successive’, Fotogenia 1 (1995): 310.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

16 Georges Roque, Art et science de la couleur (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 390–401. 17 See Bregt Lameris, ‘Colourful Projections: Bauhaus Farbenlichtspiele and their Various Reconstructions’, in At the Borders of (Film) History. Temporality, Archaeology, Theories, edited by Andrea Beltrame and Andrea Mariani (Udine: Filmforum, 2015), 371–379. 18 Frank B. Gilbreth, Motion Study (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1911), 46. 19 Hannah Osborne, ‘History of Traffic Lights: 100th Anniversary of the First Electric Traffic System’ International Business Times (5 August 2014) http://www.ibtimes. co.uk/history-traffic-lights-100th-anniversary-first-electric-traffic-system-1459680 (accessed 20 April 2016). 20 Jean Renoir, Entretiens et propos (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1979), 52. 21 Frank. B. and Lillian Gilbreth, ‘Classifying the Elements of Work: Methods of Analyzing Work in Seventeen Subdivisions’, Management and Administration 8:2 (August 1924): 151–154 and ‘Applications of Motion Study: Its Use in Developing the Best Methods of Work’, Management and Administration 8:3 (September 1924): 295–297’. ‘Therblig’ is, of course, ‘Gilbreth’ spelled backwards.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Benoît Turquety is Assistant Professor at the University of Lausanne; director of the SNF research project on Bolex, of the EPIMETE/digitalmediaepistemology research axis, and of the Swiss branch of the international research partnership TECHNÈS; and member of the Material Archival Studies Network. Educated as a film technician at the Louis-Lumière School, he holds a PhD from the University of Paris 8. His recent research focusses on the history, archaeology, and epistemology of film technology, from mid19th century visual dispositives to Kinemacolor or digital media. His latest book, Inventer le cinéma. Épistémologie: problèmes, machines (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 2014), won the Maurizio Grande International Award in 2015.

Wh y A d d iti v e ?

| 123

CHAPTER 6

Ziegfeldized Slapstick, Useful Comedy Mack Sennett’s Slapstick Comedies under the Influence of Natural Colour Hilde D’haeyere

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH06

ABSTRACT Exploring the interaction between comedy and colour, this essay studies three comedy series produced at pivotal moments in Mack Sennett's studio history: late silent films, Depression-era talking films, and small-gauge film prints for non-theatrical viewing released in 1935. In the uncertain days of late silent film, Sennett's reenactments of well-known art pieces combine refined culture with vernacular taste and transgressive parody, while his reports on nature's colourful subjects with naturalistic sounds and expert voices reinforce the orientation towards educational naturalism in Depression-era comedies. Colour film thus emerges as a technology that glosses earlier slapstick tropes with multilayered connotations and new visual appeal, bracing slapstick comedy in challenging times and ultimately ensuring its afterlife. k e y wo r ds

Mack Sennett, slapstick comedy, two-colour Technicolor, Sennett-color, Dunningcolor, Kodascope Film Library

| 125

ART AND NATURE

126 |

In the mid 1920s, despite the availability of Technicolor’s two-colour system, very few Hollywood studios were willing to take the plunge into colour. One of the notable exceptions was Mack Sennett’s comedy studio. This chapter explores the various ways colour was used in Mack Sennett comedies at three pivotal moments in studio history: in late silent films, in Depression-era talking films, and, finally, considering colour as an element of Sennett’s legacy after the closure of the studio at the end of 1933. Each of these moments saw the release of a series of short comedies in which colour played a prominent role. Each comedy series used a different approach to colour with a specific set of subjects, a distinct film style, and a particular comedic tone. Furthermore, each release of such a colour comedy series came on a moment of transition for the comedy studio, inviting an exploration of the functions of colour in comedies in times of change. To structure the study, I propose to employ the terminology that dominated the debate over the implementation of colour and divided the professional film world: the ‘art’ versus ‘nature’ dichotomy, sketched in a brief overview of the arguments. As contemporary resistance to colour film was based on aesthetic and production arguments, colour faced criticism from across the industry. Under the watchful eye of the American Society of Cinematographers, camerapeople fiercely campaigned against colour, feeling that the presence of a colour-camera operator and a colour consultant on the set imposed on their artistic reign.1 Mastering the subtle scale of greys was presented as the highest achievement of the art of cinematography, while colour film was feared for drawing moving pictures too close to reality. ‘Art’ and ‘nature’ became the two dominant frames of reference for the implementation of colour in film, usually set up as opposite poles and mutually exclusive aims.2 For colour-film manufacturers, the fidelity of a colour process to reproduce the colours of reality as accurately as possible was the ultimate goal. Film theorists tended to agree with cinematographers that the artistry of cinema resided in its disconnection from naturalistic claims. Ingrained in colour-film technology, they saw a drive towards naturalism, which they strongly resisted in the name of art. Béla Balázs, for example, doubted colour’s contribution to an artistic film style, in spite of the cheering title of his 1924 essay ‘Welcome to the colour film!’. ‘For fidelity to nature is not always of benefit to art,’ he writes, ‘Art actually consists in reduction. And is it not conceivable that the homogeneous grey on grey of the ordinary film contained the secret of a true artistic style?’3 Writing in 1933, after the transition to sound cinema, Rudolf Arnheim still argued how precisely the imperfections of a technology shape its value as an art form.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

What will the colour film have to offer when it reaches technical perfection? We know what we shall lose artistically by abandoning the black-and-white film. Will colour ever allow us to achieve [...] a similar independence of ‘reality’? he asks.4 In the discourse of film theorists as well as cinematographers, the artistry of the medium clearly resided within black-and-white photography. Meanwhile, in slapstick comedy circles, little attention was given to colour film. Gilbert Seldes, the American writer and advocate of slapstick, did not write a single word on colour in his 1924 book on the popular arts: The Seven Lively Arts.5 Focussing on a reconfiguration of the conventional dichotomy between lowbrow and highbrow culture, in which he appraised slapstick comedy as a vital art form, the then-infant technology of natural-colour film simply slipped under his radar. Five years later, in An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies, Seldes focussed on the advent of sound rather than colour.6 The writings of mid- and late- twentieth-century slapstick experts James Agee and Walter Kerr were equally silent on colour and comedy.7 All three authors locate the core of slapstick’s effectiveness as fantasy precisely in its distance from reality. Colour just seemed too far removed from slapstick comedy’s unreal universe to devote time or thought to it. Yet, in sharp contrast to this critical disinterest, stood film producer Mack Sennett. The self-proclaimed King of Comedy was an early adopter of natural-colour film, as I have detailed elsewhere.8 Sennett was the only slapstick producer active in the 1920s and early 1930s to use colour with any regularity. Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, and Laurel and Hardy each experimented with colour elements in only one film. Chaplin’s Tramp was always pictured in black and white, and, while Harold Lloyd was an avid amateur photographer who took many colour (and stereoscopic) photographs, he never used colour film professionally.9 Furthermore, Sennett presents an interesting case because his colour comedies split into two distinctly different film forms: silent comedies with colour sequences and full-colour sound subjects. In 1930, he even launched a two-colour process under his own name, Sennett-color. As natural colour was introduced in Sennett comedies before synchronous sound, his colour films complicate a chronological arrangement in which comedy looked for subjects and film formats in talking film genres, such as ‘canned’ vaudeville acts, song-and-dance musical revues, and fantasy films. Did Sennett, then, single-handedly discover the slapstick potential of natural-colour cinematography? Let us investigate three instances in which colour and comedy interact in slapstick cinema.

Z ie g fel d ize d S lapstic k , U seful C o m e d y

| 127

ZIEGFELDIZED SLAPSTICK The first case under scrutiny is the comedy series, the Sennett Bathing Girl pictures, launched in December 1927 by Mack Sennett Comedies studio for release through Pathé Film Exchanges. Between 1927 and 1929, eight two-reel silent comedies set in an all-girl environment spun a number of variations on the flapper and college theme. The leading comedienne was Daphne Pollard, with Sally Eilers and Carole Lombard debuting. Each short contains several 6.1: Technicolor film frames from Love at First Flight (Edward F. Cline, 1928, Mack Sennett Comedies), in the Lobster Films collection, Academy Film Archive, Los Angeles. Photograph Hilde D’haeyere.

128 |

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

sequences in the two-colour Technicolor No. 3 process, picturing young, wellshaped, Caucasian girls in colourful (un)dress cheerfully engaged in titillating activities. The comedy series was conceived as a vehicle for Sennett Bathing girls, who were moved from a position of decorative shapes in the background of comedic actions in mid-1920s films, to headlining lavish production numbers in full colour.10 This series of Bathing Girl comedies was among the very last shorts produced by Sennett in the old Edendale studio; they were made in the uncertain months between July 1927 and January 1928 when The Jazz Singer conquered box offices. The comedy series was also among the last shorts to be distributed by Pathé, which, after the discontinuation of the distribution contract in December 1928, issued the colour comedies one by one, stretching its backlog of silent Sennett shorts until March 1929 when Matchmaking Mamma, the final instalment, was released. Studying the Bathing Girl comedies, it appears that the staging of the colour scenes draws on a curious entanglement of references, of which ‘art’ seems to be the most cited source. The colour scenes not only breathe an artistic air, some are literally fashioned after fine-arts originals. The colour shots in The Girl From Everywhere (Eddie Cline, 1927); Run, Girl, Run (Alf Goulding, 1928); The Campus Carmen (Alf Goulding, 1928); and The Girl From Nowhere (Harry Edwards, 1928), for instance, are announced by a velvet curtain in a gilded picture frame. Frame and curtain, key indicators of pictorialism and theatricality, function as a passage from black and white to colour. The drapes open on a Technicolor tableau in which scores of bathing girls pose and parade in a slow choreography, sometimes helped by stage machinery such as a rotating platform hidden under the sand. The pace slows down to a dreamy reverie for the display of girls on a slave market, the exhibition of athletics, or Cleopatra’s stately descent down a grand flight of stairs in an oriental bathhouse. In Run, Girl, Run, the curtains open to unveil a specific setting inspired by ancient times; the shooting script describes the lost scene: technicolor for the Gladiator in burnished helmet and shield with sword in a victorious pose with her foot on the body of her fallen opponent lying on the ground in suitable costume, lying at her feet with face turned from camera.11 Clearly, this composition is modelled after the painting Pollice Verso (1872) by Jean-Léon Gérôme. This direct reference is not the only pictorial source in a Sennett Girl comedy. The Girl From Everywhere ends with a (lost) Technicolor shot of a Bathing Girl ‘posed with bow and arrow as Diana the Huntress while at her feet in majestic pose is the lion,’ in an evocation of Angelo Graf von Courten’s late nineteenth-century painting The Goddess Diana with a Lion, a

Z ie g fel d ize d S lapstic k , U seful C o m e d y

| 129

130 |

6.2: Production still of The Girl From Everywhere (Edward F. Cline, 1927, Mack Sennett Comedies), photograph by Edwin Bower Hesser, collection of the Royal Belgian Film Archive, Brussels.

rare visualization of the divine huntress with a lion instead of the customary deer or dogs.12 A bathhouse scene invokes Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres’s neoclassicist paintings, such as The Turkish Bath (1862). The transition from black and white to natural colour is treated as a passage to the domain of the pictorial arts, what Philippe Dubois termed the ‘passage à la peinture.’13 In contrast with critical discourse in which the concept of ‘art’ sides with blackand-white photography, in Sennett shorts, an explicitly artistic and painterly frame of references is mobilized for the colour scenes. Significantly, the Sennett studio was quite particular in the selection of painterly sources, mostly referencing late nineteenth-century academic art with pompous depictions of goddesses, mythical figures, and images from antiquity and the Orient situated on exotic locations in sunny climates. In mythology and antiquity, slapstick found suitable spectacles that blend physical stunts with sadistic conflicts, animal spectacles, and heroic flirtations with

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

danger. In the exotic settings and warm climate, film colour had the perfect excuse (and models) to picture undressed characters. The colour quotes of classical subjects can definitely be read as justifications of nudity, a practice already established in film at the turn of the century, when Pathé released risqué subjects such as Les Bains Des Dames De La Cour (1905) in stencil-coloured shorts to make them seem ‘more like art’.14 Moreover, the standstill of the Bathing Girls in the colour scenes not only refers to the pictorial origins of the scenes, it also ties in with the tradition of the ‘tableau vivant’, which entails the reenactment of famous artworks in which live performers assume the poses, gestures, and costumes of the original work. This was a popular after-dinner entertainment in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries that combined aspects of painting, sculpture, theatre, and literary sources. Although initially associated with high-cultured circles, the imposed format and the stillness of the modelling offered a convenient style to bring risqué entertainment without infringing on censorship rules or offending good taste.15 The high-profile artistic format peppered with titillating connotations had been frequently used in films at the turn of the twentieth century and still echoed in the Ziegfeld tableaux staged on Broadway during the 1920s. Hence, the full connotations of the term I coined earlier ‘Ziegfeldized slapstick’: it describes the class-crossing presence amidst slapstick comedy actions of colourful reenactments of artistic sources in a latenight folly’s display of beautiful female models posing in sophisticated stages of undress. One further element enriches the alliance between slapstick comedy and fine arts for the implementation of colour: the Pollice Verso-scene depicted in Run, Girl, Run was a very well-known image that shaped the cinematic imagination of ancient Rome. Gérôme’s painting had been used as a visual reference for the immensely popular peplum spectacle Quo Vadis (Enrico Guazzoni, 1913) and, even to this day, Ridley Scott was allegedly persuaded to direct Gladiator (2000) when he was shown a reproduction of Pollice Verso as a reference for the film’s staging.16 However, even at the time the tableau was recreated for Quo Vadis in 1913, the historicist style of grand painting was no longer exhibited in Paris salons, but mainly known through widely available, mass-produced reproductions on picture postcards, lantern slides, book illustrations, advertisements, cookie boxes, and the like.17 As the French naturalist author Emile Zola remarked in 1867, Gérôme had been very active in offering his paintings for reproductions, and the many photographs and engravings vied with the popularity of the original paintings.18 Accordingly, in the public eye, these painted scenes were not only perceived as unique pieces of fine art, but mostly as popular images impressed in the collective imagination as cinematic representations of ancient times. This means that referencing

Z ie g fel d ize d S lapstic k , U seful C o m e d y

| 131

132 |

academic genre painting in colour scenes in slapstick comedy shorts should not only be understood as an uplifting gesture that adds connotations of good taste and an impeccable sense of fine arts, class, and high culture to comedy. It definitely also referenced a conservative taste for popular art pieces and resonated with familiar images of art found in picture-card collections of a very broad audience across classes. In mobilizing art sources to model the colour sequences, the slapstick shorts simultaneously enjoyed the added prestige of art and history, the sex appeal of elegantly excused nudity, the audience’s satisfaction of recognizing a familiar image, and the humorous clash of keys when a fine-arts piece is transplanted into a comedy context. This richly resonant display is relegated to the confinement of a separate sequence that contains not only the risqué contents, but also the brilliant colours within the redeeming context of art. Comedy and colour are separated, and only the colour scenes breathe the solemn seriousness associated with the contemplation of fine arts. The colour scenes are also gendered spaces reserved for female performers: no male comedians fool around in natural colour. In fact, the colour inserts corral the antipodes of slapstick tropes: elegant and slow-moving women who embody iconic art pieces. The segregation not only keeps colour from contaminating the black-and-whiteness of comedic actions, it also makes the inserted colour spaces ideal spots for parody: delicate, artistic, female sections that offset slapstick’s male-dominated frenzy in black and white. To harness the high-flying colour sequence and announce the return to black and white, a transition from painterly universe back to comedy is scripted. And so it happens that, during her graceful descent down the stately staircase, Sennett’s Cleopatra slips on a bar of soap and stumbles straight into the pool. Bathing Girls thus cross over from static objects of artistic-erotic contemplation to active participants in slapstick gags to bridge the return from colour to black and white. Saturating colour scenes with art references, then, collapses the idea that the polarization between colour and black and white is a division between aspirations towards realism or towards artistic licence, between refined culture and vernacular taste, or between display and comedy, instead using fine arts as an inspiration for colour, nudity, and parody. Such multilayered colour scenes were versatile weapons to overcome the various transitions of Mack Sennett Comedies Studios. Not only the move to new distribution channels or new studio locations – both of which had little impact on movie-going audiences –, but, more importantly, the budding of talking film required extra efforts to reach audiences for silent films. Sennett Comedies gambled on Bathing Girls, colour technology, and high production values to impress audiences and ensure their continued loyalty.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

USEFUL COMEDY In 1930, the second moment under scrutiny, the condition of Sennett’s slapstick comedy studio was considerably different, most obviously due to the move to new facilities in Studio City in mid 1928, the firm establishment of sound film, and the alarming decline in movie attendance in the early Depression years. By now, the golden era of silent-comedy was definitively over and Sennett Studios was looking for film formats that befitted the studio’s growing financial problems, while luring in Depression-era audiences. One of these formats was a series of short comedies called Mack Sennett Brevities, under which banner six of the originally planned twelve one-reel comedies were released between September 1930 and October 1931. Again, colour seemed 6.3: Sennett-color film frames from Strange Birds (1930, Mack Sennett Comedies), in the collections of The Library of Congress, National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, Culpeper, Virginia. Photograph Hilde D’haeyere.

| 133

Z ie g fel d ize d S lapstic k , U seful C o m e d y

134 |

the go-to technology: the pictures were all-colour, all-talking subjects filmed in the two-colour bi-pack system Sennett-color, which was developed by inhouse technicians, led by chief electrician Paul Guerin and cameraperson Billy Williams. The Mack Sennett Brevities were specifically created to showcase the Sennett-color process and to demonstrate its assets. An analysis of the choice of subjects and colour models reveals the specific patrons and markets they targeted. Most interestingly, in the Brevities, Sennett-color was coupled with ‘nature’ just like Technicolor in Bathing Girl shorts had been paired with ‘art’. Picturing an aviary on Catalina Island that holds the world’s largest collection of birds (Strange Birds, 1930); the well-known Tudor mansion and water sports’ facilities at lake Arrowhead’s mountain resort (Take Your Medicine, Eddie Cline, 1930); waterscapes of a speedboat race as seen from an airplane (The World Flier, Del Lord, 1931); a leopard befriending a dog in Luna Park Zoo (Who’s Who in the Zoo, Babe Stafford, 1931): never before had slapstick comedy showed such an interest in nature’s subjects. The tagline for Sennett’s colour process advertised the system as ‘nature’s reflection’ and Sennett-color was indeed most used to capture the hues and shades of flora and fauna.19 In visual style and production methods, the shorts draw on a distinctly nonfictional design. Contrasting with Sennett’s first all-colour, all-sound subject, Jazz Mamas (Mack Sennett, 1929, in Multicolor), which tied in with the early sound rage for musical comedies in natural colour, the Mack Sennett Brevities were not studio-bound productions, instead making extensive use of location shooting. Sennett-color shorts give centre stage to natural locations and animal life, downplaying the physical interference of comedians. To structure the display of nature’s novelties, the stories are composed like guided tours, touristic visits, or school kids’ field trips that present successive encounters with several species, places, and attractions. Animals are named, athlete’s sporting feats enumerated, exotic birds described in a quasi-educational stream of information. Usually, this report comes from a character who acts like a comedic guide, explaining the sites and sights to visitors. ‘This is the Catalina Bird Park, the largest collection of birds in the United States, in fact, in the world,’ Frank Eastman’s offscreen voice dryly explains in the establishing shot in Strange Birds. There is virtually no interaction between animals and actors within a frame and very few instances of slapstick pratfalling. Through inventive quipping and comedic riffing, the tour guide replaces physical stunt work with verbal clowning, occasionally pronounced with a funny foreign accent. The characters in Mack Sennett Brevities actually bring a type of dialogueoriented comedy that Sennett himself, on many occasions, accused of stultifying the racing pace of slapstick comedy. ‘We have a wonderful instrument in talk, but we mustn’t overuse it,’ he advises in 1930 in a New York Times’s article,

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

‘If an automobile is crashing into a pole, we’ll get the grinding of the brakes, the cries, the burning tires, the breaking glass, the rattle and bang. The scene will be twice as funny.’20 Yet, while proclaiming to focus on funny sounds to underscore comedic actions, in the Brevities, Sennett in fact favoured voices over noises, thus siding with more realistic trends of comedy. As Rob King has argued, the approach to sound reset comic cinema’s foundational dichotomy between lowbrow and highbrow tendencies, aligning speech with ideals of cultural preeminence, and comedic sound effects with illegitimacy.21 Although King categorizes Sennett as mainly interested in sound effects to enhance the effectiveness of visual gags, he rightly locates these effects in the naturalist vein of diegetic sounds.22 No trap-style, illusion-breaking noises of whacks and whistles, but instead the splashing of water and the tweeting of birds. No non-diegetic use of music to jazz up the mood and pace of slapstick antics, but songs performed onscreen by crooning characters and famous bands: Frank Eastman in Take Your Medicine and George Olsen’s band in Movie Town.23 No shrieks and shouts, but conversations. The soundtrack is as faithful as the visuals and brings solid information for ears and eyes. The aesthetics of a Mack Sennett Brevity then can be summed up as: nature’s colourful subjects pic-

6.4: ‘Sennett-color: Nature’s Reflection’, advertisement in The Film Daily (28 May 1930): 12.

Z ie g fel d ize d S lapstic k , U seful C o m e d y

| 135

136 |

tured with colour fidelity and synchronized with naturalistic sounds accompanied by expert explications. This time, colour comedy was clearly aligned with naturalism. Trying to make sense of the major shift from an arty Ziegfeldish concept in silent Technicolor shorts to a naturalistic approach in talking Sennett-color subjects, several considerations come to mind. First, we must acknowledge the specific aesthetic, financial, and production aspects of each colour system. Technicolor was an expensive full-service system that came with the hiring of cameras, operators, colour consultants, and lab actions, which led to a strict allotment of colour film for carefully scripted scenes realized in controlled conditions to allow for maximum impact and a minimum waste of film. Employing this brilliant system for short studio sequences that display half-dressed girls in colourful fabrics is then a perfectly fitting plan. The technical concept of Sennett-color allowed more production flexibility since colour scenes were filmed by a slightly adjusted black-and-white camera operated by an in-house crew, functioning under unfavourable (light) conditions. The processing was done economically in the studio’s laboratory, which delivered colour dailies within 24 hours, resulting in very short postproduction periods: footage for Strange Birds, for instance, was filmed on 3 November on Catalina Island and the short was released on 23 November 1930.24 Since Sennett-color was created by toning the film print, blue on one side and red on the other, a positive print was more transparent, less dense, and had a softer and cooler aspect than the brilliant glow-in-the-dark colours of Technicolor’s dye-imbibition prints. These characteristics more directly led to subjects that benefited from the detailed rendition of a subtle range of colours with a large amount of blue, such as subjects in the outdoors. Furthermore, changing the colour concept from ‘art’ to ‘nature’ also indicates the shedding of the uneasy position of natural colour in cinema. When novel, the technology had originally looked to ally with media that were historically and inherently associated with colour, such as painting and theatre, for legitimacy. Nonetheless, colour’s innate capacity to accurately render shades and hues made it exceptionally suitable for nonfiction topics that benefited from the seasonal reporting of colour, such as travelogues and fashion reports. In conjunction with synchronized sound, natural colour reinforced the orientation towards naturalism in comedy – a curious change seen in light of colour’s earlier silent association with artistic excess, spectacle, and decoration. In the Sennett Brevities, colour fidelity put comedy to work: advertising California’s natural beauties demonstrated the commercial potential of the Sennett-color process. The cinematic journeys take the audience on armchair travels to hotspots in Southern California. Exact locations are laid out in estab-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

lishing shots, aerial views, and panning shots, and close shots of nameplates identify the attractions. The shorts are filmed during regular opening hours of the zoo, animal farm, or holiday resort, showing paying visitors in the background. These Californian destinations were within easy reach of the studio, making the wildlife films a go-to genre in times of tight production budgets. Similarly, they tied into the audience’s Depression-era concerns, offering affordable travel destinations, educational fun, and plain-folk entertainment to a movie crowd of families and kids. Colour film coupled with nature’s subjects brewed a powerful cocktail with the capacity to promote these touristic places and recreational activities, transforming the comedies into vehicles for commercial interests. Some boosted businesses aligned with Sennett’s entrepreneurship in the greater Los Angeles area, such as his endorsement of the expansion of the former Selig Zoo into Los Angeles’s first theme park when Who’s Who in the Zoo was filmed there, and his interests in Catalina Island where Strange Birds was shot.25 Apart from servicing his business friends, the didactic and educational air of the Brevities also proved the studio’s capabilities in the field of commercial, nontheatrical film production. Trusting the potential of colour film to attract commissioned films, such as advertising films or industrial assignments, Sennett made the Sennett-color process available to the entire industry. In the spring of 1930, Mack Sennett Comedies grouped the assets that were of interest to commercial clients in an Industrial Film Division helmed by General Sales Manager C.W. McCann.26 The Industrial Film Division offered the use of Sennett’s licence for the RCA Photophone sound system, the Sennett-color process, the state-of-the-art sound stages, and other studio facilities in Studio City to outside producers in theatrical and nontheatrical circuits. The studio in fact proposed to operate as a service centre, expanding operations beyond theatrical film production into the commercial field of commissioned films, trying to tap an extra channel of revenues. Unfortunately, while the Brevities demonstrate many connections to interests in the fields of tourism, travel, leisure wear, modes of transportation, Californian products, etc., research suggests that the only external companies to use the services of Sennett’s Industrial Film Division were minor, poverty-row houses from within the Hollywood film industry, such as Tiffany-Stahl Productions, Invincible Picture Corporation, Salient Picture Corporation, and Pyramid Productions. By the end of 1931, it had become clear that the continued investment in a minor two-colour process such as Sennett-color was not financially viable and all colour activities ceased in June 1932. Sennett-color and Mack Sennett’s Industrial Film Division were the short-lived but important signals of the new production and distribution methods the comedy studio considered, underpinning Sennett’s ambition to expand beyond the field of theatrical comedy fiction film. But the buoys were too light to save the sinking studio.

Z ie g fel d ize d S lapstic k , U seful C o m e d y

| 137

SMALL-GAUGE SLAPSTICK

138 |

The third and last moment in the history of Mack Sennett Studios to be examined is the inclusion of a series of Sennett shorts with colour scenes in the Kodascope Film Library in January 1935.27 Among the first nontheatrical film exchange systems in the United States, the Kodascope Library had been offering motion pictures in 16mm safety prints for rent out to home users, schools, and institutions since 1925. David Pierce described the business goal of the film library as twofold: to make 16mm the standard film format for home and educational movies, and to dominate the nontheatrical film industry.28 Alongside an important collection of educational films, the 1936 Kodascope catalogue also featured a wide selection of comedies and animated cartoons. Amidst an overwhelming majority of some 1800 black-and-white and occasionally tinted pictures, a tiny selection of silent colour subjects stood out: on offer were three one-reel full-colour dramatic shorts produced by Howard C. Brown and Curtis F. Nagel for Colorart Pictures, plus three two-reel Sennett Bathing Girl comedies: Love at First Flight (Eddie Cline, 1928), The Campus Vamp (Alf Goulding, 1928), and Matchmaking Mama (Harry Edwards, 1929).29 These comedies had been released theatrically through Pathé Film Exchanges

6.5: Advertisements for Dunningcolor and the Kodascope Library in Moviemakers (September 1933): 394-395.

only a few years earlier; they were part of the series of eight Sennett Bathing Girl pictures with sequences in two-colour Technicolor No. 3, whose relation between slapstick and female display I described earlier as ‘Ziegfeldized slapstick’. Revisiting these shorts on an amateur film format in an educational context seems odd on many levels and it remains unclear who actually licenced the Sennett films to the library. Sennett Comedies studio had been plagued by serious cash flow problems since 1932. Possibly, Sennett licenced the films right before the studio’s bankruptcy at the end of 1933 to recoup some losses. Motion pictures were not expected to circulate theatrically for longer than five years and, with exhibitors interested only in talking films, pictures dating back to the last days of silent-film production enjoyed an even shorter theatrical life. So perhaps former Sennett distributor Pathé sold off their stock of silent-film negatives at the time of the merger with RKO Pictures in 1931, as suggested by slapstick experts Richard M. Roberts and Steve Rydzewski.30 In any case, while the Kodascope library catalogue of 1932 only offered a handful of black-and-white Sennett shorts featuring comedians Harry Langdon and Billy Bevan, more Sennett titles started to be added in 1933, resulting in a veritable stream of Sennett-Kodascope releases in 1934 at a rate of one or two two-reelers each month, concluding with the issuing of three Bathing Girl comedies with colour scenes in January 1935, after which the intake stopped. In total, the 1936 Kodascope Library catalogue lists an impressive 30 silent Sennett shorts produced between 1924 and 1929, where they feature among comedy products from Roach, Universal, Christie, Fox, Essanay, Vitagraph, Chester, and Mutual – other titles that had exhausted their theatrical value. At a rental price of $2.50 each, the Bathing Girl comedies with colour scenes were 50 cents more expensive than black-and-white two-reel comedies, equalled only by Chaplin’s Mutual films. The films’ edge codes indicate the Bathing Girls shorts were printed to 16mm in 1933 and 1934. The production of those reduction prints entailed some technical challenges with respect to the original Technicolor sequences. The Kodascope Library operated under a system of licence agreements with motion-picture studios who were asked to make 35mm negatives available in order to copy the 16mm positives directly from originals. However, to reproduce the colour shorts, 35mm Technicolor positive prints were duplicated to 16mm by the Dunning Process Company of Hollywood, operated by special photographic effects experts Carroll and C. Dodge Dunning.31 Dunningcolor went through several stages of technical adjustments and, in addition to a system for 35mm release prints, eventually produced 16mm prints on Kodachrome Duplicating Film processed for the amateur market by the parental Eastman Kodak company, which made this colour process conveni-

Z ie g fel d ize d S lapstic k , U seful C o m e d y

| 139

140 |

ent and economical in use. Dunningcolor strips were then cut into a reel of yellow-tinted film stock, which softened the transitions between full colour and monochrome, and marked the licenced prints as originals, thwarting unauthorized copying. The fact that the spliced prints are only on offer in the 1936 Kodascope catalogue might be due to their extreme fragility that did not endure through the heavy wear and tear of library use. Curiously, the series of Sennett Bathing Girl comedies was not licenced to colour in its entirety. Of the series of eight comedies, three 16mm shorts boast scenes in full colour, two shorts were printed to black and white, and three others were left out.32 In examining which shorts were selected, a striking concept emerges. In contrast to the tableaux aesthetics in which pictorial sources were reenacted in stagey display (discussed above), the colour scenes in the Kodascope copies of Love At First Flight, The Campus Vamp, and Matchmaking Mama depict the Bathing Girls in athletic movement in the sunny outdoors. Girls play baseball on a beach, perform a butterfly ballet in Busch Gardens, or rehearse a chorus line dance on a green lawn. The sporting activities are set in topical environments, such as festivities for the arrival of a Lindbergh-like aeroplane pilot (Love at First Flight), a sporting competition between college teams (The Campus Vamp), and a charity fundraiser (Matchmaking Mama). Gone are the harems, gladiators, and kidney-shaped pools, instead showing modern women on sites of education and training. Replacing the scanty draperies of the characters from far away and long ago, the modern-day settings call for up-to-date costumes. While costumes in black and white have graphic prints of stripes and checkers, in colour scenes, they feature plain fields of green and red. Sennett’s costume designer Mme. Violette designed specific two-colour bathing suits and props ‘in proper Technicolor colours’, including ‘two-piece effects’ in ‘bright green and brilliant orange’ as recorded in the production files.33 This concept couples the slapstick designs to Jantzen’s smart swimsuit model the Twosome, a bathing suit with contrasting colours for the top and bottom parts that was a hugely popular beach item in the summer of 1928, when the films were originally released.34 Colour thus underscored the transformation of slapstick costumes into American-made fashion items, which, in turn, gives natural-colour cinema the direct commercial advantage to transfer vital information on fluctuating trends – as it has been used many times in fashion films and advertisements. Using colour cinematography for fashion reports reconciles the art-or-nature dichotomy, dressing artistic production numbers that have a mercantile need for realistically reproduced ­colours. In licensing these films to the film library, it appears a selection was made for the most modern slapstick shorts that would appeal to a fashion-minded audience of flappers. Yet the delay between the original production and the

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Kodascope rerelease six years later neutralized the trendiness and froze Sennett comedies in time as quaintly stratified film forms that reference once-popular hot spots and nearly new fashion in obsolete silence and with imperfect colours. Still, the substandard film gauge was particularly important for slapstick films, and colour definitely added to the market value of the old slapstick reels, doing its part in motivating the Kodascope Library to licence the films and motivating home audiences to rent them. The film library carried the silent comedies over into the era of talking films, and from theatrical exhibition spaces into a network of private home users and places of learning, such as schools, museums, libraries, and community institutions. In so doing, the Kodascope prints helped to keep the interest in silent slapstick comedy alive, inviting new generations to rediscover silent comedians in small-gauge, blackand-white or yellow-tinted prints that occasionally bloomed into full-colour display. Moreover, film-library copies were also instrumental in the survival of slapstick comedy subjects. Of the Sennett shorts The Campus Vamp and Matchmaking Mamma, 16mm Kodascope prints are the only colour versions still in existence today. The distribution of silent slapstick shorts, in colour and in black and white, through rental and sale film libraries (such as Kodascope and Pathegrams libraries), ensured an unprecedented access to home viewers and private film collectors – a small consolation prize compared to the industrial film production and nontheatrical distribution Sennett had originally envisioned as studio-saving strategies.

COLOURFUL AFTERLIFE The case of colour in Sennett slapstick comedies, then, articulates studio history in a nutshell, signalling the responsibility attached to colour-film technology. Firstly, for the implementation of colour, Sennett was not so much preoccupied with an idea of art nor with the desire to emulate nature. He added his own particular spin to the forked path laid out for colour film in critical discourse, satisfying the call for an ‘artistic use of colour’ by way of reenacting well-known art pieces, and applying colour’s capability for ‘natural colour reproduction’ to the presentation of nature’s subjects. In so doing, Sennett comedies did not take on the choice between art or nature on the level of film style, but on the level of filmed subjects. Secondly, his alignment with art or siding with nature does not correspond with a clean choice between high art and popular taste, between culture and commerce, between conservative and progressive forces, or between ridicule and homage; instead, colour adds an accretion of connotations to slapstick comedy that scrambles such dichotomies guided by comedic as well as commercial agendas. Thirdly,

Z ie g fel d ize d S lapstic k , U seful C o m e d y

| 141

colour not only braced slapstick products in challenging times, it also played an important part in ensuring slapstick comedy’s afterlife. Colour technology helped shape slapstick as a genre that not only looks back and reworks old-hat humour in quaint gags and clumsy tricks, but also reinvents and rejuvenates itself thanks to its technical curiosity. Precisely the implementation of advanced cinema technologies, like photographic tricks, technical stunts, natural-colour cinematography, and small-gauge film stock continuously remodelled slapstick comedy to up-to-date tastes, updating the shorts for each new generation of fans.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT 142 |

I would like to acknowledge the valuable cooperation of the following people for the priceless service of making rare and fragile colour prints available: George Willeman and Mike Mashon, Packard Campus, Library of Congress, Culpeper, Virginia; May Haduong and Melissa Levesque, Academy Film Archive, Los Angeles; Rick Prelinger, Internet Archive, Richmond, California; Elif Rongen-Kaynakci, EYE Film Institute, Amsterdam; and Bruno Mestdagh, Royal Belgian Film Archive, Brussels.

NOTES 1

For instance: Philip E. Rosen, ‘Believes Color Will Not Aid Dramatic Cinematography’, American Cinematographer (January 1927): 4.

2

The terminology drawn from: Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Remarks on Color Film [1935]’, in Color, The FIlm Reader, edited by Angela Dalle Vache and Brian Price (New YorkLondon: Routledge, 2006), 55–56.

3

Béla Balázs, ‘Supplementary Fragments: Welcome to the Colour Film’, translated by Rodney Livingstone in Early Film Theory: Visible Man [1924] and The Spirit of Film [1930], edited by Erica Carter, (New York-Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 78.

4

Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art [1933] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 154–155.

5

Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Sagamore Press, 1957).

6

Gilbert Seldes, An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies [1929] (New York: Arno Press, 1973).

7

James Agee, ‘Comedy’s Greatest Era’, Life (5 September 1949); Walter Kerr, The Silent Clowns [1975] (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980).

8

Hilde D’haeyere, ‘Technicolor, Multicolor, Sennett-Color’, in Color and the Moving Image: History, Aesthetics, Archive, edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins (New York-Abingdon (UK): Routledge, 2012), 23–36.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

9

Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances (1925, M-G-M) opens with a three-minute Technicolor sequence, Harry Langdon filmed one reel Technicolor for the feature film Long Pants (Frank Capra, 1927, First National), which was trimmed after the first release, and The Rogue Song (Lionel Barrymore and Hal Roach, 1930, M-G-M) features a brief colour appearance by Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel. All of these films are feature-length.

10 Hilde D’haeyere, ‘Splashes of Fun and Beauty: Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties’, in Slapstick Comedy, edited by Rob King and Tom Paulus (London-New York: Routledge, 2010), 207–25. 11 ‘Shooting Script of Run, Girl, Run,’ n.d., ca. 1927. 12 ‘Shooting script of The Girl From Everywhere,’ n.d., ca. 1928a. 13 Philippe Dubois, ‘ ‘Hybridations et Métissages: Les Mélanges Du Noir-et-Blanc et de La Couleur’, in La Couleur En Cinéma, edited by Jacques Aumont (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, Milano, Mazzotta, 1995), 79, 83–87. While Dubois’s term mainly relates to classical narrative feature films of the 1930s and 1940s, I find it remarkably useful to describe the early adoption of colour in silent Sennett slapstick shorts. 14 Simon Brown, ‘The Spectacle of Reality and British National Cinema’, in AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies (Birbeck: University of London, 2002), http://www.bftv.ac.uk/projects/dufaycolor.htm#_ftnref66. 15 Further reading in Steven Jacobs, ‘Tableaux Vivants’, in Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 88–120. 16 A. Lewin, ‘Rome Wasn’t Filmed in a Day’, Premiére, 13, no. 8 (May 2000): 44. 17 Ivo Blom, ‘Gérôme En Quo Vadis: Picturale Invloeden in de Film’, Jong Holland, 17, no. 4 (2001): 19, 22–23. 18 Émile Zola, Écrits Sur L’art (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 184: ‘Monsieur Gérôme [...] fait un tableau pour que ce tableau soit reproduit par la photographie et la gravure et se vende à des milliers d’exemplaires. Ici, le sujet est tout, la peinture est rien: la reproduction vaut mieux que l’oeuvre.’ 19 ‘Sennett-Color, Nature’s Reflection’, The Film Daily (28 May 1930c): 12. 20 ‘Mack Sennett and Talkers’, New York Times (30 November 1930): X6. 21 Rob King, ‘“Sound Came Along and Out Went the Pies” The American Slapstick Short and the Coming of Sound’, in A Companion to Film Comedy, edited by Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf (Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 81. 22 King, ‘“Sound Came Along”‘, 68. 23 Black-and-white comedies also favour voices over noises and focus on voice-­ oriented comedy, hence Sennett’s hiring of the foul-mouthed, mumbling comedian W.C. Fields and the smooth-talking singing performer Bing Crosby. 24 ‘Production papers of Strange Birds,’ n.d., ca. 1930; and ‘Sennett-Color’, 12. 25 Catalina Island had been the location for several Sennett comedies and documentary films since 1914, even featuring chewing-gum king and the island’s realestate magnate William Wrigley Jr. in Catalina, Here I Come (Earle Rodney, 1927).

Z ie g fel d ize d S lapstic k , U seful C o m e d y

| 143

26 ‘Mack Sennett’s Color for Industrial Films’, Variety (4 October 1930a): 1; and Mack Sennett, ‘Letter of Reference for C.W. McCann’ (10 December 1930) Author’s Collection. 27 ‘Featured Releases’, Movie Makers (January 1935): 6. 28 David Pierce, ‘Silent Movies and the Kodascope Libraries’, American Cinematographer, LXX, no. 1 (January 1989): 36. 29 The Colorart pictures are Maud Muller, Romany Love, and Mission Bells (each c. 350 feet long, rental price $1.50 a piece), originally filmed in two-colour Technicolor. 30 Richard M. Roberts and Steve Rydzewski, ‘Sennett in the Kodascope Library,’ 2016 conversation on the Silent Comedy Mafia website. http://www.silentcomedymafia.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1711, (Accessed 14 June 2016). 31 ‘Library Color FIlms’. Movie Makers (September 1933): 378. More information on Dunning Color: Ray Fernstrom, ‘Introducing Dunning Color’, International Photographer (November 1936): 10, 28, 30; and Ryan T. Roderick, A History of Motion

144 |

Picture Color Technology (London: Focal Press, 1977), 106. 32 The following Bathing Girl shorts in the Kodascope catalogue are entirely copied to black and white: The Girl from Everywhere and Campus Carmen. Not included in the catalogue are: The Girl from Nowhere, The Swim Princess, and Run, Girl, Run. 33 ‘Shooting script of The Swim Princess,’ n.d., ca. 1928. 34 ‘Twosome’, The Saturday Evening Post (30 June 1928).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Hilde D’haeyere is a photographer and film historian who investigates photographic aspects of cinema. Much of her work is on film style, movie technology, and the mechanisms of humour, with a particular focus on silent slapstick comedy. Recent publications include ‘Technicolor-Multicolor-Sennett-Color’ in Colour and the Moving Image (Routledge, 2012), ‘Slapstick on Slapstick’ in Film History (2014), and 'Frankfurter Slapstick: Benjamin, Kracauer and Adorno on American Screen Comedy' in October 160 (2017), co-authored with Steven Jacobs. Currently, she holds a postdoctoral research fellowship at KASK School of Arts at the University College Ghent in Belgium, where she also teaches and heads the master programme Film.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

CHAPTER 7

Kinemacolor and Kodak The Enterprise of Colour Frank Gray

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH07

ABSTRACT This chapter considers two distinctive elements within colour film history: the additive colour system known as Kinemacolor, and the development of subtractive colour film processes by Kodak. By understanding these two film enterprises in terms of their shared vision – to bring colour to the motion picture screen – and their very different approaches to the technical solution and its business development, it establishes the nature of these respective histories and their interrelationship. Kinemacolor, with its concentration on the optical and the mechanical, relied on George Albert Smith’s ingenuity as a lay scientist working with mechanical engineers. Dr. Kenneth Mees of Eastman Kodak was the polar opposite, as his colour work represented the professional, scientific approach funded and supported by a global corporation. k e y wo r ds

Kinemacolor, Kodachrome, Eastman Kodak, additive colour, substractive colour, George Albert Smith, Kenneth Mees, Charles Urban, George Eastman

| 145

146 |

Colour film has a long and complex history. Barbara Flueckiger’s excellent database, Timeline of Historical Film Colors, provides an authoritative overview of the many applied, additive, and subtractive colour-film systems that emerged in the 1890s and evolved throughout the first half of the twentieth century.1 This chapter considers two distinctive examples of this colour family tree: the additive colour system known as Kinemacolor and the the development of subtractive colour-film processes by Kodak. By understanding these two film enterprises, in terms of their shared vision, to bring colour to the motion-picture screen, and their very different approaches to the technical solution and its business development, establishes the nature of these respective histories and their interrelationship. It also works to highlight the very convoluted nature of the history of colour film. In 1902, Lord Kelvin, the eminent mathematician, physicist, and member of the Board of Kodak, made a confident prediction for the new century: ‘Photography in natural colours will soon be an established fact, although it will necessitate a lot of study to get it perfected’.2 But how would this ambition be realized? For the young film industry, given the prominent role models provided by Thomas Edison and George Eastman and their cinematographic enterprises, this desire could not be satisfied just through invention alone. It would be achieved through the realization of an integrated business strategy that had a number of properties: a practical invention that delivered a good three-colour moving-image reproduction of the natural world at a reasonable cost, possession of the intellectual property rights to it, and the means to industrisalize and commercialize it in a manner that would secure its success within the marketplace and generate significant profits. By the time of Kelvin’s pronouncement, there was not a colour technology that lent itself to this kind of development and exploitation. The coloured photographic image had been achieved through complicated multi-plate subtractive printing processes and complex additive screen-plate technologies. In film, applying colour to a black-and-white print was the only mode, either through hand colouring or one-colour tinting. In the quest for colour, a new way forward emerged in Britain through a very particular application of the additive theory of colour.

ADDITIVE COLOUR AND KINEMACOLOR The concept of additive colour was a distinctive feature of the research of the Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell. His exploration of colour theory and the trichromatic nature of colour vision, as presented in 1855, demonstrated his understanding of human vision and its ability to combine differ-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

ent colours in order to create a tri-colour image.3 His practical example of this understanding involved photographing a tartan ribbon three times, each time through a different colour filter (red, green, and blue). The resulting three lantern slides were then projected on a screen using three magic lanterns, each with the relevant colour filter. When the three projected images were superimposed together on-screen, they combined to create a compound colour image that reproduced the original colours of the tartan ribbon. The photochromoscope invented by Frederic Ives (also known by its trade name as the Kromskop), was the first commercial attempt to exploit Maxwell’s research. Ives’s additive colour-viewing ‘machine’ enabled a user to see a full-colour stereoscopic image derived from three pairs of stereoscope slides. Launched in London in 1898 by Ives’s Photochromoscope Syndicate, it used a system of coloured filters and mirrors to create a synthsized image that only existed within the viewer’s eye.4 The Kromskop was available commercially for only a short time, however, its dramatic demonstration of how colour images could be created using coloured filters inspired a new colour moving-image experiment. This work was led by Edward Turner with financial support from Frederick Lee. Turner, who had been employed by Ives, attempted to create a tri-colour cinematographic system by employing black-and-white film and a rotating filter wheel of red, blue, and green filters. This complicated film system, developed over the years 1899 to 1903, proved not to be practical, although it laid the foundation for Kinemacolor, devised by George Albert Smith and financed by the entrepreneur and film producer Charles Urban. The Lee and Turner and Kinemacolor systems were intimately connected through Urban, who had financed Lee and Turner and also acquired the ownership of their system. Smith worked to simplify the tri-colour approach, discovering that a pseudo tri-colour effect was produced by reducing the number of colours to just two – red and green.5 Urban had very quickly established himself as a major figure in the nascent British film industry. He first ran a Kinetoscope and Phonograph Parlor in Detroit before joining the Warwick Trading Company in 1897, a film production company in London. By 1900, Warwick had established itself as one of the largest film production companies in Britain and Europe, producing and retailing films for the growing film exhibition sector. A significant part of Warwick’s film processing was undertaken by Smith at his film works in Hove. He was a filmmaker, magic lanternist, manager of a pleasure garden, and amateur chemist. An autodidact, Smith had nurtured his own technical skills so that he could prepare, produce, and process his own lantern slides and 35mm films and run his own film processing plant. By 1900, Smith was a part of Warwick, and, together with Urban, from 1903 to 1910, they developed Kinemacolor with Smith leading on its technical development and Urban taking responsibility for its commercial exploitation.

Kine m acolor an d Ko d a k

| 147

148 |

7.1: ‘Two Clowns’ (G. A. Smith, 1906), 35mm film print: British Film Institute, digital recreation, Screen Archive South East (2010).

Successful trials of the system in 1906 were followed in 1908 by press releases, press interviews, and demonstrations for the film industry and the Edwardian media. Two events within this campaign, Smith’s Royal Society of Arts lecture and a review of Kinemacolor within the Penrose Annual, express very well not only the campaign’s success, but also the genuine interest in this new technology. They also draw attention to Smith’s accomplishment as an inventor. Smith’s paper for the Royal Society of Arts was entitled, Animated Photographs In Natural Colour.6 Presented in December 1908, it served as a public introduction to his experimental work on ‘reproducing by means of photography moving scenes in their natural colours’.7 His paper began with an introduction to film (animated photography) and then turned very naturally to the desideratum: ‘if we could only reproduce colour as well as movement […] But how is it to be done?’8 He answered by first offering a summary of colour physics and the psychology of colour, emphasizing the utility of three-colour additive theories and the need for a ‘triple seeing-mechanism’ that would combine the red, green, and violet images, as had been introduced by Maxwell. He then turned to the failed attempts by himself and others to create an additive tri-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

colour film system (although he does not state this explicitly, he refers here to the Lee and Turner experiments) and the need for an alternative approach. This was found by reducing the number of colours within the revolving filter wheel from three to two (red and green only), developing a panchromatic emulsion for 35mm film, and by directing an engineer to develop a camera and projector that operated at 32 frames per second (instead of the normative 16 fps). The result, when projected, was a coloured moving image that was the product of the viewer combining the successive red and green frames. He claims that his system would, ‘demonstrate that by dividing the spectrum into two it is possible to exhibit satisfactorily every colour to the eye, including the purest of white’. Smith summarized his work as ‘early experiments in the photography of moving things in colour’ and that he looked forward to ‘great and rapid advances in the new art of recording and reproducing moving scenes in natural colours’.9 The additive process described by Smith would be launched commercially in the next year under the name of Kinemacolor. Another forum for Smith in the same year was the British publication Penrose’s Pictorial Annual. It had been founded by the chemist William Penrose and the journalist William Gamble and was first published in 1895. They both paid great attention to the emergence of coloured photography and its application to colour printing. High-quality colour plates dominated each issue of their Annual, signifying the great precision and expertise the printing industry cultivated in the development of subtractive tri-colour printing processes. In the 1908–1909 edition of Annual, Gamble expressed a genuine exuberance for Kinemacolor after having witnessed a demonstration of it at Urban’s new London premises in mid 1908. Gamble found that the demonstration of the two-colour system elicited within him both ‘enthusiasm and admiration’ and believed Smith’s accomplishment was probably, ‘due to the fact that he approached the subject from the standpoint of a practical cinematographic worker, knowing exactly the conditions that were necessary to make the idea workable’.10 In conclusion, Gamble was unequivocal in his praise for the system and what it represented for the cinema industry: Mr. Smith has laid the foundation of what cannot fail to be a most successful realisation of the dream of many inventors and scientists, of not only rendering photographs in natural colours, but also with all of the charm of animation. I venture to predict that when the process is put before the public it will be one of the greatest sensations of modern times, and far eclipse the already marvelous achievements of animated photography.11

Kine m acolor an d Ko d a k

| 149

150 |

These positive reactions prepared the ground for the public launch of Smith and Urban’s new colour-film technology at London’s Palace Theatre in February 1909 and reflect very well Urban’s expertise in stage managing the introduction of a new commercial product. Urban established a new company – The Natural Color Kinematograph Company – which was dedicated to the system that represented, for exhibitors, a new and dedicated projector to lease and a library of films from which films could be hired. As Jackson has addressed in her detailed study of Kinemacolor’s exhibition history, there was a growing appetite within cinemas for this new colour.12 This was accelerated in April 1911 with Urban’s establishment of a residency for the new technology at the Scala Theatre in London. This provided it with a national home for both screening and promoting new Kinemacolor films. Nonfiction film programmes, especially of Royal events, proved to be very attractive, and this enthusiasm led to Urban being granted the right to accompany the Royal party on its tour of India in late 1911. The result was a film of this visit and the famous Delhi Durbar in which the new King and Queen were crowned the Emperor and Empress of India. It opened on 2 February 1912 at the Scala and, at 150 minutes, was the longest film ever exhibited. Accompanied by orchestra, chorus, bagpipers, and a narrator, this colour extravaganza marked the zenith of Kinemacolor’s commercial success. Kinemacolor commercial development, as devised and directed by Urban, was one of complete control over the apparatus (the camera and projector) and the films. It was a tight proprietary system: the camera could only be used by approved Kinemacolor operators, a cinema needed to hire the bespoke Kinema­color projector, and only Kinemacolor films produced by Urban’s fiction film studios and nonfiction filmmakers were available for hire. This restrictive practice, with its controlled prices and terms, boxed exhibitors into a very rigid business contract. This was so very different from the much less complicated and much less expensive action of a cinema manager hiring a standard film for use on the cinema’s own standard projector. Staging a Kinemacolor show also meant, of course, that a cinema manager would need to accommodate within her projection box two projectors: one for standard films and one for Kinemacolor. After the initial nationwide enthusiasm for Kinemacolor, both the supply and quality of Kinemacolor films declined. This threat to the sustainability of the business was compounded by the fact that the technology was far from perfect. Technically, it represented only a provisional colour solution given the colour fringing that was seen on-screen when movement was recorded. Physically, audiences also complained of eyestrain after prolonged periods of viewing. These issues threatened the company’s viability, but what actually brought it to its end was a legal issue in the form of a patent challenge mount-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

ed by William Friese-Greene. At the first court hearing in late 1913, FrieseGreene’s claims against Smith’s Kinemacolor patent of 1906 were dismissed, but, in March 1914, on appeal, this first judgment in favour of Kinemacolor was overturned. This action, which revoked the 1906 patent, ended Kinemacolor’s exclusivity as a motion-picture system. Urban therefore dissolved the company in order to pay its creditors. Throughout the rest of 1914 and into the spring of 1915, Urban used the agency of another company, Colorfilms, to tour programmes of First World War-related material, but this action only served as Kinemacolor’s coda. Urban and Kinemacolor’s collapse was abrupt and unexpected; however, its short life had awakened within the cinema industry and cinema audiences a tremendous thirst for colour.

EASTMAN AND MEES | 151 George Eastman, the founder and President of the American-based Eastman Kodak Company, wrote a letter to Charles Urban, dated 6 February 1912. It is direct and brief: ‘I went to your Durbar show last night and enjoyed the pictures very much indeed. I hope you will make a lot of money out of them’.13 By 1912, Eastman Kodak was the world’s largest photographic company. Eastman had begun his business with the manufacture and sale of gelatin dry plates in 1880, recognizing the importance of such plates to the popularization of photography. It was camera-ready unlike its predecessor, the wet plate, which had to be coated by hand just prior to the taking of a photograph. The next innovation to simplify photographic practice was the company’s launch in 1888 of an easy to use and relatively inexpensive camera with roll film. These actions transformed Eastman Kodak into a global photographic company with factories at Rochester (US) and Harrow (England), subsidiary companies throughout Europe, and a chain of retail stores. It served a new and growing mass market dedicated to photography. Significantly, Eastman’s simple letter to Urban was written at the very moment that Eastman was changing the direction of his business so that colour photography (and colour cinematography) could be given more prominence. In January 1912, he had visited the Wratten & Wainwright works at Croydon and, as a result, he took two actions. The first was to purchase this English company and to transfer it to the Kodak Factory at Harrow. With this acquisition, came Wratten & Wainwright’s interests, products, and patents related to dry plates, panchromatic emulsions, and photographic filters. The second and more significant action was to invite Kenneth Mees, the co-owner of Wratten & Wainwright, to build a new and large-scale research laboratory in Rochester and to make him its founding director.

Kine m acolor an d Ko d a k

Eastman said: I decided that Dr. Mees was particularly fitted for the position, both on account of his education and his practical experience, he being a chemist, a physicist, a practical manufacturer of color sensitive dry plates and of color screens for use in photography, and one of the best known authorities on color photography. […] It is very important that we should have the best man available at the head of our research laboratory, and there is probably not another man in the world having the same qualifications as Dr. Mees.14 Mees accepted the offer and, in his autobiography, he made clear what this new opportunity represented: 152 |

In a new laboratory supported by the Kodak Company, I could organize an attack on all divisions of the problems presented by the science of photography, and by that time I knew enough about industrial research to believe that work on a large scale on the basic science of photography would justify itself commercially.15 By this point, Kenneth Mees had had considerable experience as a photographic scientist and as a member of the photographic industry. His doctoral research at University College, London, was conducted in collaboration with his friend S.E. Sheppard, and their work was published in 1907 with the title, Investigations on the Theory of the Photographic Process.16 Together, they had spent six years investigating the nature of the photographic process and, of particular interest to them, were the physical chemistry of exposure, development, and fixation, and the importance of sensitometry (the study of light sensitive materials such as photographic plates and films). This publication was the first of its kind in Britain and it placed Mees and Sheppard at the forefront of photographic science. In 1906, after completing his postgraduate research, Mees joined the photographic firm of Wratten & Wainwright of Croydon as a co-managing director and co-owner. In the early 1880s and in parallel with Eastman, Wratten & Wainwright began to produce gelatin dry plates for the printing of positives on paper and the making of lantern slides. As part of Wratten & Wainwright, Mees developed two products that would be important both to the company’s development and to photography and film. The first was a panchromatic dry plate. Prior to this, dry plates, roll film, and cine-film had been sensitive to all of the colours in the spectrum except for red. Mees worked on expanding the colour sensitivity of photographic emulsions (the emulsion being a suspen-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

sion of light-sensitive silver bromide particles in a solution of gelatin applied to either a plate or film) and this activity resulted in the launch of Wratten & Wainwright’s panchromatic gelatin dry plates in 1906. His second accomplishment was the creation of a set of optical coloured filters (a gelatin filter cemented between two pieces of optical glass) for use in photography, especially with the new panchromatic plates and in the creation of tricolor prints for publication. Simultaneously, Smith worked on Kinemacolor, an invention that was also dependent upon these same two advances – panchromatic film and gelatin filters. No evidence connects Smith directly with Mees, but we can assume that Smith was aware of Wratten & Wainwright’s new commercial products and both would have been aware of the other’s public activities and publications. Throughout this period from 1906 to 1911, Mees presented himself as an expert in contemporary photographic theory and practice and an as advocate for the work of his company. His 1908 paper for the Royal Society of Arts entitled Screen-Plate Colour Photography, also given in the very same year as Smith’s paper on Kinemacolor for the same Royal Society, captured the flurry of interests in colour photography at the start of the century, providing an overview of the new and early developments in colour-screen plate photography in Europe and the United States. He drew attention to the important differences between additive and subtractive colour processes and then provided a synoptic portrait of the colour line screen processes, drawing attention to the fact that many of these approaches were related in concept to Joly’s additive work of 1896. He produced a compound photographic image composed of a black-and-white transparency with a colour line screen (created by first bringing together an unexposed black-and-white plate with a colour ‘taking line screen’ and then, through processing, creating a positive transparency, which was viewed through a ‘viewing line screen’). Like so many additive colour processes, Joly’s approach rendered the photographic plate dependent upon the colour screen. Mees also emphasized the achievement of the Autochrome, the very particular screen plate additive system that had been developed by the Lumière brothers and launched throughout Europe in 1907. Overall, Mees was sceptical of the commercial viability of these additive processes, given his knowledge of the photographic industry. He concluded his paper by offering a sobering and pragmatic conclusion: ‘No colour process which cannot be printed on paper can hope to appeal to the great mass of workers.’17 His second book, The Photography of Coloured Objects of 1909, concentrated on the uses of panchromatic plates and high-quality filters and the relation of both to three-colour photography from a perspective to which he referred as, ‘accurate knowledge’.18 Here, Mees raised again the defects with the additive process, in particular with reference to ‘additive synthesis’ when

Kine m acolor an d Ko d a k

| 153

154 |

using a photochromoscope or triple lantern. These defects were the inability to obtain a bright picture because of the use of triple filters and for the result to exist only either as a transparency or as a projection. For Mees, it was the subtractive process (which, in terms of the making of contemporary paper prints, involved the making of three negatives, each through a red, green, and blue filter, and then combining the three together, ‘as three superposed prints, each print being made in a colour which is complementary to that of the taking filter’) that was the only practical route for colour photography to pursue.19 In 1911, Mees continued with this same stance when he addressed ‘three-colour kinematography’ for the journal, Nature. Here, he registered the difficulties encountered when trying to work with the combination of three successive coloured frames on-screen (the Lee and Turner additive approach). Kinemacolor, for Mees, with its use of only two colours, could, ‘at best be only a compromise, but it would seem to be the most satisfactory for kinematographic work’.20 He further amplified this qualified review of the Smith/Urban approach by stating, ‘kinemacolor is a success, and is a striking testimony to the good practical results which may sometimes be obtained from a theoretically inaccurate system’.21

MEES AND THE KODAK RESEARCH LABORATORIES: FROM TWO-COLOURS TO THREE-COLOURS Mees moved to Rochester in 1912 and, in January 1913, the new Kodak Research Laboratories, as designed by Mees, opened at Kodak Park. Within its three stories were found sections dedicated to the making of emulsions, the coating and packing of dry plates, the manufacture of Wratten filters, experimental work, and what was described as the most comprehensive library dedicated to photographic science in the world. A team of twenty chemists and physicists were appointed, including his former collaborator Dr. S.E. Sheppard. In terms of the history of colour, it is very easy to argue that these instrumental moves by Eastman were driven by his need for Kodak to develop its own colour technology. Eastman was very shrewd because he recognized that colour photography and cinematography represented quite a formidable scientific challenge and he was therefore committed to fund the research required to develop a viable solution. His respect for science and the process of invention may well have been influenced by Lord Kelvin, who had sat for a number of years on the Board of Eastman Kodak. It was at the end of his American visit in 1902, when he had visited Eastman and the Rochester works, that Kelvin made his prediction that colour photography would eventually become a reality. Mees began to publish work that reflected his evolving interest in the gen-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

eral role of scientific research within modern industry and the particular place of specialist sciencific research within the photographic industry. In 1916 he wrote, In fact, at the present time it seems to be clear that the future of any industry depends upon its being able to command a sufficient supply of knowledge directed towards the improvement of the product and the development of the methods of that industry, and that any failure in this respect may involve eventual failure.22 In 1920, Mees returned to the Royal Society of Arts to deliver a paper that introduced and summarized the laboratories’ work since 1912. It offered an overview of the laboratories’ value and purpose in relation to the advancement of photographic research and the application of this science to the production of photographic and cinematographic materials, apparatus, and processes. He defined the key areas of laboratories scientific work as, ‘the physics of photography, the chemistry of photography, the reproduction of tone values by photography, and work on special photographic processes, including those required for photography in natural colours’.23 This ongoing colour research at Rochester provided the paper with its conclusion. It began by distinguishing between additive and subtractive colour processes and then provided an overview of the laboratories’ concentration on subtractive work and highlighted one of its important achievements: a two-colour subtractive process for motion pictures. Entitled Kodachrome, it was led by a member of Mees’s staff, John Capstaff, and had two manifestations: a version for photography (1913) and one for motion pictures (1915). The motion-picture system involved the use of a two-lensed camera that recorded two frames at a time, one through a red filter and the other through a green filter. After processing, the paired frames on the positive print were then combined on a bespoke optical printer, creating a second negative with each pair of frames printed together in registration, one on the front and the other on the back of each frame of a double-emulsion (or double-coated) film. This second negative was then bleached and dyed with complementary colours (red-orange and blue-green) to create the final dyed positive. The result was a two-colour print that could be used on any standard projector. Kodachrome was therefore an intriguing hybrid as it married Kinemacolor’s two-colour system with a very distinct and ‘theoretically accurate’ subtractive process. There were various other two-colour kinematographic systems devised by other companies in the United States and Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, most notably Technicolor No. II (1923–1927), and, like Kodachrome, they all had limited success. For Mees, the two-colour motion-

Kine m acolor an d Ko d a k

| 155

156 |

picture era came to an end with the launch of Technicolor No. IV (1932), the three film, three-colour subtractive dye transfer process that he described as, ‘a triumph of technical skill, and continuous improvements have resulted in pictures of excellent quality’.24 Throughout this same period, Mees and the Kodak Research Laboratories also explored a way to devise a practical three-colour solution for the mass market, understanding that what was now required was not a complicated combination of separate negatives but a single subtractive monopack film. This was a photographic multilayer emulsion designed for a dye-coupler (or chromogenic) process in which a single film would be first sensitized to primary colours and then developed to reveal the complementary dyes fixed within the layers of the emulsion. Creating such a new emulsion and the new sensitizing dyes was the difficult scientific challenge. In 1922, Mees was introduced to the musicians and amateur chemists Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky because of their research into the making of such emulsions with multiple coatings. The laboratories began to support their work and, in 1930, they became Kodak employees. Together with Mees’s team, they succeeded in creating a new Kodachrome, a 16mm, reversal, subtractive, triple-layered monopack motion-picture film stock. Launched onto the market in 1935, this film stock made it possible to make a film in colour very easily. Its arrival and its technical and commercial success signified the end of the long quest for a viable and ‘true’ natural-colour film. It was, however, recognized that Kodachrome, as a reversal stock (the negative became the positive), could not meet the film industry’s need for a practical 35mm subtractive stock for negatives and prints. The solution to this problem eventually arrived in 1950 with Eastman Color negative and print stock (as dye-coupler monopacks).25 Both it and its variants over the next five decades became the film industry’s standard, replacing Technicolor and its monopoly on three-colour cinematography.

THE TWO PATHS Obviously Smith/Urban and Mees/Eastman Kodak represent two entirely different approaches to colour in terms of character, resources, and scale. Smith’s additive work, with its concentration on the optical and the mechanical, relied on his ingenuity as an enthusiastic artisan and lay scientist working with mechanical engineers. The technology was then taken by Urban and locked into a highly controlled commercial system of his own design. Mees’s role in the history of colour represents the professional, scientific route funded and supported by a global corporation. Eastman Kodak had the means and

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

the patience to pursue colour research, not knowing either when or if they would find a durable and practical subtractive solution. As a long-term scientific, industrial, and business strategy, it represents the polar opposite to Urban’s single concept approach. Mees’s years as a Kodak employee (1912–1955) covered this entire period of experimentation and development. His work and that of the Kodak Research Laboratories was made possible because of the company’s dedication to photographic and cinematographic invention (the creation of new ideas, designs, models, prototypes, and the respective patents) and innovation (transforming new concepts into viable commercial products). Crucial to Kodak’s success was its ability to create products that were informed by consumer needs and desires and were affordable, accessible, and reliable. Unlike Urban, Eastman Kodak never had the desire to develop a monopolistic film system that vertically integrated the manufacturing of the system with all aspects of its commercial exploitation, including production and exhibition. In the context of the history of colour, Kodak’s focus of attention was on the creation of subtractive processes and their utility to professional and amateur filmmakers. What Mees and his generation could never have foreseen was the digital revolution that started in the late twentieth century and would mark the beginning of the end of film and the decimation of Eastman Kodak. Ironically, this same revolution would also see the additive RGB colour model (as derived from the theoretical work of Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell) become the basis for the representation and display of colour images on digital screens.

NOTES 1

The Timeline of Historical Film Colors, http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors.

2

‘Departure of Lord Kelvin’, The New York Times (11 May 1902): 28.

3

James C. Maxwell, ‘Experiments on Colour, as Perceived by the Eye with Remarks on Colour Bindness’, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 21, no. 2 (1857): 275–298.

4

Frederic Ives, Kromskop Color Photography (London: The Photochromoscope Syndicate Limited, 1898).

5

Three important sources for the history of Smith, Urban, and Kinemacolor are: David B. Thomas, The First Colour Motion Pictures (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969); Gorham Kindem, ‘The Demise of Kinemacolor: Technological, Legal, Economic, and Aesthetic Problems in Early Color Cinema History’, Cinema Journal, 20, no. 2 (1981): 3–14; Luke McKernan, Charles Urban, Pioneering the NonFiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2013). Kine m acolor an d Ko d a k

| 157

6

G. Albert Smith, ‘Animated Photographs in Natural Colours’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 57, no. 2925 (1908): 70–76.

7

Smith, ‘Animated Photographs’, 70.

8

Smith, ‘Animated Photographs’, 71.

9

Smith, ‘Animated Photographs’, 75.

10 ‘Animated Photography in Natural Colours’, Penrose Pictorial Annual: The Process Year Book, A Review of the Graphic Arts 14 (1908–1909): 129. 11 ‘Animated Photography’, 132. 12 Victoria Jackson, ‘The Exhibition Context and the Contemporary Significance of Color: The Case of Kinemacolor’, The Moving Image, 15, no. 1 (2015): 1–21. 13 George Eastman, ‘Letter to Charles Urban’, (6 February 1912), National Media Museum, Charles Urban Papers Box 1, 91. 14 Carl Ackerman provides an early assessment of the rise of Eastman and his company: Carl Ackerman, George Eastman Founder of Kodak and the Photography Busi-

158 |

ness (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 240–241. 15 C.E. Kenneth Mees, From Dry Plates to Ektachrome Film: A Story of Photographic Research (New York: Ziff-Davis, 1961), 42. 16 C.E. Kenneth Mees and Samuel Sheppard, Investigations on the Theory of the Photographic Process (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907). 17 Mees, ‘Screen-Plate Colour Photography’, Journal of the Society for Arts 56, no. 2878 (1908): 203. 18 Mees, The Photography of Coloured Objects (Croydon: Wratten & Wainwright, 1909), iii. 19 Mees, Coloured Objects, 64. 20 Mees, ‘Three-Colour Kinematography’, Nature, 87, no. 2191 (26 October 1911): 556. 21 Mees, ‘Three-Colour Kinematography’, 556. 22 Mees, ‘The Organization of Industrial Scientific Research’, Science, 43, no. 1118 (2 June 1916): 765. 23 Mees, ‘A Photographic Research Laboratory’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 68, no. 3539 (1920): 698. 24 Mees, From Dry Plates to Ektachrome Film: A Story of Photographic Research (New York: Ziff-Davis, 1961), 211. 25 Alongside Mees’s account of Kodak’s colour history, From Dry Plates to Ektachrome Film: A Story of Photographic Research, Enticknap provides an international perspective on the emergence of subtractive colour-film stocks: Leo Enticknap, Moving Image Technology – from Zoetrope to Digital (London: Wallflower Press, 2005), 85–94.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Frank Gray is the Director of Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton. As an early-film historian, his research has investigated the cultural, economic, and technological nature of early film production and consumption in Brighton and Britain from 1895–1914. He has expressed his interest in this subject area through articles, conference papers, touring film and music programmes, public lectures, and the curation of museum exhibitions. He is an AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellow, a codirector of Cine-City – The Brighton Film Festival, and the Chair of Film Archives UK.

| 159

Kine m acolor an d Ko d a k

INTERMEDIALITY AND ADVERTISING

| 161



CHAPTER 8

Rainbow Ravine Colour and Animated Advertising in Times Square Kirsten Moana Thompson

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH08

ABSTRACT Since the early 1900s, Broadway has been called the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferation of its light-studded movie marquees and advertising signs, but this was, in fact, a misnomer, as the area was often in blazing colour. From Oscar Gude’s Heinz Pickle Sign of 1891 to Douglas Leigh’s EPOK animation and monumental signs of the 1940s, this chapter discusses Times Square/ Broadway’s colourful electrical signs, arguing for an expanded understanding of animation’s historical role in the turn to colour in visual culture. It contends that electrical billboards or ‘spectaculars’ were intermedial forms of animation, marshalling sensual and affective experience that linked colour, glass, and light stimuli in mesmerizing immersive imagery. k e y wo r ds

Times Square, electrical spectaculars, Rainbow Ravine, Douglas Leigh, animation, EPOK

| 163

Out from the chrysalis of modern electrical advertising there magically evolves the new creation of this most pleasing and penetrating light, following the contours of letters and artistic borders, in unbroken velvety ribbons of gorgeous hues in startling colours. Great White Ways made up of the exposed lamp type sign are rapidly fading before the rising luminescent glow of flowing arteries of neon red, orange, green and blue. The gorgeous magentas and glowing purples created by red letters and blue borders, and the unusual illusions, blending the greens and oranges or blues and greens are indeed ‘highlights’ in illuminating effectiveness. The transition is kaleidoscopic – from the monotonous ‘spotted’ electric light to the smooth even rainbow hues, which are glorifying our electric thoroughfares.1

164 |

In an address to the Associated Sign Crafts of North America in 1927, sign designer Mel Morris of Baltimore, Luxfer Lens, and Clinton Sign Company (Iowa) described the explosion of neon colours in New York as a kaleidoscopic ‘chrysalis’. Although Broadway and Times Square had long been described as the ‘Great White Way’ because of the proliferation of its light-studded movie marquees and advertising signs, the term was, in fact, a misnomer. From the time the city’s first electrical billboard, the Ocean Breezes sign, was illuminated in 1892 on the side of the Cumberland hotel on 23rd street, New York’s electrical advertising was a blazing emporium of colour. In 1904, Times Square got its first illuminated sign with Trimble Whisky’s clinking glasses on 47th Street. By 1929, one New York Times reporter wryly observed that Times Square’s ‘ruling colour is not white’, with ‘Crimson Red a particular favorite’ and that it is ‘a vast panorama of colour – red squares and rectangles enclosing green letterings and blue-purplish lines providing a setting for yellow flashes and orange bolts of electric lighting’. 2 Observing the prevalence of neon red, another reporter Meyer Berger dubbed it ‘Rainbow Ravine’ and ‘Red Square’. 3 This paper argues for an expanded understanding of animation’s historical role in the turn to colour in visual culture, contending that electrical billboards in Times Square and Broadway were intermedial forms of animation, mobilizing scintillating, pulsing, or syncopated lines, images, and texts in colour as attraction. It traces how this advertising emerged out of a series of technological and aesthetic changes, which aligned colour with the invention of electricity and, later, neon, but also drew upon aesthetic strategies from graphic arts and commercial sign painting. Through the pioneering innovations of leading sign entrepreneurs like Oscar Gude, Jake Starr, Benjamin Strauss, and Douglas Leigh, electrical advertising in colour helped transform architectural surfaces and public spaces in the formation of a new consumer culture. Following Suzanne Buchan’s theorization of animation as pervasive

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

in its intermedial and precinematic forms, I suggest that electrical advertising was an important dimension of the ubiquitous visual presence of animated colour in public urban spaces.4 ‘Spectaculars’, or gargantuan outdoor advertising signs, promoted products through colour, three-dimensional design, massive scale, and intriguing movement, such as the giant Camel signs that blew smoke rings (1941–1967) and the A & P coffee cups (1933) that puffed clouds of steam, developed by Douglas Leigh (1907–1999). Electrical spectaculars were aided by the mechanization of light, which replaced contingency with standardized repeatable experiences,5 through new inventions by Edison electrical engineer William J. Hammer (1858–1934), such as commutator switchers, or electrical banks of lights called flashers, and rheostats, which allowed for the dimming of lights.6 However, some contingency was still present in the continuous number of blown bulbs that required servicing each day. When a sign had too many blown bulbs it had ‘small pox’.7Although black-and-white photography is often the only record of how some of these signs appeared, their descriptions in Signs of the Times, a leading trade periodical devoted to the physical and electrical sign trade, also offered some details of their colour design. The earliest Times Square signs prompted wonder and awe for their novelty and spectacle, outrage and concern at their alleged tastelessness, and nostalgia for their dazzling entertainment, garnering tremendous media attention in newspapers and fiction, from Walter Winchell to Theodore Dreiser.8 In 1923, Dreiser recalls the colours of the Ocean Breezes sign as both ‘inspiration and an invitation’ in which Each line was done in a different color of lights, light green for the ocean breezes, white for Manhattan Beach and the great hotels, red for Pain’s fireworks and the races, blue and yellow for the orchestra and band. As one line was illuminated the others were made dark, until all had been flashed separately, when they would again be flashed simultaneously and held thus for a time.9 Replacing it in 1900 on the same site of the Cumberland Hotel was Heinz’s ‘57 Flavors’ sign, with a bright green, 50 foot-wide pickle, above white eight foot text on an orange and blue background, the sign was widely decried as vulgar.10 In signs like these, colour could be created in several ways, either through coloured bulbs – like the 1457 red, blue, green, and white frosted sixteen-candlepower Edison electric bulbs in the Ocean Breezes sign – or by coloured glass lenses fitted in front of banks of ‘gas jets’.11 By the teens, metal hoods that snapped over standard white incandescent bulbs like the six different Reco Colour Hoods manufactured by the Reynolds Electric Co. of Chicago,

R ain b o w R a v ine

| 165

166 |

were a cheaper alternative to earlier methods that were subject to colour fading.12 In a March 1917 advertisement in Signs of the Times, the Reynolds Company proclaimed that ‘scientific advertising demands artistic touches, colour and action’ and that ‘by incorporating a foxy flashing effect and a pleasing colour scheme’ that signs would ‘stand out boldly and distinctively’.13 A few years later, Reynolds’s advertising underscored colour’s attention grabbing importance, ‘out of all the objects sweeping by, the spot of colour forces your attention. Colour! Motion!’14 Indeed, not only was animated a general term in the earliest decades of cinema to refer to all forms of moving images, a term I want to retrieve here,15 it was also extensively used in the sign and illustration trade press, referring expressly to the importance of movement to ‘arrest’ and ‘capture’ the eye.16 As Signs of the Times described it in 1912, there were three fundamental elements: imagery, colour, and movement: ‘Electrical advertising is a picture medium. Moreover it is a colour medium; still again, electrical advertising is a medium of motion, of action, of life, of light, of compulsory attraction’ (italics in original).17 As atomized incremental movement that repeated in cyclical form, electrical advertising of both text and images can be understood as a structural form of animation. Indeed, the electrical advertising trade used the term ‘animations’ to underscore the importance of movement in ‘talking’ signs and the men who worked out the signs’ movements were sometimes called ‘animation engineers.’18 Through the rhythmic alternation of illumination and darkness and the metrical rise and fall in luminosity, or manipulation of durational intensity, animated electrical advertising transformed a spectator’s sense of space through its capacity to extend, fill, and colour space. Through light and colour, electrical advertising not only highlighted and extended architectural entrances, surfaces, walls, and highpoints, it also acted as an expanded form of cinema, reimagining the night sky as another form of cinematic screen. Attracting audience and media commentary for its theatrical properties as a ‘show’, animated advertising was a special form of entertainment in which Times Square served as a giant outdoor theatre. Indeed, many newspaper and magazine cartoons reimagined Times Square and Broadway as a huge amphitheatre, which exceeded the viewing capacity of all the theatres and movie houses that it contained combined; it was claimed to be the ‘World’s Biggest Show’.19 Through the spectaculars that acted as forms of free entertainment, entrepreneurs like Douglas Leigh suggested that the New York spectator was ‘agog’, or struck dumb with amazement by the spectacle of light.20 Yet, earlier spectaculars, such as the Heinz Pickle sign created by Oscar Gude (1862–1925), had also drawn ‘huge crowds of loitering, gaping consumers’.21 The showstopping elements of Elwood Rice’s Ben Hur sign on the Normandie Hotel at 38th and Broadway, with its gold-leaf chariot glittering with thousands of coloured

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

glass jewels in the horses’ harnesses, and revolving wheels producing swirls of dust were evident in June 1910 when it was first turned on. Indeed, The Strand reported that a ‘special police unit was assigned to Herald Square through the summer to keep traffic moving’ and the sign’s entertainment values were deemed superlative by one commentator, even ‘more perfect and natural in its movement than the finest coloured cinematograph picture’.22 Electrical advertising’s promotion of open-air spaces such as Times Square as free ‘entertainment’ echoed the character of what was already an entertainmentbusiness district. Moreover, multicoloured incandescent and neon electrical signs were an essential component of Broadway’s theatrical and motion picture industries, whose marquees were key visual signifiers of their presence in Times Square and Herald Square. Colour, glass, and light shaped a visual landscape of desire.23 Outdoor advertising was not only upheld as an extension of the entertainment industry, but also considered to be a potential device to educate the masses, by both trade press and particular sign entrepreneurs. In a lengthy address in Signs of the Times in 1908, Theodore S. Fettinger described the many different functions of advertising; he asserts that ‘Advertising is a positive creative force. The world would lose much without it.’24 Along with ‘multiplying human desires and wants,’ ‘encouraging constant change’, and leading people to ‘indulge in luxuries’, Fettinger claims its pedagogical role in shaping class tastes and building cultural capital: Advertising creates a desire for beautiful and substantial furnishings thus educating the people to know the historical significance of various designs and colour schemes, and leading them to furnish homes artistically, harmoniously and intelligently, and through this, refining them.25 Early sign pioneer Oscar Gude also believed that advertising had an instructive role to play in the democratization of art, teaching colour and design to every citizen. Upon joining New York’s Municipal Art Society (MAS) in 1913, he was appointed to its Committee on Advertising, and proposed that there should be outdoor billboard locations that were ‘reproductions of famous paintings and great masterpieces’ that would ‘tend to inculcate lessons of patriotism and thus make the billboards a magnificent auxiliary to the work in the public schools and a power for good in the land’.26 Unfortunately, this and other ideas were rejected by the society, but, nonetheless, Gude’s ambitions link him to other figures for whom colour played a central role in the education of the masses, such as chromolithographer Louis Prang27 as well as toy entrepreneur Milton Bradley.

R ain b o w R a v ine

| 167

COLOUR DESIGN Electrical advertising’s colour aesthetics pointed to the intermedial relationships that crisscrossed cinema, advertising, and the graphic arts, and were epitomized by concepts like ‘colour smash’ or ‘eye smash’ that travelled between these fields. Derived from poster design, these terms described the way in which the eye was arrested in surprise at a pleasing or startling colour design. Discussing effective colour design in advertising posters in the trade press, H.C. Martin suggests that For a good postery effect the [colour] smash should be in one place only. Through colour, your poster types of card may create surprise, for each card should contain an element of pleasant shock sufficient to stop the roving eye in some new and unexpected way.28 168 | The striking use of colour in illustrated posters (or bulletins as they were known in the technical trade) were a key promotional device for impresarios like P.T. Barnum, James Bailey, and the Ringling Bros. to promote their circus acts and travelling entertainment forms.29 The graphic design of nineteenthcentury circus bulletins and posters in colour, in turn, were copied by animated films such as Disney’s Dumbo (1941), with its opening credits lovingly recreating them. An early adopter of gaslit signage, Barnum and Bailey also used incandescent advertising, such as their 1915 Artkraft Strauss sign of an elephant spraying three-dimensional water atop Madison Square Garden. ‘Colour smash’ also moved into the electrical sign trade and the film industry, evolving a related term often used to describe distinctive colour effects, as with Film Daily’s praise of Redskin’s Technicolor sequences as an ‘eye smash’.30 A major transformation of the urban skyline was the emergence of neon as a new colour technology, described by one sign entrepreneur as ‘Aladdin-like it introduces itself to the modern age in the form of the neon light, arrayed in all the glory of the aurora borealis.’31 Building upon the noble gas discoveries of chemists William Ramsay and Morris Travers, George Claude’s development of neon in 1910 led to the first advertisement in Paris in 1913. Claude’s 1919 sign for the Paris Opera, an orange-red neon in a blue argon border became known as ‘Couleur Opéra’. Its colours were reproduced in the United States’s first neon sign, the famous 1922 Packard sign on Seventh and Flower in Los Angeles.32 Neon offered certain advantages over incandescent lighting, including greater legibility over distance and in changing weather conditions, with less haloing around the light. Requiring less current, its longevity made it more cost-effective, and its malleability meant it could create a greater range of subjects and logos in a wider range of colours, including red, green, purple,

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

yellow, orange, and blue, that were also visible in the daytime. For several decades, neon’s ‘ruby red’, the most popular colour, increasingly dominated the electrical advertising landscape. Colour’s novelty and distinctiveness were often aligned with the simplicity of geometric shapes or the straight or curved line in movement. In the early teens, electrical ads that featured acrobatic female figures walking tightropes or jumping, swimming, and diving, were used to advertise everything from cigarettes to stockings to corsets, and the subjects of these electrical signs often drew from other media, from the Gibson Girl print ads of the 1890s to films like Edwin Porter’s What Happened on Twenty-Third Street.33 However, the coloured line’s simplicity can also be explained by the constraints of incandescent advertising, which outlined its images or text as pinpoints of light. Sometimes the line signified the product itself, like the red lines of thread that entangled the famous white Corticelli Kitten, designed by Oscar Gude, which ran from 1910 to 1913. The Heatherbloom Petticoat sign, which featured a woman clutching an umbrella against lines of driving rain and gusting wind, metaphorically used the line to advertise the synthetic silks that went into its product, while also graphically signifying weather conditions that motivated the petticoat’s periodic visibility in blinking red. Vivian Sobchack has called the line a meta-object and a constitutive element of cinematic animation. As both ‘abstract geometric’ construct and ‘eccentric visualization of energy and entropy’, it does not exist in photoreal live-action cinema, except as secondary graphic representations on billboards or charts, etc.34 I want to focus on that secondary graphic representation of the line, suggesting that Sobchack’s inbetweenness and uncertainty of the cinematic animated line is also paradoxically present in its electrical form. Through the abstracting qualities of intermittent illumination and sequential movement punctuated by darkness, each blink of the coloured line seems to hesitate, on the verge of disequilibrium, seeming to disavow its ultimate mechanical repetition. The electrical line also adopted some of the characteristics of cinematic animation in the importance of metamorphosis as transition device and as pretext for colour effects. Oscar Gude’s Nemo Corsets sign used multiple overlays to animate its ‘slimming’ message, in which a female figure is first seen without the corset, as the word ‘Before’ flashed, then trimmer as ‘After’ appears, while Halcyon Petticoats used a similar technique of overlapping coloured lines that seemed to oscillate between corset and woman, with one turning into the other, over and over again. While the coloured line was feminine form in flux, aided or hampered by wind, rain, or corset, the energy of the coloured line was also aligned with the acrobatic female form in Oscar Gude’s 1912 Egyptienne Cigarettes Straights sign. With its girl balancing on a tightrope, the line summoned the circus

R ain b o w R a v ine

| 169

170 |

with its concomitant graphic colour design. Egyptienne, Fatimah, and Pirate cigarette brands created elaborate decorative signs to conjure exotic subjects. Aligning colour with the allure of Orientalism, ‘Egyptian’ and ‘Turkish’ were code words for cigarettes laced with marijuana,35 reinforcing the hallucinogenic association between colour as ornament and the intoxicating perceptual landscape of nighttime advertising. Combined with their glittering, pulsating, or chasing movements, coloured lines and geometric patterns evoked a hallucinatory vision, or what I call the aesthetics of intoxication, about which Aldous Huxley would write in The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.36 Indeed, press coverage of these signs’ colours often prompted an ecstatic rhetoric that celebrated electrical advertising’s colour aesthetics as ‘Aladdin’s Caves’, or ‘Moorish Temples’, with the Wrigley Sign described as ‘a touch of the Orient’.37 Animated electrical colour was used strategically, often reproducing the signature colours of a brand, such as Coca Cola’s red and white. Synaesthetic perceptual address also invited the spectator to fuse colour, liquid, and electrical light. Water was a frequent design element because it incorporated movement and justified metamorphic colour transitions, as with Standard Plumbing Fixture’s 1927 waterfall of white, green, and orange light pouring into a blue river to suggest, as the Company spokesperson portentously explained, that ‘the plumbing industry has arrived.’38 While retaining a sense of the sublime in the spectacular’s scale, its technological modernity was also underscored by the company, which announced that the ‘waterfall is the symbol of the plumber’s gift – flowing water and purity in every home.’ 39 Bubbling, popping, and spraying colour effects were also common with other kinds of liquid subjects in the form of advertisements for alcohol or sodas like CC Ginger Ale, Wilson’s Whisky, Coca-Cola, or Pepsi. Clocks or weather signs, which invited people’s frequent attention, often incorporated fountain designs, such as White Rock’s famous pastel clockface, which changed colour every two seconds, from blue to pink to yellow, and back to blue.40 Heraclitian flux paradoxically aligned colour with repetition not change, in an endless circular loop. Animated advertising not only shared sequential or overlapping movement with its cinematic cousin but also borrowed preexisting animated characters from comic strips and cinema as the stars of animated sequences, from Otto Soglow’s Little King to Otto Messmer’s Felix-like cat in Douglas Leigh’s signs of the 1940s to Artkraft Strauss’s enlistment of Little Lulu for Kleenex. Some of these characters were drawn from print and visual media, such as Wrigley’s Spearmen, while others, like Cliquot’s Gin, created characters that subsequently became iconic. Another Gude creation, the Wrigley Sign (1917– 1924) was the length of a city block on top of the Putnam Building between 43rd and 44th street. With 17266 bulbs, it was seen by 300000 people each day. Twin peacocks formed an elaborately decorated feather canopy in green and purple

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

| 171

8.1: Little Lulu (1956) detail in construction for the Kleenex ad on 57th and Twelfth Avenue (reproduced by permission of Artkraft Strauss).

over the central portion of the display, where six animated Wrigley spearmen went through a drill of callisthenic sequences dubbed ‘the Daily Dozen’.41 Designed by Dorothy Shepard with 35220 light bulbs, a second Wrigley sign appeared in 1936 between 44th and 45th and Broadway. This time, it was a fish aquarium, in which colourful blue and orange fish surrounded a bright green Spearman, as bubbles and slogans like ‘steadies the nerves’ and ‘aids digestion’ meditatively emerged and dissolved.42 Colour was central to the design of the signs themselves, as with the Clicquot Club Ginger Ale sign, which featured an ‘Eskimo Boy’ on a sled, cracking a 66 foot-long whip over three smaller boys. At each crack of the whip the words ‘Cliquot’, ‘Club’, ‘Ginger Ale’, and ‘World’s Largest Seller’ blinked in blue and white light, as the sled seemed to head for the aurora borealis that glowed with changing colours. Known as the ‘Sign King’ and ‘Lamplighter of Broadway’, Douglas Leigh transformed outdoor advertising in Times Square, creating over 39 iconic advertisements, including the smoking Camel sign, a giant penguin for Kool Cigarettes, and a block-long Pepsi display with two five-storey bottles and a

R ain b o w R a v ine

172 |

colourful water fountain continuously circulating water between them, as well as many others. Leigh pioneered architectural illumination in the 1970s and 1980s, with the Empire State’s coloured lighting displays. But Leigh’s ideas were not just restricted to the ‘airspaces’ on, around, or above skyscrapers and demographically dense spaces like Times Square, for he also viewed the sky above New York City and surrounding states as a giant screen. In 1949, he was the first to use giant blimps for outdoor advertising, promoting Mobil Gas, Wonder Bread, and MGM Studios.43 Each blimp featured an array of lights that were controlled by flasher circuits, switching on and off in sequences, creating the illusion of animated objects magically floating in the night sky, with the blimp screen effectively invisible. Many of Douglas Leigh’s sketches for blimp ads for paint, soap, and washing powder drew upon similar ideas to many Technicolor cartoons of the period such as Disney’s Funny Little Bunnies (1936), with bubbles, twinkling stars, and paint pouring out a rainbow of colours as recurrent subjects.44 Leigh insisted that many of his best ideas came from cartoons, and he watched Snow White to understand what made people laugh. Understanding animation as more than just movement, he insists that the more animation in the display, the more memory value it contains [...] As for animation–anything that moves captures attention. All right: if we animate our display, let’s animate the portion of it that ought to get the attention. Let’s animate where animation belongs. Let’s animate the name, the selling phrase, the stage effect. Motion and design unrelated to the product being advertised convey no coherent meaning.45 Incorporating cel animation directly into his advertising, he bought the rights for a new technology called EPOK, which featured projections of animated and live-action shorts that were projected onto giant screens. Opening in Times Square in 1937, EPOK was promoted by Leigh as hybrid media (‘1/3 electric sign, 1/3 television, 1/3 movie’ and as an ‘electric sign that entertains as it sells’).46 Invented by Austrian Kurt Rosenberg, the world rights were sold to Leigh by Karl Ullstein, who used the technology in several American cities and internationally, from Madrid to Mexico.47 Leigh hired animators like Otto Messmer (Felix the Cat) to design his cartoons, and stars like Martha Raye, Joan McCracken, Rita Hayworth, Fred Astaire, and Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson to perform live before the screens. To create EPOK, cel animation was created in the normal fashion and photographed frame by frame. The animated film was then projected against a bank of 4104 photoelectric cells, connected to mercury tubes, which magnified the image and turned on a grid of Mazda lamps in a large exterior display. Usually positive film was used, and thus the

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

background appeared in lights and the unlit parts of the image appeared as black silhouettes, although, in 1941, with the Wilson Whisky ads, EPOK shifted into colour. For this, 3/4 of the white bulbs were replaced by green, red, and yellow bulbs evenly distributed throughout the sign, and 35 mm film was used for greater detail.48 Cartoons were shown continuously in loops and the ‘animations’ as the shows were called (irrespective of content) went on from 6 pm through to 1 or 2 am.

‘IT’S GOT ‘EM ALL STOPPED’: SOCIAL EFFECTS OF EPOK SIGNS Beginning with a simple black-and-white cartoon for Old Gold Cigarettes, the first Epok was animated by Otto Soglow, the creator of The Little King comic strip, featuring characters ‘Old Goldie’ and his girlfriend as they ‘make love, smoke cigarettes and blow smoke rings as part of the show’.49 Half a block in length and two and a half storeys high, the Old Gold cartoon featured letters eleven feet high in fluorescent tubing, with lights flashing 30 times a second, and was described in Signs of the Times as a ‘free show presenting a movie of romance and smoking pleasure’.50 Leigh’s EPOK films ran into the 1960s, promoting products such as Wilson’s Whisky and Schaefer’s Beer. These ‘shows’ drew large crowds, including celebrities like Walt Disney, who came to check out the animated films,51 and inspired comic strips and press attention by Walter Winchell.52 Like the traditional movie premiere, every opening of Leigh’s spectaculars was a celebrity event, with stars like Joan Crawford called in to turn the electric current on the sign on 49th and Broadway in January 1941, Mickey Rooney dropping by to see how the EPOK signs were made, and Liz Taylor visiting the launch of the MGM blimp that promoted the release of her picture The Yearling.53 The EPOK signs were much commented on in the press at the time for their disruptive social effects, and their ability to halt and freeze the New York pedestrian. One newspaper in 1937 describes the cop standing on the traffic-plagued safety island where Manhattan’s Broadway crosses Seventh Avenue [who] wishes the folks would get a move on instead of standing stock still, gawking up at the black and white elephants, prize fighters, horses and lovers that antic on the new spectacular.54 Indeed, not only did these ‘spectaculars’ draw audiences for their novelty, the watching crowds were also racially policed, with Bill Robinson arrested for watching his own performance on the giant screen.55 Absorbed in watch-

R ain b o w R a v ine

| 173

174 |

ing these colourful novelties, the transfixed spectator was a problem, for she interrupted the dense flow of the urban environment, in which mobile, scintillating, blinking lights mimicked the intense energy of the pedestrian, automobile, subway, and streetcar. Electrical advertising’s visual, auditory, and haptic elements immersed the travelling spectator in constantly transforming, propulsive, surging worlds, or what child psychologist Daniel Stern calls ‘vitality effects’.56 Coloured light and its effects were intensely eroticized, visually intoxicating, and often synaesthetically described in liquid terms. As Siegfried Kracauer describes Berlin’s advertising in 1927, ‘electric ads were ‘fire-lusts that shiver with salable sensuality.’57 At their heart, electrical ‘animations’ were anima: life, spirit, and movement, aligning the coloured line and geometric shape with ornamental and orientalist traditions of colour, in which altered perception and metamorphosing bodies could be had by purchasing cigarettes or corsets. Rising and falling movement exemplified by tunnelling, radiating, or oscillating coloured lights, in conjunction with three-dimensional display and sensorial address, carried an affective charge that many witnesses to the spectaculars remembered with nostalgia, and central to this nostalgia was the excitement, novelty, and hallucinatory stimulus of colour.

NOTES 1

Mel Morris, ‘Neon Will Soon Dominate as the Light of the World’, Signs of the Times, October 1927, 49.

2

‘Broadway’s Colors,’ New York Times (23 June 1929): sec. 5, 21.

3

Darcy Tell, Times Square Spectacular: Lighting Up Broadway (New York: Smithsoni-

4

Suzanne Buchan, Ed. Pervasive Animation (New York: Routledge, 2013). AFI Film

an-Harper Collins, 2007), 99. Reader, 1–22. 5

Kristen Whissel, Picturing Modernity: Traffic, Technology and the Silent Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 143.

6

Tell, Times Square Spectacular, 35.

7

Walter Winchell, ‘Walter Winchell on Broadway’, Daily Mirror (1935): n.p., Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. Microfilms 5840–5848, Press clippings, Correspondence, Pictures, Dirigible Project Files (1944-1954), and Scrapbooks.

8

David Nye, ‘Electricity and Signs’ in The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader, ed. Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannenne M. Przyblyski. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 211-217.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

9

Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City [1923] (Albany: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 119.

10 Tell, Times Square Spectacular, 41; Tama Starr and Edward Hayman, Signs and Wonders: The Spectacular Marketing of America (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 57. 11 Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders, 18, 55. 12 Reco Advertisement, Cover, Signs of the Times, 50 (4 August 1925): 1. 13 Reynolds Electric Co. Untitled Advertisement, Signs of the Times (March 1917): 25. 14 W.B. Swan, ‘Preach “Color and Motion” to Electric Sign Salesman’, Reco Advertisement, Signs of the Times, 50 (4 August 1925): 42. 15 In an article first published around 1909 and partially reprinted two years later, Watterson R. Rothacker – the Chicago manager of The Billboard and of The Signs of the Times at the time – underscored the power of ‘animated photography as an illustrative force’ in ‘Motion Pictures in Advertising: Possibilities of this Medium as an Active Aid in Stimulating Interest and Sales for a Product’, Signs of the Times,

| 175

14. 59 (March 1911): 4. 16 ‘Barbee Pulls Clever Stunt for ‘Lying Lips’, Motion Picture News, 23 (10 February 1921): n.p. 17 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 39, n. 32. 18 Tell, Times Square Spectacular, 44; Edward B. Silverman, ‘Warner Bros. Big 115 Ton Electric’, Signs of the Times (March 1930): 106. 19 King Features Syndicate, ‘Hubert cartoon’, New York Journal-American (2 February 1946): n.p., in Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.; ‘Will Run All Season’, Wilson on Broadway Column, New York World Telegraph (1 August 1937): n.p., in Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C.; ‘You Never Need a Ticket to the World’s Greatest Show: Animated Sign Productions’, Parade, Washington Post Magazine, 8 (1941): 19–23 in Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. 20 Douglas Leigh, ‘New York “Agog:” Epok: The Greatest Advertising Since Radio’, c. 1937. Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. 21 Tell, Times Square Spectacular, 41. 22 Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders, 60, 59. 23 Leach, Land of Desire, 40. 24 Theodore S. Fettinger, ‘Creative Force in Advertising: Opinions and Beliefs Concerning Retail Advertising’, Signs of the Times (December 1908): n.p. 25 Fettinger, ‘Creative Force’, n.p. 26 Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders, 29–30. 27 Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture and Modernism (New Bruns­wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 29–32.

R ain b o w R a v ine

28 H.C. Martin, ‘Enlivening Cards with Color’, Signs of the Times (October 1929): 104. 29 Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders, 23. 30 James Layton and David Pierce, The Dawn of Technicolor: 1915–1935 (Rochester, NY: George Eastman Museum, 2015), n. 52, 203. 31 Morris, ‘Neon Will Soon Dominate’, 49. 32 Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders, 85. 33 Tell, Times Square Spectacular, 47–50. 34 Vivian Sobchack, ‘The Line and The Animorph or “Travel is More Than Just A to B”‘, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3.3 (2008): 251–252. 35 Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders, 67 36 See Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell (New York: Harper, 2009) especially 26- 27 and 96-105 for the heightened perception of color forms under the effects of LSD. 37 Signs of the Times (May 1922): 85. Author’s note in MS. of Signs and Wonders, Tama

176 |

Starr Papers, Artkraft Strauss Collection, New York Public Library. 38 Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders, 75. 39 Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders, 75. 40 Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders, 65. 41 Starr and Hayman, Signs and Wonders, 66. 42 Artkraft Strauss Papers, 1927–2004, Job files, including Tama Starr Papers, New York Public Library, 1936, n.p. 43 Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. Microfilms 5840–5848, Press clippings, Correspondence, Pictures, Dirigible Project Files (1944–1954), and Scrapbooks. 44 Leigh, 1944, n.p. 45 Leigh, ‘This Business of Selling Big Spectaculars’, Signs of the Times (December 1934): 18. 46 Leigh, EPOK papers, n.p. 47 Leigh, Letter to US Consulate re. Karl Ullstein, 6 Sept 1940, in Douglas Leigh Papers, 1–2. 48 Robert Rochlin, ‘Animated Advertising’, The Cornell Engineer (1944): 22. 49 ‘Old Gold Spectacular Provides New Free Show on Broadway’, Signs of the Times (August 1938): 13–15. Press clippings, Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. 50 ‘Old Gold Spectacular’, 13. 51 Leonard Lyons, ‘The Lyons Den’ (c. 1939) in Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. 52 Leigh dirigible files, 1944–1954, n.p. 53 Leigh Dirigible Project files, 1944–1954, n.p., in Douglas Leigh Papers. 54 Leigh, ‘New York “Agog:” Epok: The Greatest Advertising Since Radio,’ (1937): n.p.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

55 According to one of Douglas Leigh’s scrapbooks, Bill Robinson was arrested for refusing to move on while he was watching an animated sign ‘doing my own tap dance’ in The Hot Mikado, and his arrest was reported across the country in at least 23 newspapers, from the Pennsylvania Evening Standard ‘Bill Robinson Mistaken for Well Dressed Loafer’ to The Detroit News, ‘Bill Robinson Arrested as Loafer; Pinched,’ and New York World Telegram ‘Bill Robinson Can So Look at Himself in Bright Lights’. Press clippings, in Douglas Leigh Papers. 56 Douglas Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Child: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New York: Basic, 2000), 53–61, 67. 57 Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 130.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR | 177 Kirsten Moana Thompson is Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Film Programme at Seattle University. She teaches and writes on animation and colour studies; as well as on classical Hollywood cinema; and on German, New Zealand, and Pacific studies. She is the author of Apocalyptic Dread: American Cinema at the Turn of the Millennium (SUNY Press, 2007); Crime Films: Investigating the Scene (Wallflower: 2007); and she is coeditor, with Terri Ginsberg, of Perspectives on German Cinema (GK Hall: NY, 1996). She is currently working on a new book, Color, Visual Culture and American Cel Animation.

R ain b o w R a v ine

CHAPTER 9

Kodachrome’s Hope The Making and Promotion of McCall Colour Fashion News Natalie Snoyman

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH09

ABSTRACT This chapter examines the multifarious relationship between fashion, film, and colour through an examination of McCall Colour Fashion News, a series of eight shorts filmed in the Kodachrome process between 1925 and 1928. Made in conjunction with McCall’s, the films feature well-known actress Hope Hampton modeling the latest in Parisian fashion, in colour. Parsing together the making, promotion, screening, and reception of the films, this chapter navigates the relationships between the various individuals and companies involved with the series, including: the designers whose creations were featured; the screen personality who wore them; and Eastman Kodak, the company that introduced and actively promoted Kodachrome as a viable colour motion-picture film process. k e y wo r ds

fashion, colour, Kodachrome, consumerism, promotion, tie-ins

| 179

In November 1923, Jules Brulatour, Kodak’s head of distribution, contacted George Eastman with the following proposal: I have been trying since I saw you last to interest the McCall Publishing Co., to put out at regular intervals a fashion film, in colors. This publication as you know, are devoted exclusively to women readers. They have a very large circulation and a tie up with them would prove I think most desirable.1

180 |

With this letter, Brulatour set in motion the production of a series of eight short films starring actress Hope Hampton modelling the latest in Parisian fashions, filmed with the Kodachrome motion-picture process. The making and promotion of the McCall Colour Fashion News series, released between 1925 and 1928, provides us with a case study through which to explore the multifarious relationship between the complementary industries of fashion and film. This particular campaign reveals a calculated collaboration between colour acting as the driving force in the promotional efforts brought forth by the fashion and film sectors. This chapter navigates the mutually advantageous promotional relationship between the various individuals and companies involved with the making of the films, focussing on: McCall’s, the popular women’s pattern magazine that attached its name to the series; Hampton, the screen personality modelling the French fashions seen on-screen; and Eastman Kodak, the company that introduced and actively promoted Kodachrome as a viable colour motion-picture film process at the time.

EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF KODACHROME James Layton’s research provides us with insight into the inner workings of the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratories and the early development of Kodachrome.2 Experiments with the Kodachrome motion-picture process began in 1912, when George Eastman established the Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, New York. Determined to develop a feasible colour process, Eastman brought over Dr. Charles Edward Kenneth Mees, a photographic scientist from England, to spearhead the department, which also included capable photographic chemists and craftsmen such as John G. Capstaff, Samuel E. Sheppard, and John I. Crabtree. In 1913, the Kodak Research Lab acquired a few three-lens Chronochrome cameras from Leon Gaumont in France, which were reconfigured to use a twin-lens. As detailed in Glenn Matthews’s article printed in the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, the Kodachrome process recorded two-colour separations through red and

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

green filters onto a film strip advanced via a two frame pull-down. The print would combine these into one colour image by printing onto opposite sides of a double-coated film, effectively eliminating the need for specialized projection equipment.3 As the first motion-picture subtractive process, Kodachrome predated Prizma and Technicolor, but did not find the same degree of success. While a few short films were made with the process, experimentation stopped entirely when the United States entered the war in 1917. Five years later, however, the lab was ready to resume tests and set its sights on producing a Kodachrome industry demonstration reel. At this point, Jules Brulatour became more directly involved with Kodachrome’s distribution, regularly sending ardent (if not unrealistic) suggestions to Eastman on how to best exploit the process. In one of his earliest pieces of correspondence to Eastman, Brulatour eagerly writes that he had ‘never been more interested or enthusiastic about any technical portion of the picture business, than [he was] about the Kodak color films’, prophesizing the Kodachrome process ‘would really revolutionize the film production, and add immensely to its charms and artistry’.4 Correspondence between Brulatour and Eastman evidences Eastman’s sentiments regarding the purpose of a demonstration reel – as well as the disparaging personalities of the two men, explaining, It is not our intention to attempt anything but close-up portrait work and what we want to do is photograph some very attractive actress who is in a prominent film which is to be released very soon. It will not require the working up of any special scene or anything of that kind.5 Entrenched within the film industry at this point, Brulatour’s connections to Hollywood studio heads, film actresses, and Broadway stars played a significant role in the execution of the earliest Kodachrome demo reels. In a letter to Eastman from early 1922, Brulatour mentioned a few actresses who might make for good subjects to pose before the colour camera, naming Mae Murray, Hope Hampton, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, and Constance Binney before adding: ‘Of the ones mentioned Hope Hampton is by far the prettiest’.6 In 1922, Hampton and Brulatour were soon-to-be-married, with Brulatour also managing the actress’s career. His position within Eastman Kodak and eagerness to increase Hampton’s star profile launched what would be a significant relationship between the star and Kodachrome throughout the second half of the 1920s. Brulatour further justified his suggestion of Hampton as star thanks to her ‘exceptional coloring, red hair, [and] blue eyes’, which, he claims, ‘would make [her] the best subject for the test’.7 With this, Brulatour emphasized

Ko d achro m e ’ s H ope

| 181

Hampton’s colouring as being the correct ‘type’ for the Kodachrome process – a meaningful factor at a time when reviews of colour demonstration reels published in trade magazines and newspapers focussed on accurate colour representation of skin tone and hair colour. By the time Hampton was featured in these early Kodachrome films, her colouring was well-documented in the press. Writers waxed poetically about the beauty of the actress’s hair and complexion, often expressing the desire to see those features captured in colour on the screen. In a 1921 piece focussing on Hampton, Photoplay’s Delight Evans writes:

182 |

It’s too bad the color process hasn’t been really perfected. Hope has the most gorgeous coloring you ever saw: deep pink cheeks, reddish-gold, curly hair, eyes as blue as her own uncut sapphires, and a white skin with an underlying tint, as the cold cream advertisements put it, of perfect health.8 With this description, Evans effectively illuminated the viewing experience for Photoplay readers seeing Hampton’s films in black and white while planting expectations in the viewer’s mind for the day when they could see an actress like Hampton on-screen, in colour. In addition to film industry publications regularly publishing descriptions of a star’s colouring, magazines like Photoplay and Motion Picture Magazine published inquiries sent in by readers, evidencing a curiosity about the hair and eye colour of screen personalities.9 Colour shorts, then, served as a vehicle for allowing a wider number of viewers to glimpse Hampton’s colouring for themselves. In the end, Hampton was among the chosen subjects for the 1922 Kodachrome demonstration reel, with John G. Capstaff shooting about 1200 feet of film at Brulatour’s Paragon Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, the results of which were screened to impressed audiences in Chicago and New York City.10 This reel featured Hampton and other actresses, including Mae Murray and Mary Pickford posing in front of dark backgrounds, wearing clothing in varying shades of red, green, and blue. In order to avoid the problem of parallax caused by the twin-lens camera, Capstaff filmed the subjects almost exclusively in close-up. Hampton appeared in the film twice, first playfully modelling a rose-adorned hat, followed by a shot of the actress reclining in one of her costumes from The Light in the Dark (Clarence Brown, 1922), shown to be a light-red Medieval dress worn in a flashback scene featured in the film. While there is no documentation regarding the selection of garments for this demo reel, the limited palette of reds, greens, and blues allowed the Kodachrome process to shine, with one New York Times writer reporting, ‘the articles of clothing and jewelry worn by the subjects seemed to possess their full chro-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

matic value’.11 Other reviews of the demonstration were equally positive, with Moving Picture World, for instance, praising Kodachrome for presenting, ‘the most natural and the clearest colored film not hand tinted’.12 For Eastman, the 1922 demonstration reel presented itself as a vehicle for perfecting the Kodachrome process, while Brulatour saw an opportunity to pique the interest of potential distributors, which he ultimately managed to do by engaging one of the most popular women’s magazines in the United States in an effective cross-promotional connection, with colour at its driving force.

MCCALL COLOUR FASHION NEWS Following the unexpected success of the 1922 demo reel, Brulatour proposed further projects to promote the process. His assessment that a fashion film might be a ‘most desirable’ genre to exploit the Kodachrome process was adept, given the rising popularity of colour fashion newsreels released throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Indeed, by the mid 1920s, it was not uncommon for cinemagoers to be treated to displays of beautifully crafted gowns in the form of serials and fashion news shorts, with short interest films an ideal avenue for experiments in colour motion-picture processes. As Eirik Frisvold Hanssen shows, by the time the first films in the McCall Colour Fashion News series were released in January 1925, fashion in particular was considered a good medium through which to explore colour in early cinema and beyond, with clothing often deemed important to colourize via hand colouring, stenciling, tinting, and toning.13 While this series was the first, longest-running, and only of its kind to be filmed in Kodachrome, French modiste Paul Poiret – whose creations are regularly featured throughout the eight Kodachrome shorts – partnered with Kinemacolor, another two-colour system, in 1913, to film his extravagant, experimental designs for the Kinemacolor Fashion Gazette. Of those films, The Moving Picture World muses, ‘in Kinemacolor [Poiret] has found the ideal medium for the display of his costume creations in all their colour combinations and texture of fabrics’.14 Richard deCordova and Charles Eckert have demonstrated how manufacturers and retailers – especially those in the fashion industry – hoped that linking their goods to the movies or stars would generate a boost in sales.15 While deCordova and Eckert are concerned with the mechanics of this practice in the 1930s, it was already in place in the 1910s.16 By the time Brulatour cemented the collaboration between Eastman Kodak and the McCall Co. in the early 1920s, specific clothing companies and designers also partnered with film stars to promote clothing through print campaigns, but also short films and serials. The Corticelli Silk Company, for example, produced a short in con-

Ko d achro m e ’ s H ope

| 183

184 |

junction with Pathé Frères Review, starring Irene Castle, the popular dancer and actress known for her work on-screen and the stage. While the McCall and Corticelli promotions starred different actresses and focussed on selling different products, both were noted for their aim of ‘instructing women of the United States how to dress’.17 The original title for the McCall Colour Fashion News series, in fact, was ‘Notes for Women,’ implying the educational intention of the films.18 One notable difference between the McCall and Corticelli films was that the Pathé films were filmed and released in black and white, unlike those in the McCall series, in which colour ultimately acted as a key selling point for both the McCall Co. and Eastman Kodak. Brulatour was confident Kodachrome had the potential to represent the beauty of the French designs to be featured in the McCall series effectively – not to mention his wife, Hope Hampton. In documenting the making of the films, a writer for a Rochester paper explained Brulatour’s intentions behind the fashion shorts: Intensely interested in the perfection of color processes for general practical use in motion picture making, Mr. Brulatour believes that a style show, such as his wife is now making for McCall’s, is especially conducive to popularizing the colored films. Surely nothing can give the gorgeous variegation of color effects like beautiful and harmonious ensembles of color in garb, especially upon the striking natural colors of Hope Hampton herself.19 Despite Hampton’s professional and personal relationship with Brulatour, she was an appropriate choice as the star of the McCall Colour Fashion News series. The 1920s saw a sharp increase in the amount of films starring Hampton, making her one of the more popular actresses in the industry. Additionally, since the early 1920s, the media presented Hampton not only as a clotheshorse, but also as one of the best-dressed actresses in film, well-qualified to discuss prevailing styles. Various newspapers and fan magazines regularly documented the expensive gowns and furs Hampton wore at premieres and on-screen throughout the decade. Furthermore, during the period in which the McCall fashion films were screened at local theatres, Hampton’s image was often featured in the style section of newspapers, modelling new outfits and trends.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

WORKING WITH MCCALL’S Like Hope Hampton’s career, McCall’s enjoyed a surge in popularity in the 1920s, doubling its circulation and quadrupling advertising throughout the decade. The placement of Harry Payne Burton as the editor of the magazine has been credited for this surge, with Burton more receptive to introduce innovative content for the publication in addition to its long-standing features of nonfiction articles and the highly popular McCall’s patterns.20 With the magazine open to new methods of promotion, and with more regular partnerships between the fashion and film industries occurring by the mid 1920s, Brulatour convinced Francis Hutter and Phillips Wyman of McCall’s to attach the company name to the Kodachrome series. For the first films in the series, the McCall Company imported costly gowns made to fit Hope Hampton from French designers, including Paul Poiret, Jeanne Lanvin, and Jacques Doucet.21 Correspondence between Brulatour and Eastman, however, confirms that Hope Hampton played a role in the selection of dresses displayed in subsequent films, sailing to Paris twice a year 9.1: McCall’s patterns available of ‘Specially Selected Creations from Paris’ based on the fashions worn by Hope Hampton in McCall Colour Fashion News.

Ko d achro m e ’ s H ope

| 185

186 |

for fittings.22 These trips to Europe were well-documented in the press, with fan and trade magazines chronicling her journeys to and from Paris. Upon her arrival in Rochester, New York, to film Paris Creations in Colors in 1925, a local reported that Hampton came to town with ‘six trunks full of Paris clothes’.23 A popular fan magazine published a blurb about Hampton returning to the States with ‘more than one hundred gowns’ in tow.24 Such publicity was likely meant to appeal to the average American viewer, eager to see the latest in Parisian style, but these stories also lent a certain authority and authenticity to the films and the association with McCall’s. The fact that the clothes featured in the film came from France – and that Hampton’s travels there were reported in the press – was a selling point for the McCall Company. France was still seen as the epicenter of all things fashionable at this time, a common discourse in McCall’s Magazine and other popular women’s magazines throughout the 1920s. By the mid 1920s, American women were likely familiar with French couture houses, largely due to the extensive coverage of Parisian style and designers in various forms of American media, including fashion magazines, newspapers, and film. The McCall Company was one such arbiter of the latest in French style, sending its designers to Paris to attend seasonal openings and return with the fashions best suited to adaptation in the McCall’s pattern pages. With the ever-increasing expansion of French fashion into the daily lives of American women, McCall’s assures prospective retailers, ‘No longer is the knowledge of French style confined to a city where the style center is supposed to be located, no longer is an understanding of style confined to metropolitan districts where information comes from shops and social gatherings’.25 While American media provided women with timely updates regarding the latest in French fashion, there was a likely discrepancy between the financial situation of the vast majority of the audience and the cost of the highclass items depicted in print and on the screen. McCall’s patterns were one way to make otherwise unattainable styles available to the average American woman. The McCall Company took pride in being the only pattern distributor to import garments made by the foremost Parisian designers and translate those designs into patterns, resulting in what the company called the ‘democratization of supreme style’, promising readers they would ‘get the effect of a Paris Gown if [they used] McCall Patterns’.26 Newspapers and trade journals reporting on the items Hope Hampton picked up from the French capital commented on the supposed value of the fashions, which ranged anywhere from $1000027 to ‘a million dollars more or less’.28 These numbers were pure speculation on the media’s part, and were more than likely used as a promotional device to increase interest in the films, but they also highlight the discrepancy between the cost of the couture items they featured and the actual financial situation of the vast majority of women audiences. Like the patterns

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

made from French designs for McCall’s, the Kodachrome films represented a form of democratization in and of themselves, bringing high-end items previously only available to those invited to private showings in the designer’s Parisian showroom to middle-class audiences via movie theatres across the United States. The McCall shorts relied on the element of reality captured by the Kodachrome process, not only to represent the French designs in their most accurate state, but also to encourage audiences to feel closer to the fashion capital. After a screening of Parisian Modes in Color, a New York reviewer remarked, ‘the colors in the picture are so perfect that it is as good as seeing an all fashion parade in Paris’.29 With these factors in mind, McCall’s popular pattern pages presented a logical outlet through which the magazine could collaborate with the screen in an effort to close the economic and geographic gap between American women and the fashion capital of Paris. In addition to the McCall name appearing in the title of the series – as well as on the title screen – the company developed a line of patterns consisting of adaptations of select creations worn by Hope Hampton in the McCall Colour Fashion News films. These patterns would be made available to women exclu9.2: Advertisement for Parisian Modes in Colour. In: Motion Picture News (March 1926).

Ko d achro m e ’ s H ope

| 187

188 |

sively through McCall’s Magazine and retailers across the nation carrying their products. The McCall’s ad-sheets stress the ability of the Hope Hampton films to whet the ‘clothes appetite’ of the nation, underlining the fact that moving pictures were, what they called, ‘a most important factor in speeding the sale of fashion’.30 Compared to the creations featured in the film, the patterns were much more simple in material, line, and colour, making them more manageable for the average home dressmaker’s skill set. Despite the discrepancies between what was presented on-screen versus in print, the company insisted that the films were the best method for showing ‘line for line, color for color, the newest fashion news’.31 The simple, dark backdrops of the earliest films in the series suited the Kodachrome process well, especially during a stage in which Eastman Kodak was still working to perfect the process.32 While the simplicity of the backgrounds benefitted the films in a technical sense, with fewer colours allowing for a smaller margin of error in terms of the stage setup, the McCall Company also had some say in this decision, reasoning that plain backgrounds would be the best way to showcase the colourful fashions.33 The first films in the series are nearly identical in terms of aesthetics: the name of a French designer flashes on-screen, followed by the appearance of Hope Hampton modelling one of the designer’s creations, taking care to highlight eye-catching elements such as pockets hidden in the jacket of a green Poiret silk pajama set or displaying the clever compartments in a snakeskin Jenny purse. Like the 1922 Kodachrome demonstration reel, the films in the fashion series feature close-ups of Hampton, most likely in an effort to avoid the documented technical problem of parallax. These close-up shots, however, were also ideal for showing off the remarkable details of these ensembles. While the first of the fashion shorts were shot at Paragon Studios in July 1924, the locations – and the settings – became more ambitious in later films, with Hampton modelling equally grand outfits on sets featuring ornate furniture or, in later films, outdoors, walking the grounds of her Oyster Bay mansion. Also similar to the 1922 demonstration reel, the items chosen to appear in the eight Kodachrome fashion shorts complemented the colour process, pulling from a specific colour palette of predominantly green, red, pink, and blue shades to emphasize the process at its best, while avoiding hues that did not reproduce well. While practical from a technical perspective, the items featured in the shorts were in accordance with current colour trends as discussed in popular fashion publications. Leading up to the release of Parisian Modes in Color, for example, Women’s Wear Daily printed a series of halftone photographs of Hope Hampton following ‘the Paris dictum for green’.34 One caption accompanying a photograph of Hampton, ‘recently returned from abroad’, informs readers the actress wears the same ‘bottle green’ velvet Poiret dress she models

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

in the film.35 In addition to being the world’s fashion authority, France was also regarded as the originator of the forthcoming season’s colour trends. Correspondents from the Textile Color Card Association (TCCA) of the United States provided detailed reports on the colours seen in French ensembles, which were subsequently published by the TCCA or in American newspapers and women’s magazines, including McCall’s. Such reports were crucial to American merchandising schemes in the mid 1920s, which focussed on a woman’s duty to practice harmonization in her own ensembles while keeping up with her Parisian counterparts.36 The films in the McCall Colour Fashion News series brought the latest in Parisian fashion and colour trends directly to women audiences, and, should they choose, allowed them to make their own reproduction to hang in their own closet with the guidance of the McCall’s patterns. As previously mentioned, one of the selling points for printing the McCall’s pattern pages in colour was to provide readers with guidance in the final steps of the dressmaking process. Like other competing women’s fashion magazines, McCall’s began to incorporate colour into its publications in the early 1920s, printing select pattern pages in colour versus halftone illustrations to enhance the appeal of their patterns. The release of Paris Creations and Paris Creations in Colour – the first two films in the series – coincided with the increase in colour illustrations appearing in McCall’s. Notably, the patterns made available to readers through the McCall Colour Fashion News collaboration were printed in colour, on thicker, pricier stock. In the same month Paris Creations in Colors was released, McCall Quarterly printed a black-and-white photograph of Hampton posing in a Lanvin dress, also seen in promotional material for the film. Directly to the right of this photograph is a full-colour illustration of a young woman wearing a reproduction of the same gown, a ‘Ladies’ and Misses’ Evening Dress’. Readers could buy the pattern (No. 3935) – the final result of which was shown in the illustration and photograph of Hampton – for the price of 45 cents, plus the cost of materials. The magazine took care to emphasize the more practical importance of colour illustrations in their ad-sheets, stressing they would better ‘guide the dressmaker in the finishing details accurately’. There was also an emphasis on the selling potential of colour materials, with the company reminding their merchants, ‘You know from previous experience […] that color illustrations sell faster and appeal more strongly to the home dressmaker. You can see at once how the sales of the pattern department will benefit from the more constant use of color illustrations’.37 Similarly, local newspapers advertising programmes featuring the McCall shorts took care to stress the fact that the series was filmed ‘in natural colors’, with viewers being able to see the creations ‘in their natural shades’. Since McCall’s patterns allowed women to choose fabric colours in their creations, the Kodachrome films informed the dressmaking process, allowing the

Ko d achro m e ’ s H ope

| 189

home seamstress to view the latest in Parisian colour trends and choose the colours for her own creation accordingly.

PROMOTING AND EXHIBITING MCCALL’S COLOUR FASHION NEWS

190 |

All eight films in the series were released either in December or January, with the first two films released on 18 January 1925 – the idea being exhibitors would screen the shorts before McCall’s retailers could carry the spring styles they featured.38 Newspaper theatre listings also reveal that the shorts enjoyed regular screenings in smaller American cities, typically playing before films targeted towards the woman cinemagoer, including The Dressmaker From Paris (Paul Bern, 1925), That Royle Girl (D.W. Griffith, 1925), and Mademoiselle Modiste (Robert Z. Leonard, 1926) – titles which were advertised as costume dramas in newspapers and trade magazines. Live fashion shows were also a regular part of theatre programmes featuring the films in the McCall Colour Fashion News series. As Michelle Tolini Finamore points out, short fashion shows regularly appeared in the Vaudeville-style programms scheduled for movie houses beginning in the 1910s and continuing throughout the 1920s.39 The films in the McCall series lent themselves to these live fashion revues, with one trade paper describing Colorful Fashions From Paris as ‘a corker to be utilized together with a fashion show in any house’.40 It was not unusual, then, for a matinee or evening programme to feature: a short starring Hope Hampton modelling Parisian fashions, a feature-length film sure to cater to a predominantly female audience, and a style show in which ‘living models’ presented the latest in women’s apparel. At their evening shows in the last week of March 1927, for example, the Columbia Theatre in Portsmouth, Ohio screened Parisian Inspirations in Color and the feature An Affair of the Follies (Millard Webb, 1927) in connection with a spring style promenade in which ten ‘beautiful living models’ showed off ‘the season’s newest designs in frocks, dresses and gowns direct from New York’s best shops and outstanding designers’.41 Other theatre listings emphasized certain fashion shows organized in conjunction with the McCall shorts featured goods from local merchants, thereby effectively involving and promoting local businesses through the city’s movie houses. While theatre listings emphasized the newness of the fashions featured in the McCall Colour Fashion News films, as well as the fact that they were filmed in colour, the connection between the films and the patterns available for purchase was emphasized elsewhere, typically in local newspapers. Some department stores placed ads informing readers that their store offered McCall’s patterns of the gowns worn by Hope Hampton seen in the Kodachrome film playing at a particular local

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

9.3: Newspaper listing for Paris Creations. In: The Bridgeport Telegram (13 April 1925).

| 191 movie theatre. These advertisements neatly engaged the theatre, the department store, the Kodachrome process, the McCall Colour Fashion News films, and McCall’s Magazine in an effective cross-industrial promotion. Trade journals consistently praised the films in the McCall Colour Fashion News series, not only for its accurate representation of colours and tones in fabric and skin, but also for the exploitation possibilities it offered. Motion Picture News mused, ‘Here is a novelty that will bring gasps from the women patrons; gasps of admiration and approval […] The gowns are shown in their natural colours and neither they nor Miss Hampton will be hard to look at even for the men customers’.43 The series became a staple of Educational Pictures’s annual release schedule between 1925 and 1928, and the praise the films received allowed bookings in venues of all sizes across the United States, with larger venues including the Chicago Theatre and the Circle Theatre in Indianapolis.44 Paris Creations in Color even made it into the Photoplay Guide to the Better Pictures, issued by the National Committee for Better Films. Whereas Jules Brulatour regularly encouraged George Eastman to take on more commercial projects during his time with the company, the McCall fashion series proved to be the most consistent and perhaps the most profitable use of Kodachrome as a motion-picture process until its experimentation and development ceased completely in 1930. Of the mild success garnered by the release of the films, Brulatour ventured to suggest that, ‘It looks as though our experiment will not prove a total loss and that the Kodak Co., will at least receive the cost of the prints’.45 While Eastman conceded improvements had been made with the Kodachrome process, company correspondence demonstrates he remained long doubtful as to whether or not the process could be commercially viable.46 And this 42

Ko d achro m e ’ s H ope

was indeed the case until the company refocussed its efforts to develop more lucrative products such as amateur film. Despite Kodachrome’s shortcomings as a motion-picture film process, the McCall Fashion Colour News series stands as a significant example in the multifarious relationship between the fashion and film industries – not to mention the significant yet under-documented role they play in the Kodachrome story. This short film series also evidences the complex quilt of issues surrounding colour from the late nineteenth century onwards. In this example, colour indeed acts as a source of attraction, but also as the unique element the fashion and film industries could exploit for promotional effect.

NOTES 192 | 1

Correspondence from Jules Brulatour to George Eastman, 19 November 1922; from the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum.

2

James Layton, ‘Two-Color Kodachrome at George Eastman Museum – History of Two-Color Kodachrome’ (George Eastman Museum-L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation Certificate Program, 2009), unpublished.

3

Layton, ‘Two-Color Kodachrome’.

4

Correspondence from Jules Brulatour to George Eastman, 6 January 1922; from the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum.

5

Correspondence from Jules Brulatour to George Eastman, 5 January 1922; from the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum.

6

Correspondence from Jules Brulatour to George Eastman, 19 February 1925; from

7

Correspondence, 1925.

8

Delight Evans, ‘A Broadway Farmerette’, Photoplay (November 1921): 42.

9

See, for example, the ‘Questions and Answers’ columns published monthly in

the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum.

Photoplay and Motion Picture Magazine throughout the 1920s and beyond. 10 Correspondence from Jules Brulatour to George Eastman, 6 January 1922; from the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum. 11 ‘SCREEN, HERE & THERE: New Color Pictures’, New York Times (26 February 1922): 74. 12 ‘Eastman Demonstrates new Color Process’, Moving Picture World (4 March 1922): 44; ‘Eastman Theatre Will Open September 4’, Exhibitors Trade Review (2 September 1922): 907; ‘Higher Art Realized in Eastman Theatre’, Variety (September 1922): 46. 13 Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, ‘Symptoms of Desire: Colour, Costume, and Commodities in Fashion Newsreels of the 1910s and 1920s’, Film History 21.2 (2009): 107–121.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

14 ‘Poiret Fashions in Kinemacolor’, Moving Picture World (October–December 1913): 389. 15 Richard deCordova, ‘The Mickey in Macy’s Window: Childhood, Consumerism and Disney Animation’, in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 203–213; Charles Eckert, ‘The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window’, in Fabrications, edited by Jaine Gaines and Charlotte Herzog (New York: Routledge, 1990), 100–21. 16 One of the earliest examples of cross-promotional efforts between the fashion and film industries are the Florence Rose Fashion Pictures, a short-lived series comprising over 30 films released by Pathé between 1916 and 1917. While the Florence Rose series was one of the first instances in which such care was put into a cross-industrial promotion, the logic behind such efforts remained consistent thereafter. 17 ‘Irene Castle-Corticelli Work on New Picture’, Women’s Wear Daily (24 August

| 193

1926): 21. 18 ‘Plan Fashion Film’, The Film Daily (17 July 1925): 2; ‘Flashes From the Eastern Stars’, Motion Picture Classic (October 1924): 54. 19 ‘Hope Hampton Dazzles Eye as She Poses at “Style Show”; Husband Directs Her’, Rochester Democrat (10 January 1925). 20 Kathleen L. Endres, Women’s Periodicals in the United States Consumer Magazines (Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 220. 21 Correspondence from Jules Brulatour to George Eastman, 19 February 1925; from the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum. 22 Correspondence, 1925. 23 ‘Hope Hampton Dazzles.’ 24 ‘Flashes From the Eastern Stars’, Motion Picture Classic (October 1924): 54. 25 ‘Parisian Importations Shown in July McCall Patterns’, McCall’s Ad-Sheet (June 1925): 1. 26 ‘Parisian Importations’, 1. 27 New Castle News (13 April 1925): 11. 28 The Film Daily (1 January 1928): 7. 29 ‘Newspaper Opinions on New Pictures’, Motion Picture News (6 February 1926): 727. 30 ‘McCall Fashion Color Film Whets “Clothes Appetite” with Parisian Styles’, ­McCall’s Ad-Sheet (January 1926): 1. 31 ‘Make the Movies Work For You’, McCall’s Ad-Sheet (December 1928): 4. 32 Correspondence from Jules Brulatour to George Eastman, 20 February 1925; from the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum. 33 Correspondence from Jules Brulatour to George Eastman, 19 February 1925; from the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum.

Ko d achro m e ’ s H ope

34 ‘Hope Hampton Follows the Paris Dictum for Green’, Women’s Wear Daily (29 September 1925): 31. 35 ‘Frocks From Callot and Poiret’, Women’s Wear Daily (10 November 1925): 38. 36 Regina L. Blaszczyk, The Color Revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 37 ‘Illustrations in Color in Style Catalogue’, McCall’s Ad-Sheet (April 1927): 8. 38 ‘Educational to Offer Advance Fashions’, Motion Picture News (2 January 1926): 37. 39 Michelle Tolini Finamore, Hollywood Before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 40 ‘House Reviews’, Variety (6 January 1926): 34. 41 Portsmouth Daily Times (7 March 1927): 3. 42 The Hamilton Daily News (9 February 1925): 9; The Waco News-Tribune (23 January 1927): 5. 43 ‘Paris Creations’, Motion Picture News (7 February 1925): 580. 44 Correspondence from Jules Brulatour to George Eastman, 19 February 1925; from

194 |

the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum. 45 Correspondence, 1925. 46 Correspondence from George Eastman to Leon Gaumont, 8 April 1921; from the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Natalie Snoyman received her PhD from the Centre for Fashion Studies in the Depart­ment of Media Studies at Stockholm University in October 2017. Her dissertation, 'In the Stay: Selling Three-Strip Technicolor and Fashion in the 1930s and 1940s', explores the promotional relationship between three-strip Technicolor and the American fashion industry. Natalie holds a master’s degree in archival studies from the University of California, Los Angeles and has worked in various archival institutions, including major film studios and art museums. She currently holds a position at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, CA.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

CHAPTER 10

Chromatic Objects Colour Advertising and French Avant-garde Films of the 1920s Federico Pierotti

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH10

ABSTRACT This article aims to illustrate the possible connections between the emerging science of advertising and a selection of French avant-garde films made during the 1920s. The connections between advertising and avant-garde films provides an opportunity to reflect on the function of colour and black and white in the visual culture of the 1920s. Indeed, advertising reinforces a subjective and non-indexical understanding of colour, establishing an alternative spectatorship model to the realistic ideology that emerged during the same period. The article attempts to demonstrate that avant-garde films follow the same model of spectatorship, despite making only an occasional use of colour. k e y wo r ds

advertising, avant-garde, colour, embodied spectator, modernity

| 195

196 |

Several recent studies have highlighted the diverse and heterogeneous experiences that shaped avant-garde cinema in the period between the two World Wars.1 One of the most noteworthy aspects in this regard is its connection with advertising. Immediately after the end of World War I, avant-garde cinema and advertising were part of a broader process of developing new spectatorship techniques. Both experiences were part of the same development insofar as they were primarily targeted towards an embodied spectator. Indeed, they had the common goal to use modes of perception that were in tune with the developments of urban modernity, made up of fluctuating vision, distracted attention, and increasing visual stimuli.2 These new spectatorship techniques emerge through a series of experiences, including the new science of advertising, advertising imagery, and avant-garde films, which were more closely associated with a distinctly modernist and functionalist trend. In this regard, cinema and advertising are part of a larger process that includes modernism, modernization, and modernity, in which there is a complex network of new technologies, experiences, and forms of spectatorship.3 As illustrated by Michael Cowan in his monograph on Walter Ruttmann (2014), by studying both advertising books and avant-garde films, it is possible to understand and express one of the connections within this network. Cowan studied the avant-garde films by the German director as part of an approach that included advertising films as well as other commissioned works. In the case of Ruttmann, this area of study ties in with the need to use cinema as a tool to control multiplicity, as part of a process of questioning the separation between aesthetics and applied arts. This article offers a preliminary glimpse into the French context and aims to pinpoint several canonical examples of avant-garde films in relation to the emerging science of advertising, which, in France, Germany, and the United States after World War I, became established as a new professional area.4 On this occasion, however, I shall not take into account advertising cinema, albeit a potentially very fruitful area of research. In particular, I aim to illustrate the possible connections between the physiological and psychological assumptions underpinning the theory and practice of advertising and a selection of avant-garde films made during the 1920s.5 The connections between advertising and avant-garde films provide an opportunity to reflect on the function of colour and the relationship between black and white and colour in the visual culture of the 1920s. Indeed, advertising reinforces a subjective and non-indexical understanding of colour, establishing an alternative spectatorship model to the realistic ideology that emerged in institutional cinema during the same period with the spread of so-called natural colour. I shall attempt to demonstrate that avant-garde films follow the same model of spectatorship, despite making only an occasional

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

use of colour.6 Indeed, this model is not exclusive to colour image, but also to black and white, inasmuch as it is part of the same visual culture. By this logic, the notion of hybridization put forward by Philippe Dubois7 for early cinema may be extended and expanded to include the entire field of intermedial experiences that shaped the 1920s. The models created by colour and black and white do not necessarily differ in terms of use, but rather may actually converge, as in the case seen here, with shared interests and visual experiences.

CHROMO-TECHNICS IN ADVERTISING SPECTATORSHIP Beginning in the 1910s, several advertising books were published in France, which referred to experimental psychology and to German and American psychotechnics. These texts aimed to use physiological and psychological approaches as a basis for advertising science in order to establish set rules and principles and maximize the effectiveness of advertisements. At the same time, the improving technology and economy of the mass production of polychrome images prompted advertisers to make more and more room for colour.8 The search for scientific laws to rationalize the industrial production of dyes and inks through colourimetry on one hand, and the perception of colour through physiology and psychology on the other, led, among other things, to the optimization of advertising practices. Which colours grab the audience's attention? What colours are most pleas­ing to people? Psychologists and advertisers all over the world started to pose these sorts of questions. Psychological theories were being applied to the impact of colours and images on consumers, as demonstrated by the many books published in those years, proposing more effective strategies for industries.9 The leverage of advertising was therefore associated with a series of physiological and psychological principles, such as the fatigue of the eye, the role of certain colours as attention-grabbers and, in particular, the need to arouse intense sensations and emotions in the spectator. The proposal to establish a science des annonces (‘science of advertisements’) in France – based on the results of American experimental psychology laboratories – came about with Pierre Clerget, a professor at the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce in Lyon.10 In his Manuel d’economie commerciale,11 Clerget emphasizes how the teaching of advertising, which was already widespread in the U.S., had begun to gain ground in France through Schools of Commerce and through the establishment of the first advertising agencies. Clerget was one of the first popularizers of U.S. advertising theories, drawing upon several key principles:

C hro m atic O b j ects

| 197

The aim of every advertisement is to get people’s attention, but our attention span is limited. Above all, it is a question of the number and nature of the objects shown. An ordinary observer, in favourable conditions, can visually follow a maximum of four objects at a given time. Attention may still be dispersed by competing attractions, but it remains proportional to the intensity of the sensation being aroused.12

198 |

Controlling the spectator’s focus was one of the primary concerns of the advertising theory. Jonathan Crary’s studies show that, in the nineteenth century, at the dawn of Western modernity, establishing a discipline on the subject of attention had become a key issue.13 Individuals were increasingly being defined in terms of their ability to pay attention, in other words, to isolate a limited number of stimuli within their broader field of perception. For Clerget, the ability to attract attention was the first of an advertisement’s four functions, having to ‘capture the glance of the passer-by and force him to stop’.14 The other three were subordinate to the first: to arouse interest through the intensity of the sensation being evoked; to trigger the desire to purchase; and, lastly, to remind the consumer of the product periodically – the so-called publicité de rappel (‘ad recall’). For each of the four points, the author refers to psychological principles in order to maximize the effectiveness of the advertisement by predicting the potential consumer’s reaction. According to Octave Jacques Gérin’s La publicité suggestive (‘Suggestive Advertising’), a simple visual rhetoric needed to be used in order to attract attention in the percep-

10.1: Illustration from Gérin, La publicité suggestive (1927), p. 156.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

tual field of advertising. As he points out, an advertisement ‘should be artistic in its own essence, but schematic in its execution, because of the brevity of the visual action’.15 Hence, the designer needed to predict the movements of the eye in order to create the connection between the image and the text. Eyetracking simulations were used to show how the eye was led to move across the ad, so that the designer could size and orient the texts and images more effectively within the rectangle. Advertising of the past, deemed less effective, became educational examples to explain how an advertisement should not be made. For instance, Gérin criticized the so-called Cinéphote device advertisement, stating that ‘whichever starting point you choose, not only does the eye have no direction when scanning the advertisement, but there is nothing to engage it’.16 Advertising theory set out to define scientifically the positioning of an embodied spectator, considering the relationship between the body and the surrounding environment. The spectator/flâneur makes use of the various spaces and media of society, which is always potentially moving, while immersed in a range of simultaneous and concurrent sensory stimuli. Indeed, walking down the street or quickly reading a newspaper or magazine, multiplied the visual and perceptual stimuli, and the thresholds of attention would fall inexorably. Advertising books emphasized how an advertisement’s ability to capture the audience’s attention depended on its material conditions of use. An advertisement intended to be seen among many from a train or moving car (such as a poster or lit-up sign) should be designed differently from one used in a waiting room (such as an advertisement in a magazine). Similarly, whether the target spectator is seated or standing, near or far, would also make a difference. Gérin explained the different scales of the visual field depending on their distance from the spectator. Another illustration of the same book shows a diagram representing the perception and organization of a spectator’s visual field when looking at an advertisement while sitting on the bus.17 In the context of mobile and distracted perception, colour was considered one of the main attention-activating factors. The link between colour and attention would then go on to become a leading topic in the advertising books of the 1920s. On one hand, these books aimed to demonstrate how the choice of colour for objects and packaging could be important and, on the other, they highlighted the centrality of advertising based on carefully constructed images. As Clerget claims: Certain colours attract more than others. Red ranks first, then green and black. [...] The ideal advert is one that arouses the reader’s emotions and sensitivity, which flatters his aesthetic feeling through a harmonious combination of colour and form, or which attracts his curiosity in an amusing way.18 C hro m atic O b j ects

| 199

10.2: Illustration from Gérin, La publicité suggestive (1927), p. 132.

200 |

10.3: Illustration from Gérin, La publicité suggestive (1927), p. 140.

The books of the period considered colour to be much more of a medium of attention, emotion, and memory than an indexical and realistic element. Indeed, in advertising practices, there is a non-indexical understanding of colour that is closer to the approach of applied colour in early cinema than that of colour reproduced photographically.19 Technological research in photography and film began to head in this direction; during the 1920s, cinema gradually freed itself from impure elements of applied colours and asserted its aesthetic autonomy as a reproductive medium. As Marcel Gromaire writes in 1919, ‘Colouring photographic images only produces false meaningless tones [...] it is important not to mix photography colour (black and white) with colouration, which expresses something else’.20 In line with this way of thinking, colour began to be seen primarily as a reproductive element.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Avant-garde cinema and advertising were areas in which one could build an alternative discourse to the realistic ideology of colour that was gaining ground during the same period. This anti-realistic approach took shape even more in the 1930s, with several experimental filmmakers such as Len Lye and an increasing number of promotional films in colour.21 These films made non-indexical use of colour in order to increase its psychophysiological and emotional impact. In the 1920s, it was mainly German experiences (like the absolute films in colour by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger) that put forward a similar use of colour, adopting nonreproductive techniques. A similar approach can be found in Ballet mécanique (‘Mechanical Ballet’, Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, 1924), in which applied colours are associated with the presence of abstract geometric shapes, while images of objects and figures are in black and white.22 This non-indexical approach to colour underwent a shift of interest towards the subjective dimension of colour, which also involved an enhancement of primary and saturated colours. In theory, these colours assumed a leading role thanks to the ability that was assigned to them to attract attention and to elicit emotions. The enhancement of primary and saturated colours was justified based on several scientific theories developed in the nineteenth century, which were a frequent point of reference in advertising books. The most prominent of these include the trichromatic vision theory by Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz, and the simultaneous contrast theory by Michel Eugène Chevreul. Young and Helmholtz’s theory is founded on the idea that human vision is based on the presence of three different photoreceptors in the optical system, which are sensitive to the wavelengths of red, green, and blue, respectively. Helmholtz’s physiological optics reflected on the phenomenon of colour fatigue, meaning reduced sensitivity towards one colour in the presence of overly prolonged or intense stimulus. It also considered afterimages in relation to the eye’s ability to produce complementary colour images in response to one of the receptors being stimulated.23 Chevreul’s theory assumes that two colours placed close to each other influence each other, reaching the highest level of intensity of feeling when two complementary colours are juxtaposed.24 Through his theories on contrast, Chevreul offered a systematic model to study such phenomena, giving a normative character to a series of empirical observations about colour made earlier by several painters. The book that rationalized these theories, published in 1839, was translated into German and English and became one of the most widely used books on colour during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.25 The psychophysiology of vision became a benchmark for regulating the laws of harmony and contrast of colour, which advertisers had to master in order to maximize the level of pleasure produced by an advertisement. It was

C hro m atic O b j ects

| 201

202 |

deemed essential to know how vision worked in order to take advantage of the power of colour to draw the audience’s attention and prolong the time they spent looking at the advertisement. To support the optical qualities of colour, the science of advertising deemed that it was preferable to use fewer colours on relatively large surfaces, which could retain their saturation even from a certain distance. However, overly large backgrounds were to be avoided so as not to strain the eye. Frequent mention was made of colour fatigue, which was seen as a physiological limit that should be considered when designing an advertisement. Given that overly large backgrounds would have caused the eye to have very strong afterimages in complementary colour, to avoid this effect, it was recommended to have a balanced distribution of primary colours so that the different receptors of the eye could be equally stimulated and the various afterimages could be mutually reinforced.26 Given its non-indexical value, colour remained a key element of the advertisement even when advertising grey or colourless items. Although the development of colourants made a broad range of colours available, many modern consumer goods (from household appliances, phones, and cameras, through to cars) were often produced in range of blacks, whites, greys, and browns.27 As Fernand Léger claimed in his essay on the aesthetics of the machine: ‘The absolutely indispensable manufactured object did not need to be colored for either functional or commercial purposes; it sold anyway, in response to an absolute need’.28 Despite the absence – or marginal role – of colour in industrial objects commercialized during the first decades of the twentieth century, the advertising images used to promote these products were often made to look more striking through the use colour. Many images show that, even when an object is depicted in grey or black, it is often placed inside a compositional pattern of saturated colours in order to draw the spectators' attention and increase the emotional impact on them. In fact, stimulating a desire to purchase does not depend so much on enhancing functionality, as on the associations and ideas evoked by the image. In a famous poster by Leonetto Cappiello for the Parapluie Revel (1922), an object like the umbrella, which is frequently black, is enhanced through the interaction between shape and colour. Indeed, the umbrella is set in motion through its repetition in three variants from different points of view, while, on a chromatic level, the object is brought to the forefront through a stark contrast between black and yellow. This way, the umbrella seems to move and come to meet the observer. In print advertising, similar solutions were even more frequent. This is because, often for economic reasons, a single-colour process was performed in addition to black. The entire third volume of L’imprimé de publicité by Laville is dedicated to colour, with the aim to present specialists with a large number of new inks that could be used to create new colour combinations. In this rare

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

10.4: Printed advertise­ment from Laville, L’imprimé de publicité (1928), vol. 3.

series of coloured advertisements for magazines, many objects (for example, a horn, tyre, or car) are printed in black, while colour is used – yet only as an abstract and unrelated element – within a more complex visual field. In these advertisements, colour was used solely for attention and as a psychophysiological element to improve the advertisements’ effectiveness. In a series of identical advertisements for glasses and keys, Laville used colour in various visual combinations, in order to demonstrate equally valid design options (green or red on black for the glasses, pink or blue on black for the keys, etc.). Although these objects appear in colour in the advertisements, the actual products being advertised would have been in a shade of black or grey. For all these forms in which colour is considered to be a non-indexical

C hro m atic O b j ects

204 |

addition, one might recall the concept of the hybridized image put forward by Philippe Dubois29 with regard to early cinema, and try to extend its scope to the context of advertising images. According to Dubois, in the original coloured image, colour and black and white coexist asymmetrically within two distinct visual systems. One – black and white – is the system of photographic reproduction, while the other – polychromy – is the colour system. Advertising is one of the fields in which the experience of hybridization is carried out in a more systematic way, both as a compositional model for images and as a mode of reception for the spectator. As a compositional model, hybridization is not a unique feature to early cinema, but rather an intermedial form par excellence that cuts across modern colour culture. In print advertising, it became common practice to juxtapose objects reproduced in black and white with compositional elements in colour, or to add arbitrary colours to an object. However, hybridization is also a mode of reception of extremely common and widespread images, inasmuch as the spectator’s experience is structured based on both colour and black-and-white media. One might recall, for instance, the alternation between black and colour pages in magazines, which became increasingly common with the spread of colour covers and inserts. From this point of view, the new spectatorship techniques that took shape through advertising and avant-garde cinema also dealt with the uses and functions of the black-and-white image. Since colour was not always possible for all media, due to technological or economic reasons, both colour and black and white were considered for making visual patterns seductive and attractive to modern spectators. While some media, such as posters, had long been the undisputed reign of colour image, colour remained a minority presence in the press. The dissemination of photographic images in printed advertisements made black and white in magazines even more important.30 With the arrival of specialized agencies, commercial photography took on a significant role in channelling new images of functional objects, which, in the same period, became part of the modern thinking of the avant-garde movements. New sensory and emotional aspects were also identified in black-and-white photographic reproductions of functional objects. This gave rise to an interesting interaction between noncoloured consumer objects and the black-and-white images taken of them by professional photographers.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

FOREGROUNDING OBJECTS IN AVANT-GARDE FILMS The embodied spectator, on whom the discourse of advertising theory is based, is the same as that which several avant-garde films sought to establish. While, unlike most advertisements, the cinematic medium showed moving pictures to a motionless spectator, avant-garde films developed a series of strategies to destabilize this position, which was considered to be one of the basic conditions of the illusion of reality. The most direct of these strategies – typical of Dada cinema – was to transform the film screening into a performance that physically involved the spectator’s body.31 A typical example is the presentation of Entr’acte (‘Interlude’, René Clair, 1924) in the show Relâche by Francis Picabia and Erik Satie (Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, 4 December 1924). The evening began with 370 overhead projectors turned on at the same time, which were placed in front of the audience. This was not merely a way of reasserting the performative nature of the event, focussing on the interaction between the stage and the audience, but was also a way of evoking and bringing the spectators – through their momentary blindness – into the sensual and physiological dimension of the performance and film screening. On the other hand, formal solutions were used as an indirect strategy to destabilize the spectator. In this regard, the fragmentation of the frame, the overlay, and the various shooting and editing solutions were technical choices that aimed to reestablish the mobile and dynamic perception of the urban spectator/flâneur. As pointed out by Michael Cowan,32 abstraction, movement, and rhythm are not only artistic elements, but are also scientific and practical aspects that, in the context of advertising theory, were used to govern public reactions. In this sense, the use of cinematic techniques to achieve motor and sensory stimulation among the spectators went hand in hand with the aim of achieving a kinetic perception in line with the spectatorship shaped by the advertising theory. Images from both avant-garde cinema and advertising were based on patterns composed to evoke intense sensations and stimuli in the viewer. Both fields worked on what Gérin called ‘the brevity of the visual action’.33 Several avant-garde films highlight the interaction between cinematic images and advertising. The latter is sometimes used to create new images that, in turn, recall compositional advertising patterns. In this sense, the appropriation of commercial imagery by avant-garde films is the most obvious effect of the intention to establish a link with modernity and modernization. Since films and advertisements were part of the same visual culture, it is possible to find a spectrum of commercial images in avant-garde cinema. In a sequence from Germaine Dulac’s La Souriante madame Beudet (‘The Smiling Madame Beudet’, 1923), the protagonist flicks through a magazine in which a

C hro m atic O b j ects

| 205

car is clearly visible. At that moment, the car floats in the clouds, as imagined by the woman. 10.5: La Souriante madame Beudet (video still).

206 |

Sometimes, advertising images were filmed as a constitutive element of the contemporaneous urban visual landscape, such as the poster Savon Cadum attached to a wall in a shot of Entr’acte. 10.6: Entr’acte (video still).

In other cases, films used posters and signs to create compositional effects or visual patterns resembling advertising. For example, in Emak Bakia (Man Ray, 1927), a group of posters are visible in the background of the shot with a man posing next to a door. 10.7: Emak Bakia (video still).

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

The graphic effect of his silhouette against the light, the contrast between black-and-white surfaces, and the combination of iconic and verbal elements, move the composition of this shot towards the patterns used in advertising graphics.34 Light signs became another expression of modern visual culture following the research of French engineer Georges Claude, who, in 1910, invented neon lighting. The effect of attraction produced by illuminated signs was immediately used for commercial purposes and was often appropriated by modernist photography and cinema. One noteworthy example is that of Léon Gimpel, a photographer for the magazine L’Illustration, which specialized, during the 1920s, in making nighttime autochromes dedicated to illuminated signs in Paris. In 1925, for example, he photographed the colourful neon signs decorating the front of the Moulin Rouge.35 | 207

10.8: Léon Gimpel, Paris, Le moulin rouge [Illuminations], 28 October 1925, autochrome plate, 9x12cm, Collection Société française de photographie (coll. SFP).

C hro m atic O b j ects

The same signs are filmed in a sequence of Ménilmontant (Dimitri Kirsanoff, 1926) in which the absence of colour is replaced by the dynamism of the moving lights and violent camera movements. 10.9: Ménilmontant (video still).

208 |

Man Ray pursued this same dynamism by superimposing images in one of the rayographs commissioned by the Parisian Electrical Company in 1931. Since functional objects were frequently depicted in advertising as a component of modern visual culture, as pointed out above, the appropriation of 10.10: Studio Lecram, Imprimé en Hélio. In: C. Laville, L’imprimé de publicité (1928), vol. 3 (printed heliography).

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

commercial imagery also implied an enhancement of industrial objects. As commercial photography agencies did at the time, avant-garde films appropriated objects to enhance their sensory impact as part of the reproduction medium in black and white. At the same time, Léger emphasized the beauty of functional objects: ‘The Beautiful is everywhere; perhaps more in the arrangement of your saucepans in the white walls of your kitchen than in your eighteenth-century living room or in the official museums’.36 The painter aimed to transfer the aesthetics of the machine to mass culture and everyday life by enhancing industrial forms and commercial practices. Similarly, in Ballet mécanique, the deconstruction and reconstruction of plastic objects, bodies, and mechanisms are based on the presence of commercial imagery: bottles, hats, pots, lids, dolls, mannequins, showcases, etc.37

| 209

10.11 & 10.12: --- Ballet mécanique (video stills).

In Léger’s film, the object is separated from its original function and natural context in order to be placed in a purely rhythmic and sensory dimension. Consequently, the images are built and edited to highlight their impact on the viewer through the dynamics between the object, form, and light. A similar process of decontextualization may be seen in some Dada films, in which the functional object is repositioned within an abstract space, albeit reproduced in an indexical manner. In this regard, there is a notable segment of Emak Bakia by Man Ray dedicated to shirt collars. The particular shape of the collars allows the artist to convey a distinctly sculptural composition, also emphasized by the stark contrast between the shirts’ intense white colour and the deep-black background.

C hro m atic O b j ects

10.13: Emak Bakia (video still).

210 |

The sequence is most likely a reference to the famous advertising photography by Paul Outerbridge for Ide Collar company (1922), which depicted the collar of a shirt resting on a chessboard. The same product is advertised by a poster by Severo Pozzati for Noveltex (1928). Although the image is in colour, the collar is depicted in white, with almost photographic precision. The collar, however, is spatially placed in front of a non-indexical pattern of black-and-red geometric patterns on a light-brown background. Once again, the black patterns create a stark contrast with the white, while the red in an ‘L’ shape enlivens the composition and helps to create the sculptural and three-dimensional effect. Advertising and avant-garde also use different editing strategies to implement similar ways of repositioning objects and bodies, creating new relationships and causal links between them. In this sense, the film Ballet mécanique is paradigmatic. Several parts of the body are frequently associated with objects and moving gears. The body is presented as a set of disconnected parts within a system of relationships in which human and machine functions converge in a new spatial and temporal dimension.38 At the beginning of the film, the smiling mouth of Kiki de Montparnasse is often associated with objects and shapes. Commercial images often used horizontal editing to create a similar set of associations. For example, in the print advertisement Odol: l’origine d’un sourire (‘Odol: the origin of a smile’), the detail of a woman’s smiling mouth is repeated in three photographs placed in sequence and linked to the image of the Odol mouthwash container. The search for new spatial and temporal relationships to maximize the impact on the spectator also includes graphical characters, which, together with the objects and bodies, make up a fundamental element of the advertisement. Advertisers studied compositional schemas based on the interaction between various factors (the lettering size, the orientation, the three-dimensional effect, etc.) in order to maximize the impact of the letters and numbers

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

on the spectator. Similarly, several avant-garde films used these same characteristics to produce optical and sensory effects. In Ballet mécanique, an entire sequence is dedicated to the dynamism and three-dimensionality created by decomposing the written text ‘On a volé un collier de perles de 5 millions’. Léger also used the same logic when inserting abstract coloured circles, triangles, and squares within the film.39 Inserting these elements further strengthened the bond between the film and advertising rhetoric, which – as pointed out above – used hybridization and non-indexical colour as one of its key strategies. Colour was not as important for its ability to reproduce an object’s colour realistically, as it was for its ability to create forms that could catch the spectators’ attention, elicit their emotions, and stimulate their memory. Therefore, by striving to achieve a sensory impact on the spectator, avantgarde films show an affinity with the psychological tests underpinning the theory. Both experiences were interested in how the senses of an embodied spectator reacted to a series of psychophysiological stimuli deployed over a

10.14: Illustration from Gérin, La publicité suggestive (1927), p. 94.

10.15 & 10.16:---- Ballet mécanique (video stills).

C hro m atic O b j ects

| 211

set amount of time. Colour and black and white were also part of this area of interest inasmuch as the images were designed according to their perceptual and sensory impact. Lastly, one might consider the washerwoman sequence in Ballet mécanique in light of Léger’s curiosity towards the audience’s reactions to rhythm and movement. Obsessively repeating the same action ultimately made the spectator of the film the subject of an experimental test. It was common practice in advertising psychology to subject a sample of people to tests in which they were very quickly and repeatedly exposed to an advertising image in order to study their attention processes. Léger used a similar method:

212 |

in ‘The Woman Climbing the Stairs’, I wanted to amaze the audience first, then make them uneasy, and ten push the adventure to the point of exasperation. In order to ‘time’ it properly, I got together a group of workers and people in the neighborhood, and I studied the effect that was produced on them. In eight hours I learned what I wanted to know. Nearly all of them reacted at about the same time.40 In conclusion, the examples discussed above show some of the potential formal strategies used to further engage the spectator’s senses and body: the non-indexical use of colour, the fragmentation of the frame, the appropriation of advertising imagery, the dynamism of camera movements and editing, the enhancement of industrial objects, and the repositioning of objects and bodies. As I have argued, the assimilation in terms of embodied spectatorship, between avant-garde films and advertising images, made it possible to focus on the sensory and bodily functions that, in those years, assimilated the two opposing forms of colour and black and white through other aspects. As I have aimed to show through the examples examined in this essay, both forms can be placed within a common perspective of intermedial experiences, which may be described with the concept of hybridization. Hybridization may be considered as both a compositional model and a mode of reception. It has been seen how both meanings can be found in both advertising and avantgarde cinema. In this regard, colour images may be considered within a set of spectatorship techniques that are not necessarily alternative nor opposed to black and white, but which may also feature black and white among its various possibilities. Adopting one and/or the other depends on the technological, economic, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of each medium in a given period of its history.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

NOTES 1

See especially Malte Hagener, Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avantgarde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007); Michael Cowan, Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde – Advertising – Modernity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014).

2

On this point, see Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 9–42.

3

On the three forms of ‘the modern’, see Thomas Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary (London: Routledge, 2000), 390. For the distinction between an expressionist and a functionalist avant-garde, see Hagener, Moving Forward, 61–68.

4

See Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 14–15. For France, also see Albert Halter and Annette Haxton, ‘Paul Dermée and the Poster in France in the 1920s: Jean d’Ylen as “Maître de l’AfficheModerne”’, Journal of Design History, 1 (1992): 39–51.

5

The corpus of this essay consists of films that belong to the so-called ‘second avant-garde’, as described by Noureddine Ghali, L’avant-garde cinématographique en France dans les années vingt. Idées, conceptions, théories, edited by Yumiko Ishikawa and Christian Lebrat, postface by Dominique Noguez (Paris: Éditions Paris Expérimental, 1995), 43–48. During the course of the essay, I will therefore use the term ‘avant-garde film’ as a synonym for ‘films belonging to the second avant-garde’. With regard to the chronology of French avant-garde cinema, see also Jacques B. Brunius, En marge du cinéma français (Paris: Arcanes, 1954), 68–81, 89–95, and 135–143; Barthélemy Amengual, ‘Rapports entre le cinema, la littérature et les arts en France dans les Années Vingt’, Les Cahiers de la Cinémathèque, 33–34 (1981): 161–168; and Richard Abel, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 273–275.

6

For detailed studies on colour experimentations in avant-garde films, see Eleanore Doppenberg and Karel Dibbets, ‘Abstract Films and Color’, in Il colore nel cinema muto, edited by Monica Dall’Asta, Guglielmo Pescatore, and Leonardo Quaresima (Bologna: Mano, 1996), 216–223; Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, Early Discourses on Colour and Cinema: Origins, Functions, Meanings (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 2006), 88–156; Joshua Yumibe, ‘Silent Cinema Colour Aesthetics’, in Questions of Colour in Cinema: From Paintbrush to Pixel, edited by Wendy Everett (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 41–56; Wendy Everett, ‘Colour in Cinema: A Musical Phenomenon?’, in Cinéma et couleur. Film and Colour, edited by Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard (Paris: Houdiard, 2009), 347–357; and Yumibe, ‘“Harmonious Sensations of Sound by Means of Colors”: Vernacular Colour Abstractions in Silent Cinema’, Film History, 2 (2009): 164–176.

7

Philippe Dubois, ‘Hybridations et métissages. Les mélanges du noir-et-blanc et de la couleur’, in La couleur en cinéma, edited by Jacques Aumont (Paris: Cinémathèque Française, 1995), 74–92. C hro m atic O b j ects

| 213

8

See Regina Lee Blaszczyk, The color revolution (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 15–18.

9

See, among the French books, J. Arren, Comment il faut faire de la publicité (Paris: Lafitte et C.ie, 1912); Arren, Sa majesté la publicité (Tours: Mame et fils, 1914); Pierre Clerget, ‘Les bases psychologiques de la publicité’, Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées, 18 (1907): 266; D.C.A. Hémet, Traité pratique de publicité commerciale et industrielle, 2 vols. (Paris: Bureau Technique de ‘La Publicité’: 1922); Octave-Jacques Gérin, La publicité suggestive: théorie et technique [1911], in collaboration with Camille Espinadel, 2nd edition (Paris: Dunod, 1927); and C. Laville, L’imprimé de publicité, 3 vols. (Paris: Jacoub et Cie, 1928).

10 See Clerget, ‘Les bases psychologiques de la publicité’, 266. 11 See Manuel d’économie commerciale (Paris: Colin, 1919). 12 ‘Le but de toute annonce est d’attirer l’attention; mais notre pouvoir d’attention a des limites. C’est d’abord le nombre et la nature des objets. Un obser-

214 |

vateur ordinaire, dans des conditions favorables, peut suivre visuellement un maximum de quatre objets à la fois. L’attention est encore dispersée par les attractions contraires, mais elle se fixe proportionnellement à l’intensité de la sensation éveillée.’ (Clerget, ‘Les bases psychologiques’, 266; all translations are mine unless otherwise noted). Clerget explicitly refers to theories in Walter Dill Scott, The Theory of Advertising (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1903) and Earnest Elmo Calkins and Ralph Holden, Modern Advertising (New York: Appleton & Co., 1905). 13 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999). 14 ‘Accroche[r] le regard du passant et le contrain[dre] à s’arrêter.’ (Clerget, Manuel d’économie commerciale, 65). 15 ‘L’affiche doit être artistique en son essence, mais schématique dans son exécution, en raison de sa courte durée d’action visuelle.’ (Gérin, La publicité suggestive, 266). The first edition of the book was from 1911: all quotes are taken from the second edition published in 1927, which introduces several variations. The images published here (already present in the 1911 edition) are also reproduced by the 1927 edition. On Gérin, see also Marc Martin, Les pionniers de la publicité. Aventures et aventuriers de la publicité en France (1836–1939) (Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2012), 177–200. 16 ‘Quel que soit le point de départ choisi, l’œil qui parcourt rapidement cette annonce n’y trouve non seulement aucune indication, mais rien qui puisse l’arrêter.’ (Gérin, La publicité suggestive, 156). 17 See Gérin, La publicité suggestive, 132, 139–140. 18 ‘Certaines couleurs attirent plus que d’autres. Le rouge vient au premier rang, puis c’est le vert et le noir. […] L’annonce idéale est celle qui éveille les émotions et la sensibilité du lecteur, qui flatte son sentiment esthétique par la combinaison

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

harmonieuse de couleur et de la forme, ou encore qui attire sa curiosité en l’amusant’ (Clerget, ‘Les bases psychologiques’, 266). 19 On applied colour in early cinema, see especially Joshua Yumibe, Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012); and Tom Gunning, Giovanna Fossati, Joshua Yumibe, and Jonathon Rosen, Fantasia of Colour in Early Cinema (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). 20 ‘Colorier les images photographiques ne mène qu’à des tons faux sans signification […] il importe de ne pas mélanger la couleur photographique, noir et blanc, avec le coloriage, qui exprime autre chose’ (Marcel Gromaire, ‘Idées d’un peintre sur le cinéma’ [1919], in Intelligence du cinématographe, edited by Marcel L’Herbier (Paris: Corrêa, 1946), 247). On the opposition of colour/black and white in French film culture, see also Ghalie, L’avant-garde cinématographique en France, 278–286. 21 For a historical background on coloured fashion newsreels of the 1910s and 1920s, see, for example, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, ‘Symptoms of Desire. Colour, Costume, and Commodities in Fashion Newsreels of the 1910s and 1920s’, Film History, 2 (2009): 107–121. 22 See Rossella Catanese, Guy Edmonds, and Bregt Lameris, ‘Hand-Painted Abstractions: Experimental Color in the Creation and Restoration of Ballet mécanique’, The Moving Image, 1 (2015): 92–94. 23 Helmholtz’s Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (1856–1867) was soon translated into French. Hermann von Helmholtz, Optique physiologique, translated by Émile Javal and N.-Th. Klein, 2 vols (Paris: Masson et fils, 1867). 24 See Michel Eugène Chevreul, De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés (Paris: Pitois-Levrault, 1839). 25 On the impact of Chevreul’s theories, see Georges Roque, Art et science de la couleur. Chevreul et les peintres de Delacroix à l’abstraction (Nîmes: Chambon, 1997). 26 See Laville, L’imprimé de publicité, vol. 3, 16–21. Laville’s colour theory was based on a popular lecture by Helmholtz (for the French translation, see Hermann von Helmholtz, ‘L’optique et la peinture’, in Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, Principes scientifiques des beaux-arts: essais et fragments de théorie (Paris: Baillière, 1878), 169–223. 27 Michel Pastoureau, Black. The History of a Color (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 170–175. 28 ‘L’objet fabriqué absolument nécessaire n’avait pas besoin, utilement parlant, commercialement parlant, d’être coloré; il se vendait tout de même répondant à un besoin absolu’ (‘L’Esthétique de la machine. L’objet fabriqué, l’artisan et l’artiste’ [1923], in Fernand Léger, Fonctions de la peinture (Paris: Gonthier, 1965), 55; English trans. ‘The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, the Artisan, and the Artist’, in Fernand Léger, Functions of Painting, edited by Edward F. Fry, translated by Alexandra Anderson (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 54

C hro m atic O b j ects

| 215

29 Dubois, ‘Hybridations et métissages’, 74–79. 30 See Robert A. Sobieszek, The Art of Persuasion. A History of Advertising Photography (New York: Abrams, 1988), 32; and Thomas Michael Gunther, ‘The spread of photography. Commissions, advertising, publishing’, in A New History of Photography, edited by Michel Frizot (Köln: Könemann, 1998), 556–565. 31 See Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Dada/Cinema?’, in Dada and Surrealist Film, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 19–20. 32 Cowan, Walter Ruttmann, 53–54. 33 Gérin, La publicité suggestive, 266. 34 On Man Ray’s films, see Kim Knowles, A Cinematic Artist. The Films of Man Ray (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). 35 See Thierry Gervais and Nathalie Boulouch, Léon Gimpel: les audaces d’un photographe, 1873–1948 (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2008). 36 ‘Le Beau est partout, dans l’ordre de vos casseroles, sur le mur blanc de votre cui-

216 |

sine, plus peut-être que dans votre salon XVIII siècle ou dans les musées officiels.’ ‘L’Esthétique de la machine, 53; English trans., in Léger, Functions of Painting, 52–53. 37 On Ballet mécanique, see especially Standish D. Lawder, The Cubist Cinema (New York: New York University Press, 1975); Judi Freeman, ‘Léger’s Ballet mécanique’, in Dada and Surrealist Film, 28–45; and Susan Delson, Dudley Murphy, Hollwyood Wild Card (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 41–68. 38 In this regard, also consider the supposed use of erotic imagery made by Man Ray and Dudley Murphy: ‘They also shot erotic footage of each other (Dudley and Katherine Murphy, Man Ray and Kiki), which was calculated to be intercut ironically between shots of pistons and other machine parts pumping up and down’ (William Moritz, ‘Americans in Paris. Man Ray and Dudley Murphy’, in Lovers of Cinema: the First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, edited by Jan-Christopher Horak (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 126; and see also Delson, Dudley Murphy, 51–52). 39 ‘Intriguingly, the colored parts in the film do not show the photographic images of machines in motion or, indeed, his paintings but rather those parts showing abstract animations of two-dimensional geometrical shapes.’ (Catanese, Edmonds, and Lameris, ‘Hand-Painted Abstractions’, 94). 40 ‘Dans La Femme qui monte l’escalier, je voulais d’abord étonner le public, puis lentement l’inquiéter et puis pousser l’aventure jusqu’à l’exaspération. Pour le ‘réglage’ je m’entourais d’ouvriers et de gens du quartier et j’étudiais sur eux l’effet produit. En huit jours je savais ce que je pouvais obtenir. Ils réagissaient presque tous vers le même temps.’ (‘Autour du Ballet mécanique’ [c. 1924], in Léger, Fonctions de la peinture, 167; English trans. in Léger, Functions of Painting, 51).

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Federico Pierotti is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Florence. His two books (2012 and 2016) regard colour in film history as a central issue to modern media visual culture. He has published in several journals and has participated in international conferences on film, media, and colour studies. He has been the recipient of Italian Academy fellowship at Columbia University in 2016.

| 217

C hro m atic O b j ects

ARCHIVING AND RESTORATION: EARLY DEBATES AND CURRENT PRACTICES

| 219



CHAPTER 11

La Ligue du Noir et Blanc French Debates on Natural Colour Film and Art Cinema 1926–1927 Bregt Lameris

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH11

ABSTRACT In 1927, a group of young Parisian cinephiles founded the so-called Ligue du noir et blanc, positioning colour in the domain of the commercial, and black and white in that of the artistic cinema. This dichotomy between colour and black and white in cinema is still part of our present-day film-historical discourses. As a result, the ligue strongly defined our relationship to early colour films in the archives and film museums. To better understand the 1920s debate, I position it within the broader French discourse on colour and film art, showing that there were other voices that declared colour to be an excellent element to use in an artistic way. The debate was not as black and white as our current historiographical knowledge might make us believe. k e y wo r ds

black and white, 1920s, early debates, cinephilia, French cinema

| 221

Twenty years ago, the Nederlands Filmmuseum (now EYE) organized a workshop on colour in silent film. Following this event, it published a book called Disorderly Order, which contains the edited versions of the workshop discussions. One of the first topics discussed in the book is the early film archival practice to reproduce early coloured films in black and white, on which Eric de Kuyper made the following comment:

222 |

Jacques Ledoux of the Belgian film archive was very interested in the technical aspects of preservation. When I discovered that silent films were coloured I asked him ‘Why don’t you preserve them in colour?’ And he answered with a boutade: that colour was like ‘un groulot qui accompagne le trot du cheval’ – the ringing of the bells that accompany a trotting horse. For that generation it was not a problem. Not a financial, economic problem, not even a technical one.2 Reading this, one might say that film archivists simply did not care about early colours. But why did they not care? During the same session, Frank Kessler tried to answer this question, connecting the problem to the earlier wish to define cinema as an art form. He explained that film critics such as Münsterberg and Arnheim built the idea of film art on its difference from reality. As a result in ‘early film theory, the absence of colour, and the absence of sound, were seen as specific aesthetic qualities of cinema’.3 He concluded by stating that there was an ideological aspect, of raising cinema to an art, an art based on silent black-and-white images to the choice to preserve early films in black and white. This discourse connecting art cinema to silence and black and white emerged during the late 1920s and early 1930s, the period during which new technologies, such as sound and natural-colour systems, were (on the verge of) breaking through. However, simultaneously, many experiments were done with coloured moving images (e.g. Bauhaus’ Farbenlichtspiele, and Ruttmann’s Opus II, III, IV, Oskar Fischinger’s films in Gasparcolor).4 This practice seems to be in contradiction to the aforementioned discourse on film aesthetics of that period. We therefore need to reconsider whether the idea that film art was connected to black and white really stood on its own and was perhaps part of a broader discourse from which it has been isolated. To get some answers to this question, I did a close reading of a series of articles published in Cinéa-Ciné pour tous from 1926 and 1927 on the so-called Ligue du noir et blanc. This Ligue was created in defence of the idea that films in black and white were artistically superior to those in natural colours – which confirms Frank Kessler’s explanation. However, not everybody agreed with the ideas it disseminated. In this essay, I elaborate on this Ligue du noir et blanc

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

and its reasonings, placing it in the context of natural-colour film in France at that moment. I also analyse the counter-discourses the Ligue provoked in the contemporary press. Finally, I will give some hypothetical suggestions as to why and how the Ligue’s discourse on art cinema as one in black and white survived, whereas the counter-discourse seems to have been forgotten.

LIGUE DU NOIR ET BLANC On 15 September 1926, the young publicist Bernard Brunius wrote an article that appeared in the journal Cinéa, Ciné pour tous called ‘Plaidoyer pour le noir et blanc’ (‘pleading for the black-and-white’). Unhappy with the naturalcolour systems that had been invented so far, Brunius felt that he needed to defend black-and-white film.5 He first argued that natural-colour systems’ reproduction of the colours of nature was far from natural. To his opinion, we perceive nature in a monochromic way and our perception of colour in land or cityscapes was the result of reason more than just our ability to see. Secondly, Brunius criticized the state of the art of these natural-colour systems. He considered them all to be technological failures that irritated the optical nerves. Finally, he was of the opinion that the colour systems reproduced nature in a wrong and exaggerated way. But even if technology would be able to overcome all that, colour film was absurd in the eyes of Brunius. The idea of art was to master an instrument the way it was instead of searching for new ‘improved’ instruments. As a result, instead of trying to invent natural-colour film, Brunius pleaded for the perfection of black and white and develop it into an art form, closing the article with these final words: Let’s save the cinema from theatre after having saved it from literature. Let’s save it from the postcards after having saved it from painting. I expect many more protesters, and I suggest to create the ‘Ligue du noir et blanc’.6 As one can see, Brunius indirectly refers to already existing ideas on how cinema had to be distinguished from the other art forms, in this case by cherishing its black-and-whiteness.

L a L i g ue d u N oir et Blanc

| 223

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE LIGUE Even though the opinions the Ligue distributed were not very new or revolutionary, Brunius was still able to find enough important names from the world of French art cinema to support him. In January 1927, he published a small follow-up article in Cinéa, Ciné pour tous, in which he summarized the views he had stated four months earlier. Again, he called for support, asking people to back his Ligue du noir et blanc. In addition, this time, he provided a list of people who had already joined. Names on this list are: Jean George Auriol, Simone Cottance, René Crevel, Pierre Deselaux [sic], Edmond Greville, René Jeanne, Pierre Kéfer, Georges Lacombe, Jean Mitry, Jean Prévost, Jean Tedesco [...] Charles Léger, Alberto Cavalcanti, Henri Poulaille.7 224 | These film critics and filmmakers all frequented the circles of ciné-clubs in France in the 1920s, and they probably all knew one another. Brunius, who was nineteen at the time, and at the very beginning of his career as a critic and an editor, was involved in the ciné-club Tribune du Cinéma founded by Charles Léger in 1925; Jean George Auriol was also involved in it.8 Another important, young person visiting the Tribune was Jean Mitry. He would become one of best-known and most-read cinema historians of the twentieth century. In addition, he became one of the founding fathers of the Cinémathèque française together with Georges Franju and Henri Langlois in 1936.9 Edmond Gréville, who soon started to make films with Abel Gance and André Dupont, was also part of this group.10 Gréville was, aside from being a filmmaker, most of all, an enfant terrible. He went to school with Jean George Auriol, and had long discussions about cinema with Brunius and Mitry, during which he ‘became intoxicated with the 7ème art’.11 Apparently, he also had a fling with Brunius’s sister Simone Cottance. Other supporters were active film critics. Crevel, for example, frequently published in Close Up, as did Jean Prévost, who also published on film in the Nouvelles Littéraires. Pierre Desclaux was the main editor of the more popular film journal Mon Ciné. René Jeanne edited the series L’Art cinématographique, in collaboration with the Ciné-Club de France and the Vieux Colombiers, which was led by Jean Tedesco, who was also in charge of Cinéa-Ciné pour tous. Henri Poulaille, who wrote for the Nouvelles Littéraires, was connected to Desclaux’s Mon Ciné, and wrote a book on Charlie Chaplin (1927).12 Pierre Kefer is known for his work as a set director for Jean Epstein’s films La chute de la maison Usher (1927), La double amour (1925), and La Glace à trois faces (1927); filmmaker Georges Lacombe started his career working as an assistant director for René Clair; and Alberto de Cavalcanti, the last in

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

the list of Ligue supporters, had just made his film Rien que les heures (1926). In February 1927, Brunius was able to add several new names to the list of Ligue supporters: René Clair, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Léon Chancerel, Charensol, J.L. Croze, Serge, Jean Dréville, Raoul Ploquin, Jacques Nathan (Pathé Cinéma), Tavano, J. Grange, Marcel Manghez, Louis de Jongh, Jacques Mauny, Raymond Guérin-Catelain, Jacques Legrain, J. Hochard, N.R. Stragliati, Jean Marguet, Jean Mercier, J. de Wodzniska, André Berge, Juan Arroy, Léon-Pierre Quint.13 Again, Brunius lists a group that consisted of gens de lettres, involved in art films, either as a producer (e.g. Raoul Ploquin: Albatros and UFA), as filmmakers (e.g. René Clair, Dréville), as a set designer (e.g. Mallet-Stevens), as a draughtsperson (Serge), or as a critic and historian (Charensol). Of all the people who supported the Ligue du noir et blanc, it can be said that they saw themselves as active in high culture, including film art.14 Several of these men were on one or more editorial boards of film journals, such as Photo-Ciné, Cinégraphie, and Cinémagazine, and, of course, Cinéa-Ciné pour tous. Finally, several of these men wrote or drew for cultural journals of the time, such as Comoedia, and Nouvelles Littéraires. No wonder, then, that the Ligue du noir et blanc was positively mentioned in several of these journals. For example, on 2 February 1927, J.-L Croze wrote a positive piece in Comoedia about the Ligue and its purposes.15 Jean Dréville also mentioned the Ligue, explaining how the film Metropolis (Lang, 1927) was an example of black-and-white film art. He called it a ‘vibrant symphony of black, of grey and of white’, and was convinced that its beauty proved that the Ligue was right in its preference of black and white over natural colour in film.16

COLOUR CONTEXT, TECHNICOLOR, AND THE BLACK PIRATE As already mentioned, the discourse on film art and black and white was not new in 1926. So why did Brunius create this Ligue at that moment in time? And why did so many intellectuals support it? We can find part of the answer to these questions in Brunius’s writings, for example, in his text from September 1926, which starts with the following paragraph:

L a L i g ue d u N oir et Blanc

| 225

226 |

Monsieur Colour came closer to me with little steps. He lowered his journal and appeared to me in close up, the physiognomy opened wide with joy as if he had his daughter accepted at the Conservatory, won the concours du ‘Matin’, seen his wife on the arm of the richest man on earth, been appointed curator of the Clément Vautel Museum, understood the hidden meaning of a book by Henry Bordeaux or came up with the perfect word. He could not hide the real motive: – a new colour film technique has been invented.17 A few things are notable in this text fragment. First of all, in this French text, we find a reference to English in the use of the term ‘Monsieur Colour’ instead of ‘Monsieur Couleur’, connecting colour to Anglophone culture, and although it leads too far to say that Brunius directly refers to Herbert Kalmus, we can imagine Monsieur Colour might be him or someone very similar. Furthermore, many of the reasons he suggested for Monsieur Colour’s happiness, were highbrow: become the curator of a museum, understand a piece of literature, have your daughter accepted at a quality school. But no, to finally come up with the real reason for his joy, ‘a new natural color technique had been invented’.18 Brunius’s disdain is clear. Of course, a new ‘natural colour system’ was hardly a novelty in 1926 France. Gaumont had its Chronochrome, Kinemacolor had been shown in Paris, and Pathécolor had claimed to reproduce the colours of nature ever since the 1910s. Besides, in 1926, nothing really important happened in the development of natural-colour systems. So why these opening words, why Monsieur Colour? The answer might be found in the fact that the American Technicolor firm started pushing its natural-colour system in Europe in 1926.19 Herbert Kalmus himself went to Europe, where, on 19 April 1926, he presented films in two colours made with the Technicolor II system at the Artistes Associés (‘Associated Artists’) in Paris. In Science et industries photographiques on 1 June 1926, the films showed during this private projection were praised for their technical perfection and their pleasant effect. This was two months before Brunius published his first article on the danger of colour and the Ligue du noir et blanc.20 In addition to this, Technicolor was already well-known in France. The technology was seriously discussed by French scientists, such as Lobel and Clerc, who followed the developments in the United States with great interest. For example, on 1 March 1926, Lobel elaborately discussed Technicolor, mentioning the fact that the system was starting to get big in America, ending his article by naming The Black Pirate as an instance of this success. The fact that he mentioned this particular film was no coincidence, since it was impor-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

tant for the Technicolor firm. Whereas most films only used Technicolor in shorter apotheose-like fragments, The Black Pirate was entirely filmed in natural colours, and therefore announced as a ‘Technicolor feature’. Additionally, in the United States, the film was much praised for its artistic use of colour.21 Already before the film premiered, its director Albert Parker explains to the press that the use of a brown undertone softened the overall colour tone of the film ‘giving an “antique”, mahogany tone to the picture, softening and enriching the chromatic hues’.22 In another interview, he explains how he: ‘looked at old paintings [...] and found out that they didn’t have to be a bit like nature to be lovely’.23 For this, Parker was praised by the press: ‘[H]e is the man who discovered that skies do not have to be blue. Nor do colored films have to look like penny picture postal cards.’ In June 1926, another critic writes: ‘It isn’t a bit like nature, thank goodness; it is art.’24 As a result, we can state that the film was advertised and received as one that used natural colours in an artistic way, comparable to painting. The Black Pirate premiered on 8 March 1926, both at the Selwyn in New York and at the Tivoli in London.25 In London, there was a special audience present, including Royalty and, maybe even more important for Technicolor, critics from Paris who crossed the English Channel to see the Technicolor feature.26 On 1 April 1926, Cinéa – Ciné pour tous discusses this event: Simultaneously with its appearance in New York, The Black Pirate, the new production by Douglas Fairbanks, started its career in exclusivity at the Tivoli-Theatre in London. It has been very well received and the press unanimously praises the film. The comment ends with an appreciative remark on Technicolor: it seems that the colour system that was used for this big production is really satisfying.27 However, it would take until 15 September 1926 for the film to arrive in Paris. Remarkably, this coincided with Brunius’s first call to join the Ligue du noir et blanc. On October 1926, two weeks after The Black Pirate premiered in Paris and after Brunius announced his Ligue, the journalist and scriptwriter Edmond Epardaud discussed The Black Pirate – again in Cinéa, Ciné pour tous. He explained that Paris was impatiently waiting for this film that had been received so well in New York and London, to arrive in the Paris cinemas. Not only because the film was ‘a Douglas Fairbanks’, but also because it was made entirely in ‘natural colours with the new technique Technicolor [my italics]’.28

L a L i g ue d u N oir et Blanc

| 227

228 |

So even though, in reality, there was no remarkable technological improvement of the system, Epardaud believed there was. After this announcement, he briefly referred to the debate on colour, black-and-white, and film art that Brunius had started just two weeks before. Epardaud did not want to get caught up in this debate. Nevertheless, he declared that colour, as a new technology, should be accompanied by a new aesthetics. He thus subtly nuanced Brunius’s harsher statement that films in natural colour could never be a ­ rtistic.29 Despite the temporal overlap of the film with his statements on colour, Brunius never directly mentioned Fairbanks, Technicolor, or The Black Pirate until after 1 February 1927. On this day, a French-language article supposedly written by Douglas Fairbanks appeared in Cinéa, ciné pour tous. This article describes why and how colour in The Black Pirate was used in artistic ways. Fairbanks explains, first of all, how he and his team discovered that the film material registered colours differently from the way we see them. As a consequence, one needed to be extra careful when filming in Technicolor. Fairbanks said that, for The Black Pirate, he basically used soft, neutral colours, which gave an effect of warmth, rather than colour.30 Secondly, he writes that the image became unfocussed when using the natural-colour system. In Fairbank’s opinion, this enhanced the effect of impressionist painting. He concluded that a film in natural colour was more a representation of a dreamlike impressionist fantasy than of pure reality: Colour, if conveniently added, can increase the effects, strengthen the emotional value of the screen imagery, and approach it to the art of painting.31 We do not know if this article was published in a reaction to Brunius and his Ligue or not. Either way, the Americans had missed out on some of the strongest French arguments against colour. Cinema had to be saved from all the other arts (including painting!) in order to allow it to grow into an art form itself. Unsurprisingly, two weeks later, Brunius called Fairbank’s ideas on colour ‘sympathetic idealism’, adding that colour could be nothing but an ‘agreeable play on our eyes’.32

COLOUR AESTHETICS AND FILM ART Of course, Brunius’s discourse was black-and-white in every sense of the word. For him, film and colour simply could not be combined into an artistic achievement. Others tried to be more nuanced. In January 1927, film historian and scriptwriter René Jeanne continued Epardaud’s more nuanced tone on films

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

in natural colour (again with an article in Cinéa-Ciné pour tous). He started his article stating that, so far, films in natural colour, such as The Glorious Adventure (Blackton, 1922), Stage Struck (Dwan, 1925) and The Merry Widow (Stroheim, 1925) were disappointing. The aforementioned film The Black Pirate – which, according to Jeanne, was made with a three-colour system33 – was an example of how natural colour should not be used in film. However, this did not mean that natural colour in film could not be used in an artistic way. In France, investigations were going on, trying to develop (superior) naturalcolour systems. As an example, Jeanne mentioned the screening of two films made with a version of the Keller-Dorian system at the Studio des Ursulines, shown by an engineer named Richard, probably Abel-Pierre ­Richard, the technical director of the Keller-Dorian colour-film firm at the time.34 Jeanne was struck by these films because, even though they were made as trials, they ­actually: | 229 presented a new interest [...] the plain play of colours and their report with each other.35 He continued that this abstraction of colours, close to the ‘cinéma pur’, was probably not what the ‘firmes américaines’ were thinking of when using natural colours in their films. In conclusion, Jeanne explained that colour film should not copy nature in the most realistic way, but strengthen the cinema eye so different from our biological eye, deforming and interpreting reality, and representing dreams and fantasies. Interestingly, Jeanne’s article called ‘La Controverse de la couleur’ was printed on the same page as Brunius’s very brief ‘Pour le noir et blanc’, followed by the list of people that supported the Ligue, one of which was René Jeanne. So, even though his ideas on natural-colour film were more nuanced than Brunius’s, he still signed up for a cinema in black and white. The following day, 16 February 1927, another short piece called ‘Pour le noir et blanc’ appeared in the communist newspaper L’Humanité.36 The text announced Brunius’s attempt to start his Ligue du noir et blanc and laid out the arguments used. The anonymous author also declared that, although he agreed with Brunius on the dangers of colour in cinema the way it was being used, he also saw enormous potential for new and original creations of cinéma pur with the help of natural-colour techniques. One month later, 26 March 1927, a longer and more elaborate article on the topic of colour and the Ligue du noir et blanc appeared in the same newspaper. This was signed by Léon Moussinac.37 Moussinac was a writer, journalist, historian, and film critic. He was a good friend of Louis Delluc, an active member of the Ciné Club de France, and he wrote a weekly film essay for L’Humanité.38 Interestingly, in

L a L i g ue d u N oir et Blanc

1923, Moussinac had already written in favour of natural-colour film, with an article called ‘Technique commande’ published in La Gazette des sept arts. By then, the journal was still led by Canudo, who himself announced ‘le mouvement en couleur’ as the eighth art in 1920.39 Léon Moussinac started his 1927 essay declaring The Black Pirate a complete failure, if this was all there was to cinema in natural colour, he would immediately support Brunius’s Ligue du noir et blanc. However, Moussinac thought the problem was more complicated than just a matter of black and white, colour, and The Black Pirate. In his opinion cinema was not only what was shown in the theatres, but also the so-called cinéma pur, or, in his words, cinéma intégral (‘integral cinema’), and cinéma absolu (‘absolute cinema’),

230 |

Or, cinematographic forms that should realise a harmonious sequence of images, able to awaken certain feelings or sentiments that would be incomplete in black-and-white: they have to appeal to colour in every necessity.40 As an example, he mentioned Leopold Survage and his ideas and designs for films called Rythmes colorés from 1914.41 Furthermore, he referred to scientists, such as the French psychologist Louis Favre, who studied the idea of colour movement. Favre indeed published a book on colour movement and colour music in 1927, building on his presentation at the Collège de France, attended and referred to by Léon Moussinac.42 Following Favre, Moussinac brought up the idea that, if artists were allowed to experiment with naturalcolour film, exciting things might happen. However, artists did not have the means or the technology to do so. All that, Moussinac explained, belonged to capitalism, which, of course, only speculated on profit. Others, too, suggested similar ideas about cinéma pur in colour, for example, René-Guy Grand, in his published article called ‘Controverse de la Couleur’ in Cinéa, Ciné pour tous of 1 April 1927. Another example is filmmaker Henry Fescourt’s article ‘Expériences’ in Cinégraphie, in which he explained he was dreaming of colour music, as ‘a play between reds, mauves, purples, yellows, blues, that passed in rhythmical evolutions, by all chromatisms of multiple intensities growing and shrinking’.43 However, nowadays, these ‘other’ sounds on natural colour and film art are far less known than Brunius’s black-and-white doctrine.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

CONCLUSION The 1926–1927 discourse on black-and-white and art cinema in France as it developed from the Ligue du noir et blanc into a broader debate was more nuanced then we tend to remember. The question remains, however, why do we remember this period mainly for the idea that film art should be in black and white? Taking into consideration all the parameters involved, this question is almost impossible to answer, but I will provide some hypothetical suggestions that might be a starting point for such an answer. First, there is the idea of chromophobia as described by David Batchelor in his book of that title44; the fear of colour that supposedly dominates the ideas and uses of colour in Western culture.45 The Ligue du noir et blanc can be seen as part of this attitude. However, the very existence of a counter-discourse, explaining that moving colour could be the next step in pure cinema, undermines Batchelor’s argument that colour was only seen as vulgar and low. Still, chromophobia might partly have been the reason why the discourse on black and white as a premise for art cinema has been remembered more than that on moving colour as pure cinema. Another explanation might be the figure of Jean Mitry, one of the early supporters of Brunius’s Ligue. As we now know, he became a person of great influence on film culture and historiography, in France and beyond, after World War II. In fact, Mitry did not change his mind on colour film in his later years. For example, in the third part of his Histoire de cinéma (1923–1930) published in 1973, he writes the following about colour in the period 1923–1930: The toll of the Sea, produced in 1923 [...], and most of all The black pirate, directed by Albert Parker with Douglas Fairbanks in 1925, had enough technological quality, but as far as the artistic was concerned, the results were very little satisfactory.46 After reviewing all kinds of colour systems, French as well as foreign, he ends with Technicolor III: The ‘vulgarity’ of the colours was even more accentuated, even if their range was bigger. At least the process was valuable for animation films and for films that were not meant to be realist. Walt Disney was one of the first who used it, effectively in Flowers and Trees and in the ‘Silly Symphonies’ that followed.47 Mitry, then, might have been an important factor in the survival of the ‘Brunius’ part of the 1920s discourse on film art, black and white, and ‘natural

L a L i g ue d u N oir et Blanc

| 231

232 |

colour’. It would be interesting to investigate the subsequent careers of more Ligue members and see if and how they wrote about colour, black-and-white, and film art. That would inform us on their possible influences on how the discourse on black-and-white, natural-colour, and film art developed into the one we know. Finally, the members of the Ligue might not have considered the counterdiscourse as very different from their opinions on art cinema. The idea that natural-colour film needed its own aesthetic in order to become art cinema might have been perceived as a further development of the same argument. This would explain why René Jeanne’s text was printed as part of the debate started by the Ligue in Cinéa-Ciné pour tous. Besides, it would clarify why René Jeanne wrote this text and, at the same time, supported the Ligue. Although to us this seems contradictory, it might have been very logical to the members of the Ligue. However, this does not explain why the debate was not remembered with all its nuances. One conclusion remains crystal-clear: our recall of the 1920s debate on film and colour is selective, probably as a result of discourses and practices on art cinema and black and white of later periods. This means that, in addition to the fact that restoration and duplication of canonical titles took the colour out of our physical film heritage, the 1920s theories on the artistic potential of natural-colour films or moving colours also disappeared from our memory and historiography of film.

NOTES 1

This article is based on archival research that was done within the framework of the Leverhulme-funded research project ‘Colour in the 1920s, Cinema and its Intermedial Context’. I would like to thank Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe for making this possible.

2

Nico de Klerk and Daan Hertogs, Disorderly Order (Amsterdam: Stichting Neder­ lands Filmmuseum, 1996), 18. Remarkably, Ledoux allowed Noël Desmet to experiment with the restauration of tinted and toned films already during the 1980s.

3

Klerk and Hertogs, Disorderly Order, 19.

4

Bregt Lameris, ‘Colourful Projections: Bauhaus Farbenlichtspiele and Their Various Reconstructions’, in At the Borders of (Film) History. Archaeology, Temporality, Theories (2015).

5

Bernard Brunius, ‘Plaidoyer pour le noir et blanc’. Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (15 September 1926): 21.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

6

Brunius, ‘Plaidoyer’, 22.

7

Brunius, ‘Pour le noir et blanc’, Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (15 January 1927).

8

Richard Abel, French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/anthology, 1907–1939, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 342; and Edmond Gréville, Trente-Cinq Ans Dans La Jungle Du Cinéma (Lyon: Institut Lumière, 1995), 56.

9

Patrick Olmeta, La Cinémathèque française: De 1936 à nos jours (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000), 45.

10 Christophe Gauthier, La passion du cinéma: cinéphiles, ciné-clubs et salles spécialisées à Paris de 1920 à 1929 (École nationale des chartes, 1999), 131–132. 11 Gréville, Trente-Cinq Ans. 12 Isabelle Marinone, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma “Humain […]”‘ 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze. Revue de l’association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma 43 (June 2004): 5–14. 13 Brunius, ‘Pour le noir et blanc,’ Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (15 February 1927). 14 Tinting and toning appears to have been part of Brunius conception of black and white. This becomes particularly clear when he explains that, to him, nature was monochrome. For example, to him, green landscapes were part of what he called ‘uncoloured’. This shows that, to Brunius, the monochrome was part of the aesthetics of black and white, which leads to the conclusion that tinted and toned films were also included in what he called black and white. So, even though Brunius wrote that he was pleading for cinema in black and white, he was actually pleading against polychromatic ‘natural colour’ films. This explains why people such as René Clair signed up for the Ligue, despite the fact that he made beautifully tinted and toned films such as La proie du vent (1927). Other examples include Alberto Cavalcanti and Robert Mallet-Stevens, who collaborated on the film L’Inhumaine (1924), which has been rediscovered for its colours in tints and tones. The film was recently restored with ‘original’ tinting and toning by Lobster film. For more information on the restoration and the reconstruction of the colours, see the website: ‘L’Inhumaine.’ http://linhumaine.com/ (Accessed January 12 2016). 15 J.-L. Croze, ‘Cinéma Sur Ecran – Noir et blanc contre couleurs,’ Comoedia (2 February 1927). 16 Jean Dréville, ‘Metropolis’, Cinégraphie (15 November 1927): 51–52. 17 Brunius, ‘Plaidoyer’, 21. 18 Brunius, ‘Plaidoyer’, 21. 19 Troland Diaries, 11 March 1926, George Eastman Museum. 20 ‘Informations’, Science et industries photographiques (1 June 1926): 62. 21 Edwin and Alza Schallert, ‘Hollywood High Lights’, Picture-Play Magazine (December 1925): 68; ‘Yo, Ho, and a Bottle of Rum!’ Picture-Play Magazine (February 1926): 16; ‘Doug’s Colorful Opus’, Motion Picture News (20 March 1926): 238; Sally

L a L i g ue d u N oir et Blanc

| 233

Benson, ‘The Screen in Review’, Picture-Play Magazine (June 1926): 54–55. 22 ‘Colorful hope’, Motion Picture News (20 February 1926): 894. 23 Sara Redway, ‘About Pirates and Pictures’, Motion Picture Magazine (June 1926): 27, 94, and 97. 24 Benson, ‘The Screen in Review’, 54–55. 25 ‘Newspaper Opinions on New Pictures’, Motion Picture News (3 April 1926): 1528. 26 ‘“Black Pirate” – London’ (1926): 3. 27 ‘L’activité cinégraphique’, Cinea – Ciné pour tous (1 April 1926): 1. In the same issue of Cinéa, we can read that Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were to arrive in Paris on 10 April 1926. It is unclear to what extend they were there to promote Technicolor. 28 Edward Epardaud, ‘Le pirate noir’, Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (1 October 1926). 29 Epardaud, ‘Pirate noir’. 30 Of course, the fact that, in France, Douglas Fairbanks explains what Albert Parker

234 |

was explaining in the US was related to advertisement strategies. Fairbanks was a celebrity in France and the film was entirely connected to him, not to its director. 31 Douglas Fairbanks, ‘Piraterie en couleurs’, Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (1 February 1927): 10. 32 Brunius, ‘Pour le noir et blanc’, 14. 33 Again, it becomes clear that there was confusion about this film and its colours. 34 François Ede, ‘The Keller-Dorian Process and Lenticular Film: An Episode in the History of Film Color’, 1895 Special Issue (2014): 190. 35 René Jeanne, ‘La controverse de la couleur’, Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (15 January 1927): 27. 36 L’Humanité, ‘Pour le noir et le blanc’ (1927): 4. 37 It is very likely the anonymous author was Léon Moussinac. 38 ‘Léon Moussinac, homme de passions, intellectuel communiste’, L’Humanité, (2016). 39 Odile Crépin-Etaix, ‘Le cinéma, et après? Encore du cinéma’, in Le cinéma et après?, edited by Maxime Scheinfeigel (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010). 40 Léon Moussinac, ‘Noir et blanc’, L’Humanité (26 March 1927): 4. 41 See, for examples: http://www.moma.org/collection/artists/5735. 42 Louis Favre, La Musique des couleurs et le cinema (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1927). 43 Henri Fescourt, ‘Expériences’, Cinégraphie 4 (December 1927): 60. 44 David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion, 2000). 45 Batchelor, Chromophobia. 46 Jean Mitry, Histoire de cinéma muet. 3 (1923–1930) (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973), 497. 47 Mitry, Histoire, 478.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Bregt Lameris has a PhD in Media and Culture Studies (Utrecht University, Netherlands), and an MA in Cinema and Theatre Studies (Radboud University, Netherlands). Other research interests include the history of film archiving, film historiography, film colours (technology and aesthetics), medical images, and the representation of madness. She recently published her monograph Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography with Amsterdam University Press in 2017. Bregt Lameris has also worked as a Research Associate for the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts’. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher for the ERC advanced grant project FilmColors at the University of Zürich.

| 235

L a L i g ue d u N oir et Blanc

CHAPTER 12

A Material-Based Approach to the Digitization of Early Film Colours Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp, David Pfluger

G. Fossati, V. Jackson, B. Lameris, E. Rongen-Kaynakçi, S. Street, J. Yumibe, The Colour Fantastic. Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema. Amsterdam University Press, 2018 DOI 10.5117/9789462983014/CH12

ABSTRACT While the digitization of archival films has been practiced for more than a decade, there is still a lack of academic rigour in this field, both on a scientific as well as on an interdisciplinary level. Therefore, we are in need of a better understanding of basic principles, both technological and aesthetic, that guide the many decisions taken throughout the process. This paper presents three interconnected research projects that investigate these topics with a comprehensive approach. Based on thorough analyses of the technology, physics, and aesthetics of film colours, this material-based approach connects these diverse disciplines with the aim to translate the appearance of analogue film colours into the digital domain. k e y wo r ds

film, colours, aesthetics, technology, digital, restoration

| 237

While the digitization of archival films has been practiced for more than a decade, there is still a lack of academic rigour in this field, both on a scientific as well as on an interdisciplinary level. In the specific case of translating early colours into the digital domain, curators and service providers have found practical solutions to the many related obstacles and diverse requirements. However, we are in need of a better understanding of basic principles, both technological and aesthetic, that guide the many decisions to be taken along the process. This paper presents three interconnected research projects that investigate these topics. In her recent text The Archival Life of Early Color Films, Giovanna Fossati writes with regard to the digitization of tinted material:

238 |

As not many laboratories are working on the ‘digital Desmet’ method, there is still very limited experience and the results are not yet as successful as in the case of the photochemical method. In particular, the reproduction of the original tints is not always accurate, while the reproduction of the black and whites, instead of remaining neutral, acquires an undesired tint.1 One of the main causes of this problem is the complexity of the task. Research in this field has to consider a wide array of disciplinary approaches, from chemistry, physics, and IT, to aesthetic and historical aspects, and not the least, psychophysical questions of colour perception and colour appearance. In the analogue film-restoration era, there have been numerous solid approaches to combine practices with academic research, restoration ethics, and curatorial considerations. From the 1980s, there has been the so-called Italian Scuola Bolognese2; in the Netherlands, there is the master programme ‘Heritage Studies: Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image’, closely connected to EYE Filmmuseum; and in the US, various master programmes at NYU and UCLA have been established as well as the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation, in collaboration with the University of Rochester. In archival practices, we can identify several film laboratories and audiovisual archives that helped to invent ingenious approaches to the problem of transferring early film colours to modern film stocks, including applying historical techniques of tinting and toning.3 The properties of modern chromogenic stocks and their material supports, which differed considerably from the historical nitrate film, have continued to pose severe limitations.4 Digital tools, in contrast, are a relatively recent development, and still poorly understood, not in the least because many commercial tools available to the industry are black-box operations. This paper gives an overview of three research projects: ‘Timeline of His-

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

torical Film Colors’, ‘DIASTOR’, and ‘ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors’, all of which are located at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich and managed by Barbara Flueckiger as principal investigator. The common denominator of these projects has been the search for an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the gap between a humanities-based investigation of historical technologies and aesthetics of analogue and digital film on the one hand, and applied technological research in IT, combined with material science and optics on the other hand. Over the course of these projects, the research team(s) established a material-based approach to the digitization and reconstruction of (early) historical film colours. This approach combines a deep investigation of the material properties of the films with contextual research on the films’ aesthetics. In addition, it explores the principles of the digitization chain, from scanning to post-processing, colour grading, and projection. As a general objective, the approach aims to build a bridge between the different aspects by integrating them in the digitization and restoration workflow to the material characteristics of the film element(s).

‘TIMELINE OF HISTORICAL FILM COLORS’, A COMPREHENSIVE WEB RESOURCE In the framework of the research project ‘Film History Re-mastered’ (20112013), Barbara Flueckiger and Franziska Heller investigated the changing perception of film history as a result of the digitization of archival films. One of the main topics of this project was the change of film aesthetics in regard to the rendition of colours, which led to the development of the ‘Timeline of Historical Colors’. Early film colour research is based on technical handbooks, including those on colour photography from even before the advent of film.5 This line of investigation was pursued throughout the twentieth century, with the publications Colour Cinematography6 and A History of Motion Picture Color Technology7 widely regarded as the most important works. While these overviews are essential in providing solid knowledge about the chemical, mechanical, and optical principles in operation, they do not discuss the aesthetic or narrative application of these processes in film or media production, nor their contemporary reception. By contrast, a growing number of books in recent years have focussed on semantic, narrative, and aesthetic features of colour in film.8 With some notable exceptions of texts that investigate historical developments,9 such as silent film, early Technicolor, or colours in British or Italian film production, these texts only rarely build a connection to technology. When they do, they hardly explore the technical foundations of the colours scientifically; they instead

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

| 239

240 |

rely entirely on written sources, and are located within a ‘text-based’, bottomup, analytical approach. Predominantly after the famous 1978 Brighton, UK International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) Congress, academic interest grew to explore uncharted film archival collections. The quest focussed most notably on early film colours, eventually leading to the 1995 workshop on colour in silent cinema held in Amsterdam and to an increase in colour restorations.10 Analogue techniques of film colour restoration were the topic of the seminal publication by Paul Read and Mark-Paul Meyer.11 In summary, there is a wealth of publications, but it is the interconnectedness of the different approaches to the investigation of (early) film colours that has never been explored. This insight led to the development of the ‘Timeline of Historical Film Colors’ by Barbara Flueckiger in 2011. During two research visits at Harvard University, she started to collect written sources from the different fields of study relevant to the topic. From the inception of the project, she aimed to integrate pictorial representations of the various film colour aesthetics by taking photographs of historical films in audiovisual archives. To this end, she has developed a modular, calibrated camera setup that allows her to capture the images on an inspection bench at a high resolution – currently 50 MP with a Canon EOS 5Ds R – and high dynamic range (HDR).12 Firstly, these images give the user of the web resource an immediate sensorial impression of the colour appearance of the films as material objects. Secondly, they provide important information about each of the depicted film colour’s characteristics, most importantly about those parts of the film that are not seen in projection, such as frame lines, the perforation area including edge codes, foot numbers, and typical colourings, damages, or contaminations. Various illumination techniques have been applied to render the film’s material properties, including its three-dimensional information, reflection, and texture. Raking light, for instance, produces images that show the surface properties including dust, scratches, dirt, silver mirroring, and blemishes. A range of specific information about dyeing techniques and the hues of individual dyes or pigments become visible at splices and in nonimage parts where leaking dyes can be identified individually. Photomicrographs with up to 20x magnification and super-macro photographs give detailed information about the small-scale variations of the film colours. Furthermore, the standardized procedure enables the comparison of different prints of the same film in various archives. First published online in 2012 as a chronological overview, the ‘Timeline of Historical Film Colours’ was redeveloped in 2013 to serve as a Digital Humanities platform that allows external contributors to upload texts and images directly. As of 2018, it contains over 9500 photographs, more than one

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

thousand original papers and secondary sources – accessible through a pop-up reader – such as patents, selected analyses, firsthand accounts of contemporary reception, restoration case studies, filmographies, links, and downloads, and a section on edge codes and identification of colour-film stock, plus colorimetric measurements.

‘DIASTOR – BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN ANALOGUE FILM HISTORY AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY’ As a result of insights gathered in previous projects, ‘DIASTOR’, an applied research project, was conceived to focus on several identified research gaps. Even before ‘Film History Re-mastered’, the earlier applied research project ‘AFRESA’ focussed on technical questions of film restoration and aimed to develop a mobile scanner unit for middle-level requirements to produce digital access elements in archives. With their background in digital image processing, physical chemistry, and scientific photography, collaborative partner Image and Media Lab (now Digital Humanities Lab) at the University of Basel, built on a long history of basic and applied research on the digitization of photographic colours with a special emphasis on the reconstruction of faded chromogenic stocks.13 ‘AFRESA’ therefore aimed to implement these insights into the digitization of moving images. The project instantly made clear that, firstly and not so surprisingly, film scanning is the most crucial step in the digitization of archival film, and, secondly, that there is a thorough lack of interdisciplinary research into unresolved problems of practice and technology. In general, most of the film scanners were never developed to match the requirements of archival film. Furthermore, they were and are severely limited in their scope to adjust to a variety of different colour-film stocks. Subsequently, ‘DIASTOR’ set out to investigate these limitations by connecting various players in film preservation, digitization, and IT research from the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and advanced research in visual computing from the Disney Research Lab. Service providers14 were at the core of the project, both by providing their technical infrastructure and by implementing the results. They included the only film laboratory still operating in Switzerland, Egli Film, which soon thereafter was taken over to form cinegrell postproduction; engineering companies, such as Sondor Willi Hungerbühler, and – perhaps most importantly – audiovisual archives; the Cinémathèque suisse and SRF Swiss Radio and Television, which were asked to identify and express their special needs. Several case studies – applied-digitization and restoration projects – were provided not only by DIASTOR’s partner archives, but also by external archives,

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

| 241

such as Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, EYE Filmmuseum, the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation in Wiesbaden, and Harvard Film Archive. Three of these case studies focussed on early film colours – mainly tinting, and, to a lesser degree, toning. Each of these case studies was designed to target a principal practical question:

242 |

– Der Märchenwald – Ein Schattenspiel (provided by the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek) was used for the reconstruction of tinting with a newly invented workflow, which will be presented and discussed in a later section of this paper, entitled ‘Colour and Style Transfer’; – The colour analysis for the digital restoration of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari was used for the documentation, appearance, and chemico-physical measurement of tinting and toning in five different prints;15 – The digital Desmet study executed on the tinted title Aan de kust van Istrië [On Istria’s coast] aimed to investigate the influence of a laboratory environment on scanning and to devise an environment-independent ‘recipe’ for scanning and post-processing films with early applied colours. Each of the applied-colour schemes had special characteristics that further informed the research questions. While, as a silhouette film, Märchenwald was very particular regarding the high-contrast characteristics with deep blacks that often pose a problem to colour grading, Aan de kust van Istrië had many mid-tones that show the interaction of the tinting dyes with the blacks and greys of the silver image. The colour analysis for Caligari was a particularly interesting case study because the existence of five differently tinted and toned elements required extensive research into the colour aesthetics and the genealogy of the prints. Each of these case studies necessitated an individual approach embedded in overall principles according to the three-pillar model discussed in a recent publication of the DIASTOR team:16 1. Photographic documentation, plus analysis of dyes or colour compounds; 2. Research into stability and decay models of dyes and colour compounds; 3. Film historical and aesthetic analyses; study of written historical sources. The first pillar makes extensive use of the photographic documentation elaborated for the ‘Timeline of Historical Film Colors’. It soon became clear that a close analysis of colour appearance is paramount to understanding the problems in scanning and reconstructing early applied colours. Colour appearance means the interaction of matter with light under certain viewing conditions.17

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

12.1: Influence of condensed (left) vs. diffuse light on contrast rendering: the Callier effect.

| 243 12.2: Diffuse (left) versus collimated (right) illumination.

It includes studies of colour perception in the human visual system, physical properties of spectral characteristics of dyes and colour compounds, and studies of different types of illumination.18 The appearance of tinting and toning in projection is highly affected by the apparatus, the brightness of the source of illumination, its colour temperature and spectral power distribution, the distance to the screen, and the reflection of the screen. As mentioned in the Caligari paper, there is a significant difference between collimated – that is, directed illumination as applied in projection – and diffuse light sources, especially in the domain of tinted and toned films, which contain silver grains that scatter the incidental light. As a result of the Callier effect19 produced by collimated illumination, tinting and toning appear to have higher contrast,

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

look crispier, and small-scale detail including scratches and dirt become more visible.20

244 |

The influence of the Callier effect on the rendition of tinting hues is highly unpredictable and needs further investigation. While cinema projectors operate with collimated light sources, most inspection situations in film labs, archives, and colour grading suites rely on diffuse illumination. It has to be noted that scanners operate with diffuse light as well. To analyse the dyes or colour compounds, we resorted to a variety of methods as discussed in the Caligari paper. For tinting or toning only, colorimetric measurements with the spectrophotometer are sufficient to devise the spectral characteristics of dyes or colour compounds and to identify them based on reference books. Tinting–toning combinations may require additional methods. One colourimetric method that was used in DIASTOR extensively and successfully was the ‘Principal Component Analysis’, according to Ohta.21

12.3: A tinted nitrate print of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (GER 1919, Robert Wiene). Copyright: Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, Wiesbaden. Photograph by Barbara Flueckiger. Source: Archivo Nacional de la Imagen – Sodre, Montevideo/ Cineteca di Bologna.

This method allowed for the identification of the spectral characteristics of single dyes in film stocks that apply several dyes, such as tinting–toning combinations or more recent chromogenic stocks. Applied colours are often unstable and it is difficult to identify the decay of the dyes because their original hues are unknown. For instance, in the two Caligari prints from South American archives, the nocturnal scenes were tinted green while they were blue in other prints, more in tune with established colour codes of the time. Often, however, the decay affects only part of the images, mainly the frame area that used to be exposed to the heat of the projector. Individual sections of film tinted in the same hue may show variations due to the printing and dying process. Before the advent of the mechanical control of the printing lights, the positives had to be developed in patches according to their density and were subsequently dyed, thereby producing slight variations, probably due to the concentrations of dye baths.22 For pillar three – film-historical and aesthetic analyses and study of written historical sources – we could resort to the ‘Timeline of Historical Film Colors’. Either the necessary information was readily available or we could add external sources by visiting archives or by papers already gathered but not yet included in the ‘Timeline’. Therefore, it acted both as a resource, but also as a platform to share insights elaborated within the project. These are two of the main functions of this Digital Humanities platform and will become more extended in the research project ‘ERC Advanced Grant FilmColors’, which will be the topic of the last section of this paper.

MATERIAL–SCANNER INTERACTION To understand basic principles of material–scanner interaction, the ­DIASTOR team developed and executed a scanner study that included seven professional high-end scanners.23 In this study the team scanned a variety of seven different colour film stocks to explore the optical and mechanical constraints of the scanners.24 A comprehensive account of the scanner study and its results will remain outside of the scope of this paper, but a detailed report has been written and is currently available. The present paper rather aims to summarize some basic principles by referring to previous work and to analyse the specific case of scanning early applied colours in more detail. As Flueckiger notes elsewhere, scanning is a reduction process, governed by selection principles, or, to put it differently: in essence, digitization is an extraction of discrete data from a continuum of physical properties of the outside world.25 In his 1968 seminal study of digitization in Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman discusses the concept in regards to earlier meas-

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

| 245

246 |

urement methods that try to extract data in a similar fashion, such as a thermometer. While temperatures are continuous phenomena, their digital measurement is based on a numerical order system and converts the physical and sensorial dimension into this system by assigning arbitrary and discrete numbers to it according to a specified protocol. The same principle is at the foundation of scanning. Continuous colour (or grey) tones are mapped into a discrete RGB space by a combination of two processes: sampling and quantization. Sampling means the extraction of values from a spatiotemporal entity by filtering this entity into small units: pixels in the spatial domain and discrete frames in the temporal domain. Quantization describes the assignment of binary values to the discrete data extracted in the sampling process. This assignment of binary values is defined by a reference system such as a colour space and their organization within a given scale, for instance, 16bit linear per channel RGB. By definition, all data outside this system is lost. It is important to note that the first step – sampling – is essentially defined by optical and, to a lesser degree, mechanical operations of the extraction system, in this case, the scanner. Therefore, it is important to look into the interaction between the scanner and the film material on a physical basis. Early on, Rudolf Gschwind and Franziska Frey started to highlight some fundamental problems of this interaction, displayed in figure 12.4.26

12.4: Material–scanner interaction for chromogenic negatives. Illustration by Franziska Frey and Rudolf Gschwind.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Each of the vertical bars and dotted lines indicate the narrow band characteristics of the scanners’ sensors. Ideally, the scanners’ sensitivity would match the absorbance maximum of each individual dye when scanning negatives or faded chromogenic stock. Individual scanners may have slightly different properties, but, in essence, they have fixed spectral sensitivities that may or may not comply with the spectral characteristics of the film stock to be scanned. Especially in the domain of early applied colours, we may be confronted with unusual properties of dyes and colour compounds. In the course of the preliminary scanner studies performed during the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam in 2013, it became obvious that some of the scanners were not able to capture the blue tinting at all. They were, as we were told by one of the manufacturers, ‘colour blind’. While it was difficult or even entirely impossible to obtain information about the scanner sensor’s and the illuminant’s properties, we could tackle part of the problem by investigating the film stock. This task was executed by Giorgio Trumpy, an associate senior researcher in DIASTOR, employed at the University of Basel at the time. Trumpy measured the blue tinting on a bench spectrophotometer SHIMADZU UV-1800, which delivered the result shown in fig. 12.5. The three vertical bars – red, green, and blue – indicate typical characteristics of narrow-band illumination. As a result of the mismatch between the

12.5: Measurement of the blue tinting with the bench spectrophotometer Shimadzu UV 1800 by Giorgio Trumpy, the blue, green, red lines indicate narrow band LEDs of a typical scanner.

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

| 247

248 |

physical properties of the scanner and the spectral absorbance of the blue dye with a peak between the green and the red line, the scanner shows difficulties to capture this specific blue hue. While it may seem that this mismatch is an exception due to the particularities of this specific dye, similar effects occurred in all the other instances in which we scanned tinted materials. In the case study Aan de kust van Istrië, we scanned the same material on an Oxberry scanner and on an ARRISCAN at Haghefilm Digitaal in Amsterdam, plus on an ARRISCAN at DIASTOR partner cinegrell postproduction in Zurich, in collaboration with scanner operator Markus Mastaller from ARRI in Munich. The results were similar for the different hues in Märchenwald, compared to the reference images captured with the method described in the section that addresses the ‘Timeline’ (see 12.6-12.9). It has to be noted, however, that the scans on the ARRISCAN were not primarily captured with the aim to render the colours as faithfully as possible, but with the aim to avoid any clipping, i.e. a situation in which the density of one of the channels is not within the tonal range of the selected colour space and bit-depth. Even when trying to match the colours better, the results were far from rendering the hues in their saturated and glowing quality as they appeared on the nitrate print.

12.6-12.9: Der Märchenwald. Ein Schattenspiel: Comparison raw scans (left) with reference photographs (right). Credit: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek. Photographs by Barbara Flueckiger.

As elaborated in more detail in the article ‘“Digital Desmet”: Translating Early Applied Colors’,27 we decided to abandon the concept of scanning as a process to capture the appearance of the film completely and instead devised a method that we termed ‘Digital Desmet Plus’, a strategy that aimed to capture each RGB channel individually by capturing the maximum amount of information while, at the same time, preventing any clipping in the blackand-white range. In accordance with the thoughts about the principles of the scanner–material interaction mentioned above, this strategy provided the most flexibility for colour grading. Most importantly, the DIASTOR scanner study has shown that there is currently no single scanner on the market that is able to cover the full spectrum of requirements defined by a range of historical film colours. Ideally, scanners should offer much more flexibility; none of them, for instance, operates with collimated light, which could be essential for recreating the look of tinted or toned film in projection. Additionally, a modular scanner system, which allows the adjustment of sensor, optical system, and illumination, would be of great use to capture these early films. Most scanners are not able to record the full film width and thus they cut off important metadata present in the non-frame portions of the film. Once the film print is decayed or lost, these metadata will be lost forever, and, with the loss of metadata, the film print’s history will become more obscure to future researchers and archivists.28 As discussed elsewhere,29 we should envisage a scanning process that captures the films’ material properties beyond the reduction to one single reading of the image plane with reference to the imago–struttura (‘image–structure’) dichotomy proposed by Cesare Brandi.30 Traditional scans flatten the threedimensional structure of a film, its emulsion, and support into a two-dimensional representation. New technologies – including so-called computational photography – are evolving in other fields of film production. They combine a multitude of lighting situations with varying camera angles, focus planes, and/or 3D scans to form a comprehensive representation of scenes or objects. Future film scanning technologies should make use of these tools to register the full colour range with a multispectral approach and to capture the threedimensional layers of the film as a material object.31

COLOUR AND STYLE TRANSFER When we understand scanning primarily as the gathering of information, we have to develop a complementary strategy that aims to reconstruct the appearance of a film. We called this approach the information-versus-appearance model. As noted in the section that addresses the ‘Timeline’, the documenta-

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

| 249

250 |

tion of the colour appearance of a film’s material manifestation necessitates a calibrated camera setup that allows for the adjustment of every single component to render the visual impression of the film as closely as possible. Even such a sophisticated work flow is still confined to several constraints. First of all, the reference object, the individual print, is rarely devoid of any flaws and it is not necessarily representative of the artwork’s integrity. It may be faded or damaged; it may be incomplete or altered; it may contain material from different sources; and we often do not know its origin or history. The second, perhaps more important question, refers to the source material(s) that serve(s) as object(s) of reference(s). While the question of the source material has been the topic of a long-standing debate in film restoration,32 digital tools add another level of complexity to these questions. The two-step process used in analogue Desmet33 is a predecessor of a vast array of procedures to combine elements from different sources. Due to restrictions of space in this paper, we omit the complex problem of the ‘original’34 as well as the question of a film’s philological reconstruction. However, we can refer to the difference between variants, different instances of the film intended at the time of film production, and versions, historically altered textual instances of a film. This investigation is necessary to devise the colour scheme of the digitized element, and it includes a comprehensive documentation of the origin and the genealogy of all the elements available. While the philological reconstruction of the text may define the recourse to a variety of variants and versions of a specific film, including written sources, such as censorship cards or intertitles with a focus on textual completeness, the aesthetic appearance and the colour scheme might need to go beyond the field of a single film. We have to consider the technologies and style of the cultural context, the material appearance of a specific film stock produced in a certain period and/or the diachronic style of a film director, a production company, or a cinematographer who was instrumental to create a cinematographic work of art. This is especially the case when we have to assume that the surviving material manifestations of a film do not represent the historical authenticity of a film’s aesthetics. As a result, it is important to note that there is not a single reference, but a multitude of references, or a field of references, that should be considered when we aim to emulate a film’s appearance. The technological, cultural, and aesthetic contextualization remains at the core of the basic idea behind the ‘Timeline of Historical Film Colors’. The documented film prints and manuals by Eastman, Pathé, and Agfa,35 plus the primary- and secondary-source papers, should provide a variety of elements to support the decision process. With regard to early applied colours, we are often confronted with material objects in black and white that serve as the material basis for the scanning process such as the camera negative, and we need to draw information about

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

the applied hues from the extended research into the historic style and the documentation of other surviving elements, a process that includes all the three pillars mentioned in the previous section. Once the decision process has been established and all the source materials have been investigated and measured colourimetrically, this collection of elements has to be documented photographically to translate the necessary references into the digital domain. As mentioned above, colour appearance is tied to the interaction of matter with light and to the viewing conditions. Therefore, the documentation of the film material requires careful consideration of the illuminants and of other parameters of the work flow. If, for instance, the photos are only slightly overexposed, the characteristics of tinted film might be lost and the saturation of the brighter, tinted areas appears attenuated and uneven. | 251 12.10 & 12.11: Slight overexposure (< 1EV) of the lime-tinted frames from Aan de kust van Istrië (IT, 1910[?]) (top), correct exposure (bottom). Credit: EYE Filmmuseum. Photographs by Barbara Flueckiger.

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

12.12 & 12.13: RestoGUI stage 1 (top) and stage 2 (bottom). Screenshots by Simone Croci.

252 |

Exposure needs to be controlled at all times by a histogram. In certain cases of densely tinted and toned films, a series of exposures has to be combined into an HDR image. To consider the effect of collimated light and of carbon-arc projection lights, additional measures need to be taken, part of which need further development. The spectral-power distribution of carbon arcs is documented in several papers.36 An often-overlooked aspect of colour appearance is texture. Small-scale variations of colour distribution on the film’s surface are instrumental for aesthetic and affective appreciation of the artwork. These dimensions are especially important in the domain of early applied colours. There is a particular interaction between the silver image – or, in the case of metallic or mordant toning of the corresponding distribution of pigments or dyes, respectively – and the applied dyes in tinting, hand or stencil colouring. Even a slight reduction of the grain structure and the covariations of colour distribution can alter the colour impression considerably. Digital de-graining and re-graining tools hardly ever consider the specific influence of texture on colour appearance. Debayering37 of digital files captured on scanners with Bayer-sensors also

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

destroys the grain structure, unless the resolution is very high and greatly surpasses the resolution of film.38 Based on our insights, DIASTOR partners Disney Research Zurich and the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich developed a tool for the colour and style transfer, called RestoGUI.39 It allows the colour grader to semi-automatically extract and apply colour values from a reference image, captured according to the considerations described above, onto the information contained in the scanned image. The RestoGUI is a feature-based approach that selects several regions of interest in the source image and applies the colour values (and texture) to a target image. The automatic selections can be adjusted manually. After a first stage of colour and style transfer, a ‘difference’ image shows the necessary adjustments, which can then be applied manually. In addition, the RestoGUI allows the export of a lookup table [LUT] in a specific format. Since we worked with a Baselight colour-grading interface at cinegrell postproduction, we asked the IT specialists to deliver the LUT in the corresponding f­ ormat. The advantage of this material-based approach proposed here is directly connected to two of the most important desiderata of restoration ethics, namely transparency and documentation. Each of the steps is transparent by being inter-subjectively accessible and plausible, and each of the steps is also well-documented and standardized, from the careful documentation of the material objects used for the digitization processed, to each step in the work flow.

OUTLOOK: ‘ERC ADVANCED GRANT FILMCOLORS’, DEVELOPING A MULTIDISCIPLINARY DIGITAL HUMANITIES APPROACH In 2015, Barbara Flueckiger was awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council for her next project ‘FilmColors. An Interdisciplinary Approach’. This grant allows her to pursue the material-based approach as outlined in this paper further, by combining four areas of research with a team of postdocs, a restorer, a web developer, and several PhD and master students: 1. Computer-assisted analysis of film colour aesthetics on a large group of films; 2. Development of a crowdsourcing tool for the systematic analysis of film colours; 3. Studies of technical papers and physico-chemical analyses of colour films; 4. Implementation of the insights from the previous three points into digitization and restoration projects.

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

| 253

The general objective of this project is the systematic exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and technology to be achieved by integrating all these various aspects. Beyond its interdisciplinary approach, this research project applies research tools in the emerging methodology of Digital Humanities to identify diachronic aesthetic patterns in a large group of films and to uncover their relationship to material properties and technological innovation in Europe, the US, and in Asia. This methodology implements a broad range of digital tools to enable the analysis of cultural artefacts, both by focussing on individual works and by the collaboration of researchers from different fields and from all over the world. A range of analytical and colourimetric methods is devised to deliver a set of parameters to characterize each colour process and film stock. All the results of this study including primary and secondary sources are published on the ‘Timeline of Historical Film Colors’ to enable further research from film scholars, historians, archivists, and scientists. 254 |

NOTES 1

Giovanna Fossati, ‘The Archival Life of Early Color Films. Restoration and Presentation’, in Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, edited by Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna Fossati, and Jonathon Rosen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015), 41.

2

Michele Canosa, ‘Per una teoria del restauro cinematografico’, in Storia del cinema mondiale, Vol. V, edited by Gian Piero Brunetta (Torino: Einaudi, 2001), 1069-1118; Gian Luca Farinelli and Nicola Mazzanti, Il cinema ritrovato. Teoria e metodologia del restauro cinematografico (Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1994); Nicola Mazzanti, ‘The Colours of the Film d’Arte Italiana’, in Tutti i colori del mondo. Il colore nei mass media tra 1900 e 1930, edited by Luciano Berriatúa et al., (Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis, 1998), 141-146; Mazzanti, ‘Footnotes. (For a glossary of film restoration)’, in Restauro, conservazione e distruzione dei film, edited by Luisa Comencini and Matteo Pavesi (Milan: Quaderni Fondazione cineteca italiana, 2001), 23-31; Simone Venturini, Il restauro cinematografico. Principi, teorie, metodi (Udine: Campanotto, 2006); Rossella Catanese, Lacune binarie. Il restauro dei film e le tecnologie digitali (Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2013); and Marie Frappat, ‘“L’école bolonaise” de restauration des films’, in L’avenir de la mémoire. Patrimoine, restauration, réemploi cinématographiques, edited by André Habib and Michel Marie (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013), 39–45.

3

For an overview, see Sean Kelly, ‘A Dyeing Art. Research and Documentation as Means of Authenticity in Applied Colour Restoration’ (MA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2012), 47–48.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

4

In chromogenic film, the colour-forming substances are either present in several layers in the emulsion or added later during film development. The basic principle was discovered in 1911 by Rudolf Fischer and Hans Siegrist. Unfortunately, the dyes used in these processes proved to be unstable, thus lead to colour fading of the films, see Timeline of Historical Film Colors: http://zauberklang.ch/ filmcolors/cat/chromogenic-monopack/

5

Josef Maria Eder, Ausführliches Handbuch der Photographie (Halle: Wilhelm Knapp, 1892); Arthur Freiherr von Hübl, Three-Colour Photography. Three-Colour Printing and the Production of Photographic Pigment Pictures in Natural Colours (London: W.A. Penrose, 1904; E.J. Wall, The History of Three-color Photography (Boston: American Photographic Pub. Co., 1925).

6

Adrian Cornwell-Clyne, Colour Cinematography (Boston: American Photographic Pub. Co., 1937, 1940, 1951).

7

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

8

Wendy Everett, Ed., Questions of Colour in Cinema. From Paintbrush to Pixel (Peter Lang: Oxford, 2007); Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow. Color Design in the 1930s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard, Cinéma et couleur (Paris: M. Houdiard, 2009); Richard Misek, Chromatic Cinema. A History of Screen Color (John Wiley & Sons, 2010); Susanne Marschall, Farbe im Kino (Marburg, Germany: Schüren, 2005); and Christine N. Brinckmann, Color and Empathy (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press); ­Jacques Aumont, Ed., La couleur en cinéma (Milan: Mazzotta, 1995); as well as some issues of the journals Film History (vol. 12, no. 4, 2000 and vol. 21, no. 1, 2009) or 1895 (no. 71, 2014).

9

John Belton, ‘Cinecolor’, Film History, 12.4 (2000): 344–357; Scott Higgins, ‘Technology and Aesthetics. Technicolor Cinematography and Design in the Late 1930s,’ Film History, 11.1 (1999): 55–76; Scott Higgins, ‘Demonstrating Three-Colour Technicolor. Early Three-Colour Aesthetics and Design’, in Film History, 12.4 (2000): 358–383; Joshua Yumibe, ‘Silent Cinema Colour Aesthetics’, in Questions of Colour in Cinema. From Paintbrush to Pixel, edited by Wendy Everett (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007), 41–56; Joshua Yumibe, ‘From Switzerland to Italy and all Around the World. The Josef Joye and Davide Turconi Collections’, in Early Cinema and the “National”, edited by Richard Abel, Giorgio Bertellini, and Rob King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 321–331; Joshua Yumibe, Moving Colors. Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012); Color and the Moving Image. History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive, edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins (New York-London: Routledge, 2012); British Colour Cinema. Practices and Theories, edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Federico Pierotti, La seduzione dello spettro. Storia e cultura del colore nel cinema

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

| 255

(Genova: Le Mani-Microart, 2012); Federico Pierotti, Un’archeologia del colore nel cinema italiano. Dal Technicolor ad Antonioni (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2016); and James Layton and David Pierce, The Dawn of Technicolor, (Rochester, NY: George Eastman Museum, 2015). 10 Daan Hertogs and Nico De Klerk, Eds., Disorderly Order. Colours in Silent Film. The 1995 Amsterdam Workshop (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996); Fossati, 1996; Binder, 2014; Frappat, ‘L’école bolonaise’; Kerstin Parth, Oliver Hanley, and Thomas Ballhausen, Eds., Works in Progress. Digital Film Restoration Within Archives (Vienna: Synema, 2013). 11 Paul Read and Mark-Paul Meyer, Eds., Restoration of Motion Picture Film (Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000). See also Bob Mabberley, Paul Read, and Sonja Snoek, ‘Recording and Reproducing the Original Tints and Tones of Quo Vadis. A Technical Case Study’, in Tutti i colori del mondo. Il colore nei mass media tra 1900 e 1930, edited by Luciano Berriatúa et al., (Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis, 1998),

256 |

151-155; Joao S. de Oliveira, ‘Black-and-White in Colour’, in This Film is Dangerous. A Celebration of Nitrate Film, edited by Roger Smither (Brussels: FIAF, 2002), 117-122. 12 See Barbara Flueckiger, ‘Color Analysis for the Digital Restoration of Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari’, The Moving Image, 15, no. 1 (2015): 22-43 and blog on http://www.filmcolors.org. 13 See Franziska Frey, ‘Untersuchung des Stabilitatsverhaltens von fotografischen Farbmaterialien’ (PhD Thesis. ETH Zürich, 1994); Rudolf Gschwind, ‘Restoration of Movie Films by Digital Image Processing’, in Preserve Then Show, edited by Dan Nissen (Copenhagen: Danish Film Institute, 2002), 168–178. 14 In the first year, AV Preservation by reto.ch also partnered with DIASTOR. 15 The film was provided by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation, see Barbara Flueckiger, ‘Color Analysis for the Digital Restoration of Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari’, The Moving Image, 15, no. 1 (2015): 22-43. The film was provided by EYE Filmmuseum; see Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp, Franziska Heller, and David Pfluger ‘“Digital Desmet”: Translating Early Applied Colors’, The Moving Image, 16, no. 1 (2016): 106–124. DOI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/640570. 16 Flueckiger et al., ‘“Digital Desmet”‘. 17 Fairchild, 2013. 18 See discussion in Giorgio Trumpy and Barbara Flueckiger, ‘Light Source Criteria for Digitizing Color Films’, Proceedings of the Colour and Visual Computing Symposium 2015, CVCS, Gjøvik Norway, August 2015, IEEE. 19 Callier effect, first described by André Callier, ‘Absorption und Diffusion des Lichtes in der entwickelten photographischen Platte, nach Messungen mit dem Martensschen Polarisationsphotometer’, Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Photographie, 7 (1909): 257. ‘The ratio between the attenuances, which were measured illuminating the sample specularly (as in a directed bright-field) and diffusely

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

(as in a diffused bright-field), is termed the Callier Q factor’, see Giorgio Trumpy, ‘Dust BW. Detection of Dust and Scratches on Photographic Silverhalide (black/ white) Material by Polarized Darkfield Illumination’ (PhD Thesis, University of Basel, 2013), 41. 20 Trumpy, ‘Dust BW’; Trumpy and Flueckiger, ‘Light Source Criteria’. 21 Ohta, 1973. 22 Anke Wilkening, ‘Die Restaurierung von Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari’, Beiträge zur Erhaltung von Kunst- und Kulturgut, Verband der Restauratoren, Issue 2 (2014): 27-47. 23 The seven scanners were: DFT Scanity, Northlight, ArriScan, Lasergraphics Director, RTI D-Archiver, Sondor ALTRA, and Kinetta. 24 Barbara Flueckiger, David Pfluger, Giorgio Trumpy, Simone Croci, Tunç Aydın, and Aljoscha Smolic, ‘Investigation of Film Material–Scanner Interaction’ (2018). 25 Barbara Flueckiger, Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer (Marburg, Germany: Schüren, 2008); Flueckiger, ‘Material Properties of Historical Film in the Digital Age’, Necsus, 1, no. 2 (2012), http://www.necsus-ejms.org/material-properties-of-historical-film-in-the-digital-age (Accessed 7 March 2016). 26 Gschwind and Frey 1994; 1995. 27 Flueckiger et al., ‘“Digital Desmet”‘. 28 Flueckiger, ‘Material Properties’. 29 Flueckiger, ‘Material Properties’. 30 Cesare Brandi, Teoria del restauro [1963] (Torino: Einaudi, 1977). 31 Flueckiger, ‘Material Properties’, see also the FILMIC project by Jim Lindner and Josef Marc. 32 See, for instance, Nicola Farinelli and Gian Luca Mazzanti, ‘Il restauro. Metodo e tecnica’, in Storia del cinema mondiale (2001); and Read and Meyer, Restoration of Motion. 33 The Desmet method was named after Noël Desmet, who first devised the method at the Cinémathèque Royale in Brussels. A nitrate positive is duplicated onto black-and-white negative film that is panchromatic – that is, sensitive to all colours – so that as muchinformation as possible is captured. The colours, in turn, are brought back in at a later stage when the negative is printed to a colour positive on modern stock and when the particular colour is flashed onto the film for tinting. The Desmet method was devised for several reasons. First, it was cheaper than using colour internegatives. Second, as a safety element, the black-andwhite intermediate is chemically more stable. Third, and arguably most important, it was possible to eliminate some of the fluctuations, stains, and unevenness mentioned above. In the early to mid 1990s, the Desmet method became best practice for reproducing films with tinting and toning. 34 See discussion in Farinelli and Mazzanti, Storia del cinema, 5; Giovanna Fossati, From Grain to Pixel. The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam: Amsterdam

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

| 257

University Press, 2009), 117–123; Rossella Catanese, Lacune binarie. Il restauro dei film e le tecnologie digitali (Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2013). 35 Paolo Cherchi Usai, ‘The Color of Nitrate. Some Factual Observations on Tinting and Toning Manuals for Silent Films’, in Silent Film, edited by Richard Abel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 27-30. 36 For a primary source, see F.T. Bowditch and A.C. Downes, ‘Spectral Distributions and Color-Temperatures of the Radiant Energy from Carbon Arcs Used in the Motion Picture Industry’, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1938): 400-409. For an investigation of their influence on the rendition of early film colours, see Christine Keller, ‘Die Simulation historischer Filmfärbung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Lichtes moderner Filmprojektion’ (MA Thesis, Bern, 2007). 37 Debayering is a digital image process used to reconstruct a full-colour image from the incomplete colour samples output from an image sensor overlaid with a col-

258 |

our filter array (CFA) in red, green, and blue. It is also known as CFA interpolation or colour reconstruction. 38 Anya Hurlbert, ‘The Perceptual Quality of Color’, in Handbook of Experimental Phenomenology, edited by Liliane Albertazzi (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013); and Jianli Liu, Edwin Lughofer, and Xianyi Zeng, ‘Could Linear Model Bridge the Gap Between Low-level Statistical Features and Aesthetic Emotions of Visual Textures?’ Neurocomputing, 168 (2015): 947–960. 39 Simone Croci, Tunç Aydın, Nikolce Stefanoski, Markus Gross, and Aljoscha Smolic, ‘Advanced Tools and Framework for Historical Film Restoration’ Journal of Electronic Imaging, 26.1, 011021 (2017).

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Prof. Dr. Barbara Flueckiger has been a professor for film studies at the University of Zurich since 2007. Before her studies in film theory and history, she worked internationally as a film professional. She is the author of two text books about “Sound Design” and “Visual Effects”. Since 2001 she has developed and led many research projects on the interaction between film technology and aesthetics. Her recent research projects investigate the digitization and restoration of archival film, in collaboration with archives and the film industry. In 2015 she was awarded the prestigious Advanced Grant by the European Research Council. Dr. Claudy Op den Kamp is a Lecturer in Film and faculty member at the Centre for Intellectual Property Policy and Management at Bournemouth University, UK, and Adjunct Research Fellow at Swinburne Law School, Australia. She holds degrees from the University of Amsterdam (MA Film and Television Studies), the University of East

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Anglia (MA in Film Archiving), and Plymouth University (PhD in Art and Media). She has worked as Haghefilm Conservation’s Account Manager; as a Film Restoration Project Leader at the Nederlands Filmmuseum; and, between 2013-2015, as a senior research assistant in the DIASTOR project at the Department of Film Studies at the University of Zurich. Dr. David Pfluger has a doctorate in physical chemistry and was a senior researcher in the DIASTOR project. He brought to the team his background in physical chemistry, cinema postproduction, digital preservation of film and video, and a particular knowledge of the Swiss archiving landscape. He works as an independent consultant for archives and, since 2005, he is a member of the Film and Video Competence Network of Memoriav, Switzerland. His other research includes early cinema history, with an emphasis on the pioneers Georges and Gaston Méliès.

| 259

A Material - Base d A pproach to the Di g itization of E arl y F il m C olours

ARCHIVAL PANELS (EDITED TRANSCRIPTS) THE COLOUR FANTASTIC Round Table Archival Panel: Preservation, Restoration, Presentation, and Policy Sunday, 29 March 2015 pa n e l l i s ts :

Giovanna Fossati (moderator), Sonia Genaitay, Ulrich Ruedel, Bryony Dixon, Annike Kross, Tina Anckarman, Tone Føreland, Thierry Delannoy, Benjamin Alimi, Fumiko Tsuneishi

The conference started with presentations of archivists from various institutions, immediately followed by a panel discussion, moderated by Giovanna Fossati. The archival presentations focussed on concrete projects undertaken by the archives. Sonia Genaitay from the British Film Institute (BFI) discussed the importance of documenting the colours (and techniques) on the nitrate stock within archives’ catalogues. Such colour logs were kept by BFI archivists for many decades, and today they have become crucial in cases in which the nitrate are no longer available (due to extreme material decay or the policy of destroying the hazardous nitrate print after copying onto safety material), since most surviving safety copies are in black and white. Ulrich Ruedel from the University of Applied Sciences (HTW) Berlin (previously at the BFI) presented the scientific methods used to analyse and record early colours, focussing particularly on the cases of mordent tones and later on Kinemacolor. This latter case provides an example in which the colour only becomes evident during projection, merging as it were ‘in our eyes and in our minds’. Such additive colour systems make it clear that analysing early colour does not mean only examining vin-

| 261

262 |

tage prints on the bench, but should go beyond this to examining them during projection. Bryony Dixon, curator of silent film at the BFI, talked about the ways in which their institute tries to disseminate the message that early cinema was coloured, noting that, although restoring early colours adds significantly to restoration costs, the presence of colours also make the sponsors and the general audience more enthusiastic about new restorations. Dixon also stressed the differences of colour between various historic genres (such as the bright fantasy colours of the fairy films, opposed to the as-natural-as-possible colours applied to films showing wild life) and presented some of the new possibilities of bringing the films directly to audiences through streaming video like the BFI Player. Film restorer Annike Kross from EYE gave a presentation of the recent project of re-restoring some of the coloured films from the Desmet Collection. By comparing the same films that had been restored using the technology of the early 1990s with the present-day methods that allow for better colour correction and the possibility to address specific areas of colour within a frame during digital restoration, Kross laid out the gradual changes in the approach to restoration and evolving policies, and made a case regarding the importance of the constant effort to improve the way the original colours are retained. Tina Anckarman and Tone Føreland of the National Library of Norway presented a showreel of recently discovered and restored stencilled films from their collection. They stressed the fact that, although their institute prioritizes Norwegian cinema, the uniqueness of each and every coloured film from early cinema allowed them to mark these foreign (mainly French) films among their priorities. Thierry Delannoy and Benjamin Alimi from Digimage-Classics presented showreels of tinted and toned prints that were reproduced with analogue and digital methods, explaining the advantages and drawbacks of the particular methods. They pointed out that industrial innovation (whether analogue or digital) does not take into account abandoned colouring techniques such as tinting. The final speaker was Fumiko Tsuneishi from the Filmarchiv Austria. She addressed the difficult compromises often made during restoration, for example, between the intensity of black and the brightness of white areas, which both cause loss of detail and have disturbing effects during projection. Tsuneishi also addressed the ethical dilemma of retrieving colours through technical manipulation – whether it is acceptable to touch up and intensify a colour that was obviously once present, but has faded in the meantime. *

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

g i ova n n a f os sat i :

To kick off this discussion, I’d like to refer to the already mentioned change in mindset in the past 20 years with regards to the colours of silent cinema. I think that change has influenced the way we deal with films: from cataloguing, to programming, to restoration. Although, by the time of the 1995 Amsterdam Workshop colours had been ‘so to speak’ on the agenda since the 1978 Brighton Conference (during which there was very little explicit said about colours, though), we were then only starting to open up a new field of investigation. I think, by now, two decades later, we’ve been dealing with this field in many ways. The mindset has changed, but sometimes it’s difficult to describe how. For these reasons, I wonder in which ways you see changes within archives, in the broader sense. For example, do you feel that in laboratory work (i.e. restoration work), colourists have a changed perception of the images? I remember 20 years ago a big question was whether colourists understood the nature of these early colours? So, when they were working with coloured films, could they really reproduce it on contemporary colour-film stock? Did they understand the inherent characteristics of these colours, which are obviously different than contemporary film colours? From an even broader perspective, among the general audience, except for a fascination for historical colour systems we mentioned earlier, is there really a better understanding of them? Do you perceive that?

b ryo n y d i xo n :

Well, just a note really: from this morning, we can see the value of the combination between the archival and academic disciplines, I think. So science, academic research – we need to bring them together. Our understanding of the aesthetic principles that are in play during the time of films being made, as well as the scientific analysis of chemistry, the physics, and everything: this is what’s so valuable about bringing this group together, especially 20 years after. We have a different toolbox to play with today. Because we’ve got the toolbox, we’ve got the skills, we’ve got the people, we’ve got the films, all we need now is … some money.

a n n i k e k ros s :

I think it’s true that around that time the archives also opened up to other professions, not just to film historians who perhaps only wanted to look at content, but also to others who maybe haven’t had any idea about film history, but were just fascinated by the medium. I think that bringing these all together meant bringing new chemistries in and that broadened up the whole knowledge. As to your remark about working together with colourists and their knowledge: working on the restorations with colourists who are used to grading modern colour films – it always takes a few days to get them into the aesthetics of early films. But you see that it’s really necessary that a film labora-

A rchi v al P anels ( e d ite d transcripts )

| 263

tory has people who know where these films come from and what history they have to really be able to reproduce the colour well. so n i a g e n a i tay :

I’m not sure actually that the mindset has changed very much. I think the restoration technology has changed, yet, what remains, is the source material and the nitrate and the enthusiasm and passion of the people who are working on it. There’s a huge amount of research done on a film before any work starts. We are fortunate now to be able to communicate easily with people all around the world to gather more information about things. But I think this mindset really hasn’t changed; it’s gotten even stronger in fact, while technology has definitely changed a lot of things for the better.

264 |

u l r i c h r u e d e l : I think the mindset has grown with the options of what we can do now: like Annike showed us with the examples of the previous and most recent restorations of the Desmet films. I remember that, in the 1980s, people were happy to have some colour, and there wasn’t a sensitivity for the blackand-white parts of the image to be truly black-and-white. We have more sensitivity for that right now. Beyond that, we’d also like to have the punch of the grain of black and white, which is hard to get on colour stock, and maybe digital is just getting there. So, I think we have seen an actual growth, and I would strongly reemphasize that dialogue is very important for this. The different aspects are not mutually exclusive. As a scientist, I sometimes felt reservations from curators, as if they were saying ‘Are you suggesting that what my eyes are seeing are wrong?’. Surely, the eyes deceive you all the time, but, then again, that doesn’t mean that science can give all the answers. It all has to work together. I really like what Fumiko pointed out about the aesthetics coming in with the restoration ethics. If there is a colour and you can’t really see it, then it makes sense to say that there is no point to have it on the screen that way. And it would make sense to consider that ‘maybe it has faded and maybe that’s something we should scientifically investigate’. At the point where we are, I think it makes total ethical sense to say that, if a hand colour was applied, it was meant to be seen. So I think this dialogue can keep growing, and, in the past 20 years, a lot has happened on the science side, starting with pioneers such as Paul Read or Brian Pritchard. We all base our work on those results and take it from there, and that’s very exciting. t h i e r ry d e l a n n oy :

Yes, now colour-grading apparatus are aware of what were toned or tinted shots, but, in the end, the final decision is the archive’s. It’s for the archive to decide the saturation of blue, for example, and not only for us at the lab.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

tina anckarman:

We represent a small film archive (Norway), where we don’t have that many early colour films. But, I think that the acknowledgment of every coloured print being unique has made a difference, because, lately, we have had a lot of attention thanks to that, and I think that that has changed the attitude within our small institution. I’d also like to add that we have many possibilities through new technologies, but still, there is the uncertainty. What was the original colour and will we ever be able to screen or show the original colour, because of the digital colour space, etc.? The results can be so different. Even with the new technology, it is not possible for some of the colours ever to be screened again.

va n e s sa to u l m i n :

First, I want to make a comment, then I have a question to ask. The comment is, I was sitting with Frank Gray here, and for the last 20 years, we’ve both created film histories that developed along as this dialogue was happening. I was rather shocked about how Sonia so casually mentioned that the nitrate was gone. It is not to comment on the BFI, but I just have to say, it’s a shocking observation. Because I can’t really see any other national collection could get away with just saying, ‘It’s gone’, for an original item. I feel I do have to comment on that – not in a negative or positive way, but just for the record. Secondly, I want to ask this: all this amazing work has been going on, but how is it going to be exhibited and shown and translated? I thought it was really interesting that BFI introduced the BFI Player. It’s been an amazing revelation in the UK, but I think it’s equally important to think about how people are actually going to see this material. The exhibition of this material can be in lots of different formats. Now you’ve done all the work or you’re doing colour restoration, but how are people going to see it?

b ryo n y d i xo n :

Yes, nitrate decays. It goes all the time. We are in a constant state of burying our nitrate as it were. Every archivist here has the same problem, and it has been going on since we received nitrate in the 1940s. Nonetheless, there are nitrate prints from the 1890s that still exist and that we work with. In fact, one of the things we’re doing in the next few years is to restore every single piece of Victorian film, all 400-and-something of them to the best of our abilities using the materials that we have, although some are very, very fragile. We opened a can from an original 68mm print the other day, and little flakes of emulsion started to rise, and we put the lid back on very quickly. We don’t get rid of nitrate until it is brown powder essentially. And even then, working with Uli over the last couple of years, we realized there is still a value in keeping the brown powder; frankly, you never know. There are chemical things that you might want to analyse even at that stage. In terms of the exhibition of a film, things like the BFI Player are a com-

A rchi v al P anels ( e d ite d transcripts )

| 265

promise in the new world. We’ve talked a little bit about the sort of problems that archives have with only being allowed to concentrate on their national production, which is ridiculous. The thing that we need to address, I think as a group, is to put pressure on the institutions to say that early cinema in particular needs to be dealt with as international heritage. And that the digital stuff not being allowed to be seen internationally is equally ridiculous. It’s absolutely crazy that we can’t allow internet access across the copyright territories. That’s just the state of things at the moment; another whole operation needs to happen about copyright internationally to change the law. We’ve just had a law changed in England that has actually made everything worse. We are now dealing with the orphan stuff, where we’re chasing down fourth-generation relatives of pioneer filmmakers to clear material. Let’s hope we’ll get over that. c é l i n e r u i vo :

266 |

This question is for Fumiko, but, maybe more generally, it’s about how to proceed in a practical way when we preserve stencilled films? When you made your presentation, Fumiko, you mentioned that you use wet gate on stencil prints. At the Cinémathèque française, our curatorial decision was not to use wet gate on stencilled prints because we’re not sure how the aniline colour would react after the wet gate treatment. Because, in France, we are still using perchloroethylene for the wet gate, and we are worried about the consequences. I would also like the feedback from different archives about what would be their recommendation. Is there a scientific recommendation? Because some people from sciences told us not to use it.

f u m i ko ts u n e i s h i : Our situation is still worse actually. We are not using perchloroethylene; instead, we’re using a special liquid from ARRI. It is a new thing, it is not bad for the environment, but it is bad enough for one’s health, and it’s not really known what it will do 20 years from now. It is risky, I know, but this is what we do; not only with hand colouring and stencils, but also with tints. Because we fear that leakage might influence the quality of the colour afterwards, we immediately do a cleaning after the scanning. So there is indeed a risk. ulrich ruedel:

We have discussed whether we should try that with modern hand colours. I’d say, of course, archives should always err on the side of caution. That, if you have something, preferably if it’s homemade because then it’s disposable, you could test it first. Off the top of my head, I don’t see something that would cause concern, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t such concern, and it just reinforces the question that one of the research branches that we need more of is accelerated ageing to understand the ageing of dyes and tone pigments to begin with, and to understand decomposition patterns. Accelerated

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

ageing is apparently a very expensive method, but that doesn’t rule out doing it. I was excited to hear that my university asked for the equipment for this, so stay tuned. b r egt l a m e r i s :

I have a remark about the history of restoration and the history of colours being shown in film museums and film archives: we tend to repeat that, before the 1980s, everything was restored in black and white. However, actually, there were only very few film titles actually restored and duplicated, and the rest were simply shown on nitrates. So, colours were seen, colours were screened, there just was a different discourse about them.

j os h ua y u m i b e :

I want to come back to Giovanna’s question about shifting attitudes towards colour over the last 20 years, and to think about it broadly in relation to the ways in which film heritage has also shifted over recent decades. We’ve revised and expanded a number of historical ideas about what heritage is from national cinemas and auteur cinemas, to things more recently like useful cinemas, regional cinemas, and travelling cinemas, like in the case of Mitchell & Kenyon. I’m wondering how colour fits into this shifting of what’s the centre of heritage to the periphery of heritage, and how we can think about these kinds of new interests in terms of changing ideas about what heritage might be today.

g i ova n n a f os sat i : This point allows me to move to a more general topic with regard to the restoration of film heritage. What is the ‘object’ that we are restoring? Whether we talk about colour or we talk about anything else, this is a discussion that keeps coming back. I think, today, we definitely have better tools and many more choices compared to 20 years ago. At the 1995 workshop, we were basically talking about whether to use Kodak internegative or the Desmet method for tinted and toned films, or to recreate the original tinting technique (as Prague has been doing with fantastic results). Of these three techniques, probably the Kodak internegative is the only one that we have stopped using since then. All the other techniques remain available, alongside the new digital options we have at our disposal today. Furthermore, there is now more research being done in the field and, as consequence, more understanding. Yet, somehow, all of this is very much concentrated on understanding the object. However, we all know that the object itself is not the only aspect of film experience. Going back to Vanessa’s remark, what about exhibition? We have, nowadays, many more ways to exhibit online (without getting into the copyright issues here); we have films being installed in exhibitions like the current Desmet exhibition at EYE and similar ones; and, of course, there are festi-

A rchi v al P anels ( e d ite d transcripts )

| 267

vals with beautiful programmes. Like every year in Bologna, where Marianne Lewinsky always finds and shows the best colour restorations from around the world. But again, what is this film heritage, the objects, we are restoring and showing? Are we taking all the other nonmaterial aspects, such as the exhibition aspect (the film experience) into the account? Are we not focussing too much on restoring the object itself? ulrich ruedel:

268 |

I think we’re still having two poles really. One is access, access, access, which is wonderful, but, at this point, online streaming still requires compromises in quality. On the other hand, obviously the ideal situation is to go to a screening. I think, over the past years, to look at the DCP made straight off a negative or of a carefully restored image is pretty impressive and probably second only to screening a nitrate print. In my view, sometimes the DCPs are done really well, arguably better than the 35mm prints from a decade or two ago, or even from a couple of years ago. It depends on a case-by-case scenario really. Also, if you watch a carefully restored film on a Blu-ray disk properly projected, that can be pretty impressive too. So, I think we have these two poles of electronic access. They still have to merge. Streaming will become better, or there might be other ways of digital access. But I think it could get there that access is much more authentic and accessible. va n e s sa to u l m i n :

I think that’s what I was trying to say. I’ve been attending for 20 years nearly all of these events that we’ve talked about. Talking about Bologna and Pordenone, with more than 1000 people attending each of these festivals every year. But how many people actually outside this small world that we’re in get to see this material? They don’t, and I still think, whenever we implement these ideas, like the wider streaming access, there’s no engagement process beyond a very small audience. I still think with early cinema in particular, we tried, with Mitchell and Kenyon, and we reached millions. We really did reach millions, and I don’t think a lot of collections, institutes, or other entities have learnt from that. Because I still feel, whenever I go places, people don’t know what amazing material is in the archives. They still don’t. Sometimes it’s the archives themselves not promoting it, sometimes it’s the funding not providing the resources, and there’s lots of ways around it. But I feel the issue of engagement is vital for what’s being done here on the restoration and technical side of silent colour. Like Bryony has said, regarding copyright, there should be pressures internationally and nationally because, ultimately, it’s the public who are losing, and ultimately your funding will be cut because the public doesn’t get to see it. That’s what’s happening in every country in our economic climate – it’s happening in the UK. If the funding people don’t get to see it, they won’t fund it. That’s the economic reality.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

b ryo n y d i xo n : I might add, though, that we are in this very strange transitional moment with all these proliferating formats and platforms and devices and so on. I think it will settle out and I think online streaming, as clunky and imperfect as it is, will eventually get those numbers. You do have to engage with them – I take your point entirely because you can’t just put it out there and expect people to find it. You have to go and find them and put the two things together. I think that’s really important. But yes, you have to publish, publish, publish to get it out there. You’ve got to come to conferences like this, but then you’ve also got to find your audiences and go to them. We are in this sort of rather strange time where our conventional repertory cinema is almost gone, and it’s being replaced by something much more fluid, much more exciting, and we need to recalibrate and analyse exactly what that is, and then go out and engage it, because you’re right: the public pays for this very expensive activity. And the delights of all this material needs to be properly explained. It’s complicated, and it will need a lot of doing and funding. a n k e m e b o l d : Just to bring in the conservation side too: adding to what Bryony said a little bit earlier about the deterioration of the nitrate originals, I think we as archives do have the full responsibility for using language very carefully in the context of nitrate deterioration. I come from Germany, one of the countries where there still is systematic destruction of nitrate after copying to analogue carriers. As archives, we should state clearly that deterioration is related to how we keep the original. We know that, with lower temperatures and with controlled humidity, our originals will last very long, but not all the collections are in proper storage, and I know this goes for a lot of institutions. So I just feel this needs to be spoken about with honesty, which doesn’t always happen: telling why and which nitrate print deteriorated, and when or why it was destroyed. uli ruedel:

I think the laws of nature still apply within cool and dry storage, so there is still a risk, albeit a dramatically diminished risk. That’s why we should be happy about any vault, and the colder the better. But the risk is still there and that’s our argument that we need to keep working on active preservation. It is inevitable that something might decay in the meantime, and thus we need careful inspection policies, and so forth. The other point I would like to add to the previous debate is regarding access: yes, we need more, but we also have to be careful how the compromises we already took for access might shift perceptions. Now, when you present a lovely digital tint that really comes close to a chemical tint, audience members or clients or commercial companies might say, ‘That’s not what it looks like’ because they’ve been watching DVD tints or Desmet prints over the last decades. So, I think that’s also why we need

A rchi v al P anels ( e d ite d transcripts )

| 269

science to reinforce some points and to show original techniques, if only for reference. I wouldn’t mind tinting 35mm prints, but I also love the digital versions. But then maybe it’s useful once in a while to take an alternative option and restore it chemically so we have something to screen and look at, and with an understanding of the aesthetics and of the science to understand why it looks different. so n i a g e n a i tay :

270 |

Regarding the decomposition of nitrate, at the BFI, we’re very fortunate that we have these fantastic storage facilities to put time relatively in suspension, as it were. The nitrate is incredibly well preserved there, and we need to do very little to it until it is needed for restoration. But also to get back to the language, my casual remark of saying that ‘nitrate was gone’: deterioration is not the only reason why the nitrate could be gone. At the time, it was common practice for people to send their nitrate to the BFI to be duplicated, and then for it to be returned to the donor. So, in this particular case, I don’t know if the nitrate had deteriorated and been destroyed, it could simply have been returned to the donor in exchange for a black-and-white copy. What the donor has done with the nitrate in the meantime is a different story, of course. I agree, nitrate deterioration is still very much a concern, because, as soon as you get it out of freezing conditions, then you get to see the extent of 60–70 years of previous preservation, so the story continues.

e l i f ro n g e n - k ay n a kç i :

I want to expand a little bit on what we have been talking about in terms of exhibition. Now the possibilities of digital are great on the one hand because it allows us to go with our films into places where we couldn’t go before – not only on the Internet, but even to people’s telephone screens. However, I also have some questions about these new colour versions now coming into life. For example, Uli already mentioned DVD colour. Nowadays, if a film is going to be broadcasted, it actually gets graded again because it looks different on monitors. If we put something on YouTube, it looks different than how it looks in projection. For example, when our French colleagues show their DCP, it looks brilliant. Of course, we are in a very controlled environment here at EYE cinema, where we have a very well-calibrated DCP player. If you would put that clip online I don’t know how it would look on people’s monitors. Fumiko was already suggesting this. This creates new versions proliferating. For example, Jáccuse was broadcasted in the United States with digital colouring, digital tinting, and it came out on DVD as such. We have the same restoration on 35mm with Desmet colour, but is it the same? All this concern from the creators about getting the colours right is also now going into this proliferation of different colour versions, which actually open up new questions.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

to n e f ø r e l a n d : I want to comment that the reason for preservation may not be that the film is wanted for viewing or that people want to see it, but it can be because the nitrate is decaying, and it needs to be done. At least in our institution, the people working with the access are in another department than us. So, if we find something we think more people should see, maybe we should use more of our time to inform them, that they should work more on this material because maybe people might be interested in seeing it. And I also think that the wrapping around the material is important too to get the people to know about it. You need to put it in a context, because there’s so much out there. If all the rights are cleared, and you can put it online, you still need people to find what they’re looking for, when they’re looking for it. So I think the context of the presentation of the preserved material is very important. And it takes a lot of work to get that done in a good way. f u m i ko ts u n e i s h i :

For me, the reproduction of colour can only be called authentic when it is done on the black-and-white stock with applied dye tinting. In the past, the only place to do this was in the Czech Republic, but now there’s also a possibility in Japan in Osaka where Imagica West is doing this work commercially. We did some tests – of course, this costs more so we can’t do it for every nitrate preservation – but, in this case, we can really compare the nitrate on the viewing table and then also we can compare the restoration and the original nitrate and conclude that this and this is the same colour. As soon as the colours are copied on a colour internegative, and/or the Desmet print, or on DCP, there can be no authenticity, in my opinion. I personally believe that colour restoration is merely a reproduction: it’s not about really keeping the original information, but it is to make something look nice.

a n n i k e k ros s :

After all, also the applied dye prints are new prints. What we have to deal with anyway when it comes to film restoration or preservation is to acknowledge that we always make something new. The ethical aspect is about how close do you want it to ‘look like’ the source you have started with. But, in general, the dangerous thing is that this process gives you also a lot of freedom; we have to limit our options, while we actually work on a new copy. That’s the huge difference with all the other restoration fields where they work on the original.

g i ova n n a f os sat i :

Thank you Annike. This reminds me that, 20 years ago in the Colour Workshop publication I had written an essay with the title ‘Coloured Images Today: How to Live with Simulated Colours (and Be Happy)’. I guess that title remains valid now 20 years after, despite the arrival of so many new techniques and possibilities.

A rchi v al P anels ( e d ite d transcripts )

| 271

THE COLOUR FANTASTIC Archival Panel Roundtable 2: Digital Restoration Tuesday, 31 March 2015 pa n e l l i s ts :

Giovanna Fossati (moderator), Michelle Carlos, David Pfluger, Barbara Flueckiger, Claudy Op den Kamp Michelle Carlos (National Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart) Digital Colour Restoration of Applied Colour Silent Era Films: Dilemmas, Practice, and Digital Presentation David Pfluger (DIASTOR project) Identifying Problems in Scanning Early Film Colours

272 | Barbara Flueckiger (DIASTOR project, University of Zurich) Creating a Reference: Caligari Restoration Colour Analysis Claudy Op den Kamp (DIASTOR project and Plymouth University) Reproducing Tints in the Digital Domain: Testing ‘Digital Desmet’

One of the final panels of the conference was a roundtable with presentations on digital restoration, as it has been employed in the last few years, to reproduce the colours of silent cinema. The ensuing discussion was moderated by Giovanna Fossati. Michelle Carlos (National Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart) presented her research on ‘Digital Colour Restoration of Applied Colour Silent Era Films: Dilemmas, Practice, and Digital Presentation’. Drawing on her laboratory experience, Carlos argued for the need to create better digital documenting tools for keeping track of colour restorations. She also pointed out the impossibility of reaching an ideally colour-timed restoration, simply because even the most accurately executed restoration jobs end up being presented in widely variable conditions, such as variances in lamp-house lumens, or monitors with limited colour range, or projectors unable, or not calibrated, to respond to subtleties of image contrast. The other three speakers were from the DIASTOR project (University of Zurich), and they presented their collective research. David Pfluger spoke about the differences between the scan test outcomes for film digitization. Various tests run by the DIASTOR project, involving the scanning of the same tinted nitrate print all came out with deviations from the original, according

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

to the differently calibrated scanners, even those of the same manufacture. On the other hand, a similar problem arose, as the data obtained from scanners using different software packages was too incompatible for reliable analysis. Professor Barbara Flueckiger showed samples of the colour analysis made during the latest 2014 restoration of Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, in which original nitrate tints were reproduced after meticulous analysis, involving x-ray fluorescence, of three tinted prints found in different archives worldwide. She also demonstrated the mobile digital photography unit developed by DIASTOR to enable stabile conditions for digitizing film frames. However, at the same time, she stressed the fact that every digitization is merely a reading under certain conditions, since one can never take everything into account simultaneously. Colour perception, for instance, is also always subjective, and it becomes very difficult to analyse purely objective colour references. Claudy Op den Kamp shared some of the test results from currently used analogue colour reproduction techniques; e.g. duplicating via colour negative onto colour stock, and duplicating with the Desmet method through a blackand-white negative and subsequently adding the colours during the printing and grading onto colour stock. She proposed a ‘translation’ of such analogue methods into the digital realm by using different scanning procedures such as creating three black-and-white digital separates. She also discussed the ‘digital Desmet’ method, suggesting ways of improving it by intervening at the scanning level, rather than only during postproduction. * g i ova n n a f os sat i :

Let’s start with a question: will all this data (e.g. Michelle Carlos’s research on colour grading) be available?

m i c h e l l e c a r los : At the moment, I am revising my Master’s thesis, which I’ll be glad to share with you. But the question is, how to get it published. b a r b a r a f lu ec k i g e r : With DIASTOR, we are drafting a final report on our research project, and we are also planning to publish many research articles drawn from the work, because we have carried out so many case studies. We are going to write a report on the scanner test too, although it’s very hard to compare all the different results. I think all of us have learned a lot in this project, because it was a collaboration between so many different fields. It was also challenging because it required juggling all the different needs: our research questions with those of our industrial and corporate partners. Another challenging aspect for the collaboration has been the availability of all these companies, because, everywhere in Europe, companies are in a state of transi-

A rchi v al P anels ( e d ite d transcripts )

| 273

tion, reducing their staff constantly. But all in all, I think we have learned so much and we would like to provide insights into what we have learned. r e to k ro m e r : I don’t have a question, but a remark from the provider side. We are usually unable to provide the archive with the colour data we have from laboratory work, because the archive generally doesn’t want it. g i ova n n a f os sat i :

274 |

That’s a very interesting remark. And something that I have been thinking about in the last couple of days, particularly since listening to Peter Delpeut’s keynote when he discussed the big changes in the archival practice in the last 20 years. I’ve been thinking about the fact that not all archivists are really looking closely into the practice of film restoration. I’m not saying that they need to understand everything that is happening on the technical level, but they should at least understand what the possibilities are. Given that the archivist is typically the one who decides the aim of a restoration, and since there are many ways to restore films, one needs to be very transparent, through documentation, about what one’s aim is. As Michelle Carlos pointed out, documentation is not a standard procedure, so besides not asking the laboratories and in general the scanner manufacturers about the technical information, as Reto Kramer just pointed out I am afraid that many archivists still don’t ask for a documentation of the restoration work.

b a r b a r a f lu ec k i g e r : In our DIASTOR project, the main idea has been sharing information, and I see that this is not so much the case in many different instances; archives, scanner manufacturers, people who try to keep the knowledge to themselves. This is an attitude we have to change. Because we need transparent documentation; the scanner should not be a black box as it is right now. It was incredibly difficult to get first-hand information from the manufacturers what their scanners actually do at the technical level. I think all of us should work very hard towards more open-minded access to our knowledge and also to provide the knowledge to others. c l au dy o p d e n k a m p : I just want to add that some of this information is very context specific; for example, some of the settings that we use on the ARRI scanner at Haghefilm in Amsterdam cannot be used in Zurich at all. Although both machines are ARRI scanners, they are not compatible with each other. So, only to a certain level, can you deal with that kind of technical information, knowing that it’s so context and setup specific. a n n i k e k ros s :

I think from my experience the sharing between archives exists already – there’s not a platform to share all our information, but if you ask, you

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

usually get an answer. For example, amongst Scanity users we have an e-mail list that works fairly well. Of course the film labs, postproduction houses, and scanner manufacturers are commercial enterprises making money with this work, and I don’t blame them for not sharing their information with everybody. I mean, they need to know what film archives want and need; as long as they listen to their clients and see what their demands are, and try to solve their problems, I think they are doing a great job. dav i d p f lu g e r : Yes, I would like to add that the concepts of structure and work flows in a hybrid archive are new to most archives, because there is now a mix of digital and analogue work and material, since you always keep the original elements. A certain time is needed for these concepts, which are still in development, to sink in on both sides, before the correct questions are asked and correct answers can be given.

| 275

m i c h e l l e c a r los :

I am going back to documentation of all the things we do in postproduction. Of course, I cannot speak for everyone in postproduction, but, in my experience, I was asked by one of my clients to write documentation on everything that I did, and the sample that I did is what you saw in the Excel file that I presented. At the time I was doing the restoration, I was the colourist; I actually didn’t have much time to carry out the documentation, but the client asked for it, and we were proud to say ‘we can do that’. But it is a common mistake in postproduction to think: ‘we can now do all of that in digital and also do the documentation for you at the end’, but this is not realistic, or necessarily affordable. That’s why I am proposing that if there really is a need for documentation from all the archives, then maybe we can ask the manufacturers themselves to create this feature in their software, because the metadata is already there, but it’s just not accessible as a readable .xml file, for example.

g i ova n n a f os sat i :

I’d like to move the discussion forward by asking a question to the scholars in the audience who are not dealing daily with grading and restoring films. How much of this do you care about and how much are you aware of everything that restorers, colourists, and, in general, the people who work in the lab can do to the films you will finally access? Are you asking yourselves the question ‘How close is what I’m seeing on YouTube or in projection to what was seen in projection at the time the film was made, or to the nitrate print held at the archive’? sa r a h s t r e e t :

I would echo that. These are fundamental questions about provenance, about notions of authenticity, and about scholarly care – to fol-

A rchi v al P anels ( e d ite d transcripts )

low through and to make it very clear for ourselves as academics to students. The painstaking processes that people go through, assisted by new technologies – all of this is great, and I suppose the challenge is about making the processes and the scientific ingenuity accessible, not only to the scholarly and professional communities, but also in public demonstration for more public engagement. Something like Caligari is a wonderful case, when people say: ‘Oh, we never realized it was in colour at all’. Let alone the painstaking issues that Barbara Flueckiger has come across when doing the very detailed work on this classic film, but what about all the other films that aren’t necessarily in the cannon; how were they coloured? k i r s t e n t h o m p so n :

276 |

As an academic who is not very technical, I think that one issue, especially with personal archives, is that our own photography is often our only means of recording what we can, leaving aside the issues of photocopying, which might not be permissible, and our documentation. And I am not just talking about photographing emulsion, but also photographing other documents. I have tremendous limitations and frustrations with technical knowledge of how to do that uniformly, dealing with the colour differences and also reflection issues, and whilst I have been aware of Barbara Flueckiger’s marvellous photography, but more informational guidelines for our own personal research imaging is much needed. b a r b a r a f lu ec k i g e r : As a film-studies professor at a university, I think it is really very important to guide the students towards knowing and understanding how important the material basis of what they are seeing is, and also how important the aesthetic side of it is. Especially nowadays, students are watching whatever streams on the Internet, and then they come to class and say, ‘This was a little bit blue, and then it was green, and then it had some yellow,’ – while it is very important to specify what kind of green, what kind of blue. Yet this is so much tied to the material bases of the moving images viewed, and, for this, one has to develop an understanding of the connection between material bases and what the aesthetics of the colours are. Many film scholars are used to considering a film like a book where it doesn’t matter what kind of book you have; it’s print, and it’s always telling more or less the same story. It doesn’t matter which font is used. Of course, as a bibliophile, you may like one edition better than the other one, but it mainly conveys the same information; yet this is not true for film. I see that many people in academia are not so much aware of this, and I think we should constantly remind them of it. I think that places like archives with facilities to display and to exhibit films in their more or less original versions, are very crucial to the process, to give a better understanding.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

b r egt l a m e r i s :

I just wanted to comment that, also in literature, this is a thing. Last year, I gave a guest lecture for Slavic Literature studies where I tried to explain the use of film as a historical source and went into the material aspects, talking about the source material and the difference from the duplicate. They’ve really very much recognized this for books, because different editions do not contain the same illustrations, which changes the nature of the reading experience.

j e n n i f e r p e t e r so n : I want to say that what I really appreciate about DIASTOR and the Timeline of Historical Film Colors, is that it is prepared so carefully, even annotating what light sources are used for the photos there. That kind of precision is really important. I taught the history of colour in film last fall, arriving at digital material in the last few weeks, and found out that this was what my students were most interested in, and what I knew the least about. Today I’ve learned more about digital colour restoration and preservation than ever before, thank you so much. But I would have loved to have been able to present this to them in some form; my students are production students; they’re really tech-heavy; they’re interested in technology, especially digital technology. If someone can write a textbook on this for undergraduates, that would be great. They would be interested, because they’re all shooting digitally, so there’s something we can use with this shift to digital that has captured their attention, and we can capitalize on that to draw their attention to restoration and preservation practices. I think that it would be very useful and of interest to a lot of people. m i c h e l l e c a r los : I’m also giving some training in colour grading, and this conference just gave me the idea to develop a full tutorial with some series of colour grading of different colour systems. I could recreate these looks digitally through colour grading and maybe present it to your students. I could also show them, as I did here, how it’s done. It can be really a full tutorial that can be taught. b a r b a r a f lu ec k i g e r : I think the problem is that you cannot write a textbook about it, frankly. This is one of the reasons why I opted for our database: because an Internet resource allows you to connect between different kinds of information, you can show clips, etc. I’m now on the second stage, and I envisage to have a third stage where you have more interactivity and more information with instructional films about how things work. What I see from my teaching is that, if the students lack the basic knowledge, and if you don’t have interactivity providing it, very little sticks with them. A textbook probably helps to convey basic concepts, but then, on top of that, you really need a lot of interaction with the

A rchi v al P anels ( e d ite d transcripts )

| 277

students and also workshops because the perception needs training. That’s very difficult.

278 |

f r a n k g r ay : I’m just so pleased that we’re actually talking about a very important issue, especially on the last day of the conference. As someone who runs a film archive that is also part of a network of archives in the UK, I’m just so conscious of two things: that my colleagues aren’t all here today, and that I think actually we have a real knowledge deficit. I’m part of a culture where most of our digital work and scanning is outsourced. We put it in a box, off it goes, and it comes back. It costs money, but there’s so little learning taking place and that really bothers me. Because understanding just the basics of a scanner and choices you have would lead to more responsible choices. So I’m very concerned about that outsourced activity. As a professional, it’s how we grow that digital consciousness, that digital intelligence. I feel the need to jump on it, and do it as quickly as possible. I’m aware that scanners are actually coming down in price. This is a potential of not just acquiring the understanding, but actually developing the skills in-house, having the hardware and software in-house and, if you can’t do it, then how to actually work together with other archives to pool information is important. It is somewhat embarrassing to say this, because for me it reflects quite a primitive way of engaging with these issues, and that’s just not good enough. m i c h e l l e c a r los :

It’s really nice that you’ve mentioned that because, from the very first day, I’ve wanted to ask if anyone of you feels intimidated by the technology that we have, especially as you witness in our presentation today how intimidating it is to see all the possibilities. It’s probably a good opportunity right now to reach out to archives to tell them what we know and to also hear what they need from us so we create this dialog later on that will be really useful in the development of digital film restoration.

g i ova n n a f os sat i :

I really think we have a chance now because our younger colleagues, and definitely our students, are much more at ease with the technology. I think that archives, especially those archives with an internal lab, have always had internal training on technology and have some kind of knowledge sharing in everyday practice. But, with digital technology, we have two possibilities. One is to know more about it and acquire the tools we need to get to the results we want to obtain, and the second one is to influence how the technology evolves. With the latter, we have a better chance with digital technology than probably we have ever had with photochemical technology as archivists and scholars.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

AUTHORS’ BIOGRAPHIES is Professor of Film Heritage and Digital Film Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where she has taught in the MA Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Program since its establishment in 2003. She is also the Chief Curator at EYE Filmmuseum (Amsterdam) where she supervises a collection of more than 40000 titles. She is the author of From Grain to Pixel: The Archival Life of Film in Transition (Amsterdam University Press, 2009 and 2011); coauthor with Tom Gunning, Joshua, Yumibe and Jonathon Rosen of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2015); and coeditor with Annie van den Oever of Exposing the Film Apparatus. The Film Archive as a Research Laboratory (Amsterdam University Press, 2016). g i ova n n a f os sat i

v i c to r i a jac k so n , PhD, is a Research Associate at the University of Bristol on the ERC-funded project, ‘The Idea of Animation: Aesthetics, Locality and the Formation of Media Identity’. She was formerly a Research Assistant on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project, ‘Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts’, also at Bristol. Her PhD examined the distribution and exhibition of Kinemacolor in the UK. Other research interests include early film history, animation, film exhibition, consumer culture, and film and film archiving.

has a PhD in Media and Culture Studies (Utrecht University, Netherlands), and an MA in Cinema and Theatre Studies (Radboud University, Netherlands). Other research interests include the history of film archiving, film historiography, film colours (technology and aesthetics), medical images, and the representation of madness. She recently published her monograph Film Museum Practice and Film Historiography with Amsterdam University Press in 2017. Bregt Lameris has also worked as a Research Associate for

b r egt l a m e r i s

| 279

the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts’. She is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher for the ERC advanced grant project FilmColors at the University of Zürich. e l i f ro n g e n - k ay n a kç i  is

the curator of silent film at the EYE Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. In 1997, she completed her MA at the UvA Film Studies, concentrating on film history and national identity. After following the EU-funded Archimedia course, she started working at the EYE Filmmuseum in 1999, with a focus on the archiving and revaluation of lost and forgotten films. Her curatorial work consists of preserving, researching, and presenting EYE’s silentfilm collection, which is famous worldwide, for, among other things, the Desmet Collection, which was inscribed onto Unesco Memory of the World register in 2011. 280 |

is Professor of Film at the University of Bristol, UK. Her publications on colour film include Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation, 1900–55 (2012), winner of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies prize for Best Monograph, and two coedited collections (with Simon Brown and Liz Watkins): Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive (2012) and British Colour Cinema: Practices and Theories (2013). She is currently coauthoring, with Joshua Yumibe, Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s, to be published by Columbia University Press. Her latest project is The Eastmancolor Revolution and British Cinema, 1955–85, a 3-year research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

sa r a h s t r e e t

j os h ua y u m i b e is Associate Professor and Director of Film Studies at Michigan State University. He is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 2012); and coauthor, with Giovanna Fossati, Tom Gunning, and Jonathon Rosen, of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2015). With Sarah Street, he is currently working on the coauthored monograph, Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (under contract with Columbia University Press)

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abel, Richard. French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915–1929. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. ––. French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/anthology, 1907–1939. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988. Ackerman, Carl. George Eastman: Founder of Kodak and the Photography Business. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930. Agee, James. ‘Comedy’s Greatest Era’. Life, 5 September 1949. Amengual, Barthélemy. ‘Rapports entre le cinema, la littérature et les arts en France dans les Années Vingt’. Les Cahiers de la Cinémathèque 33–34 (1981): 161–168. Andrew, Dudley. What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and Its Charge. Chichester, West ­Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. ––, Ed. Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ‘Animated Photography in Natural Colours’. Penrose Pictorial Annual: The Process Year Book, A Review of the Graphic Arts 14 (1908–1909): 129–132. Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art [1933]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. ––. ‘Remarks on Color Film [1935]’. In Color, The Film Reader, edited by Angela Dalle Vache and Brian Price, 53–56. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Artkraft Strauss Papers, 1927–2004, Job files, including Tama Starr Papers, New York Public Library. Arren, J. Comment il faut faire de la publicité. Paris: Lafitte et Cie, 1912. ––. Sa Majesté la Publicité. Tours: Mame et fils, 1914. Askari, Kaveh. ‘Early 16mm Colour by a Career Amateur’. Film History 21.2 (2009): 150–163. Bachelard, Gaston. Étude sur l’évolution d’un problème de physique. La propagation thermique dans les solides. Paris: Vrin, 1927.

| 281

Baker, Laura E. ‘Public sites versus public sights: The progressive response to outdoor advertising and the commercialization of public space’. American Quarterly 59.4 (2007): 1187–1213. Balázs, Béla. ‘Supplementary Fragments: Welcome to the Colour Film’. In Early Film Theory: Visible Man [1924] and The Spirit of Film [1930], edited by Erica Carter, translated by Rodney Livingstone, 76–80. New York-Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010. ‘Barbee Pulls Clever Stunt for “Lying Lips”‘. Motion Picture News, 23 (10 February 1921): n.p. Barjavel, René. Cinéma total. Essai sur les formes futures du cinema. Paris: Denoël, 1944. Batchelor, David. Chromophobia. London: Reaktion Books, 2000. ‘Be It So, Electrical Advertising Has Only Just Begun’. Signs of the Times, (December 1912): n.p. Bellows, W.A. ‘Electrical Advertising School’. Signs of the Times, 64: 3 (March 1930): 64.

282 |

Beltrame, Alberto and Andrea Mariani, Eds. At the Borders of (Film) History. Temporality, Archaeology, Theories, ed. Andrea Beltrame and Andrea Mariani. Udine: Filmforum, Editirice Universitaria Udinese SRL, 2015. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Benson, Sally. ‘The Screen in Review’. Picture-Play Magazine (June 1926): 54–55. Berriatúa, Luciano. ‘Regarding a Catalogue of the Tints Used on the Silent Screen’. In Tutti i colori del mondo. Il colore nei mass media tra 1900 e 1930, edited by Luciano Berriatúa et al., 135-139. Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis, 1998. Binder, Michael. ‘A Light Affliction. A History of Film Preservation and Restoration’, 2014. Accessed 7 March 2016. http://www.lulu.com/shop/michael-binder/ a-light-affliction-a-history-of-film-preservation-and-restoration/paperback/ product-22460121.html. ‘“Black Pirate” and “Gold Rush” – London’. Variety (9 March 1926): 3. Blaszczyk, Regina L. The Color Revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Blom, Ivo. ‘“Comme l’eau qui coule”: les filmes des rivières de Gaumont dans la collection Desmet’. 1895, 18 (1995): 156–163. ––. ‘Gérôme En Quo Vadis: Picturale Invloeden in de Film’. Jong Holland, 17, no. 4 (2001): 19–28. Boime, Albert. The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting c. 1830–1865. Washington, DC: Smithsonian University Press, 1991. Bowditch, F.T. and A.C. Downes. ‘Spectral Distributions and Color-Temperatures of the Radiant Energy from Carbon Arcs Used in the Motion Picture Industry’. Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (1938): 400-409. Brandi, Cesare. Teoria del restauro. Torino: Einaudi, 1977 [1963]. ‘Broadway’s Colors’. New York Times (23 June 1929): sec. 5, 21.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Brown, Simon. ‘The Spectacle of Reality and British National Cinema’. In AHRB ­Centre for British Film and Television Studies. Birbeck: University of London, 2002. http://www.bftv.ac.uk/projects/dufaycolor.htm#_ftnref66. Brunius, Jacques Bernard. ‘Plaidoyer pour le noir et blanc.’ Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (15 September 1926): 21–22. ––. ‘Pour le noir et blanc.’ Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (15 January 1927). ––. ‘Pour le noir et blanc.’ Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (15 February 1927). ––. En marge du cinéma français. Paris: Arcanes, 1954. Buchan, Suzanne E, Ed. Pervasive Animation. New York: Routledge, 2013. AFI Film Reader. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the ­Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [1757]. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958. Calkins, Earnest Elmo and Ralph Holden. Modern Advertising. New York: Appleton & Co., 1905. Canosa, Michele. ‘Per una teoria del restauro cinematografico’, in Storia del cinema mondiale, edited by Gian Piero Brunetta, 1069-1118. Torino: Einaudi, Vol. V, 2001. ‘Captain Scott’s Men. Science with the Camera. Terra Nova’s Start Tomorrow’. Daily Mail (31 May 1910). MS1453/39/1-2 Thomas H. Manning Polar Archive, Cambridge. Catanese, Rossella. Lacune binarie. Il restauro dei film e le tecnologie digitali. Roma: Bulzoni Editore, 2013. Catanese, Rossella, Guy Edmonds, and Bregt Lameris. ‘Hand-Painted Abstractions: Experimental Color in the Creation and Restoration of Ballet mécanique’. The Moving Image 1 (2015): 92–98. Cati, Alice. Pellicole di ricordi. Film di famiglia e memorie private (1926–1942). Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2009. Cauda, Ernesto. La cinematografia per tutti: guida pratica per cinedilettanti. Roma: A.C.I.E.P., 1931. Chalfen, Richard M. Snapshot Versions of Life. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987. Cherchi Usai, Paolo. ‘Le miracle du Chronochrome’. Cinémathèque 3 (Spring-Summer 1993): 83–91. ––. ‘The Color of Nitrate. Some Factual Observations on Tinting and Toning Manuals for Silent Films’. In Silent Film, edited by Richard Abel, 27-30. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996. ––. Silent Cinema: An Introduction. London: BFI, 2000. Chevreul, Michel Eugène. De la loi du contraste simultané des couleurs et de l’assortiment des objets colorés. Paris: Pitois-Levrault, 1839.

Bi b lio g raph y

| 283

Christensen, Thomas. ‘Restoration of Danish Silent Films – in Colour’. Film History. An International Journal 21, no. 2 (2009): 180-183. Clerget, Pierre. ‘Les bases psychologiques de la publicité’. Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées 18 (1907): 266. ––. Manuel d’économie commerciale. Paris: Colin, 1919. ‘Colorful hope’. Motion Picture News (20 February 1926): 894. Cornwell-Clyne, Adrian. Colour Cinematography. Boston: American Photographic Pub. Co., 1937, 1940. Correspondence from George Eastman to Leon Gaumont, 8 April 1921. From the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum. Correspondence from Jules Brulatour to George Eastman, 6 January 1922–19 November 1922. From the George Eastman Legacy Collection, George Eastman Museum. Cowan, Michael. Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde – Advertising – Modernity. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014.

284 |

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Crépin-Etaix, Odile. ‘Le cinéma, et après? Encore du cinéma’. In Le cinéma et après?, edited by Maxime Scheinfeigel. Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010. Croci, Simone, Tunç Aydın, Nikolce Stefanoski, Markus Gross, and Aljoscha Smolic. ‘Advanced Tools and Framework for Digital Film Restoration’, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, Disney Research Zurich, Switzerland, 2015. Unpublished manuscript. Croze, J.-L., ‘Cinéma Sur Ecran – Noir et blanc contre couleurs’. Comoedia (2 February 1927). deCordova, Richard. ‘The Mickey in Macy’s Window: Childhood, Consumerism and Disney Animation’. In Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin, 203–213. New York: Routledge, 1994. Delson, Susan. Dudley Murphy, Hollwyood Wild Card. Minneapolis: University of ­Minnesota Press, 2006. D’haeyere, Hilde. ‘Splashes of Fun and Beauty: Mack Sennett’s Bathing Beauties’. In Slapstick Comedy, edited by Rob King and Tom Paulus, 207–225. London-New York: Routledge, 2010. ––. ‘Technicolor, Multicolor, Sennett-Color’. In Color and the Moving Image: History, Aesthetics, Archive, edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins, 23–36. New York-Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012. ‘Departure of Lord Kelvin’. The New York Times (11 May 1902): 28. Dixon, Robert. Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity: Frank Hurley’s Synchronized Lecture Entertainments.Blackfriars-London: Anthem Press, 2013. ––. ‘What was Travel Writing? Frank Hurley and the Media Contexts of Early ­Twentieth-Century Australian Travel Writing’. Studies in Travel Writing 11 (2007): 59–81.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Doppenberg, Eleanore and Karel Dibbets. ‘Abstract Films and Color’. In Il colore nel cinema muto, edited by Monica Dall’Asta, Guglielmo Pescatore, and Leonardo Quaresima, 216–223. Bologna: Mano, 1996. Dougal, Richard C., Clive A. Greated, and Alan E. Marson. ‘Then and Now: James Clerk Maxwell and Colour’. Optics and Laser Technology 38 (2006): 215. ‘Doug’s Colorful Opus’. Motion Picture News (20 March 1926): 238. Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. Microfilms 5840–5848, Press clippings, Correspondence, Pictures, Dirigible Project Files (1944–1954), and Scrapbooks. Dreiser, Theodore. The Color of a Great City [1923]. Albany, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996. Dréville, Jean. ‘Metropolis’. Cinégraphie (15 November 1927): 51–52. Dubois, Philippe. ‘Hybridations et métissages. Les mélanges du noir-et-blanc et de la couleur’. In La couleur en cinéma, edited by Jacques Aumont, 74–92. Paris: Ciné-

| 285

mathèque Française, 1995. Duclair-Northy. Pour bien tourner. Guide des cinégraphiste amateur. Paris: Lemonnier, 1924. ‘Eastman Demonstrates new Color Process’. Moving Picture World (4 March 1922): 44. ‘Eastman Theatre Will Open September 4’. Exhibitors Trade Review, 2 September 1922, 907. Eastman, George. ‘Letter to Charles Urban’. (6 February 1912), National Media Museum, Charles Urban Papers Box 1, 91. Eckert, Charles. ‘The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window’. In Fabrications, edited by Jaine Gaines and Charlotte Herzog, 100–121. New York: Routledge, 1990. Ede, François (2013): ‘Un épisode de l’histoire de la couleur au cinéma. Le procédé Keller-Dorian et les films lenticulaires’. In: 1895 Special Issue. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze. Revue de l’association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinema (2013): 187–202. Eder, Josef Maria. Ausführliches Handbuch der Photographie. Halle: Wilhelm Knapp, 1892. ‘Educational to Offer Advance Fashions’. Motion Picture News, (2 January 1926): 37. Elsaesser, Thomas. ‘Dada/Cinema?’. In Dada and Surrealist Film, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli, 13–27. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. ––. Weimar Cinema and After: Germany’s Historical Imaginary. London: Routledge, 2000. Endres, Johannes. ‘‘‘Primordial Plant” and “Blue Flower”: Goethe and Romanticism’. Goethe e la Pianta. Natura, Scienza e Arte, 93–100. Covegno-Palermo: Università degli Studi di Palermo, University Lübek, 2006. Endres, Kathleen L. Women’s Periodicals in the United States Consumer Magazines. ­Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Bi b lio g raph y

Enticknap, Leo. Moving Image Technology: from Zoetrope to Digital. London-New York: Wallflower Press, 2005. Epardaud, Edward. ‘Pirate Noir, Le.’ Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (1 October 1926). Evans, Delight. ‘A Broadway Farmerette’. Photoplay (November 1921): 42. Everett, Wendy. ‘Colour in Cinema: A Musical Phenomenon?’. In Cinéma et couleur. Film and Colour, edited by Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard, 347–357. Paris: ­Houdiard, 2009. Exhibition Catalogue. City of Hull Municipal Art Gallery, 1914. ‘Exploding Myths about Making Colored Pictures’. The Film Spectator, 28 April 1928. Fairbanks, Douglas. ‘Piraterie en Couleurs’. Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (1 February 1927): 10. Farinelli, Gian Luca and Nicola Mazzanti. Il cinema ritrovato. Teoria e metodologia del restauro cinematografico. Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1994. Farinotti, Luisella. ‘Piero Portaluppi’. In Il cinema degli architetti, edited by Vincenzo

286 |

Trione, 182–185. Milan: Johan & Levi Editore, 2014. ––. ‘Pensare per immagini. Il (foto)amatore come figura della modernità estetica’. In Fotografia e culture visuali del XXI secolo. La svolta iconica e l’Italia, edited by Lorenzo Marmo and Enrico Menduni, special issue of Quaderni di Imago 1 (2016). Farinotti, Luisella and Elena MosconiE, Eds. ‘Il metodo e la passione. Cinema amatoriale e film di famiglia in Italia’, special issue, Comunicazioni sociali 3 (2005). Faure, Jacques. L’entretien et l’exploitation du cinéma. Comment on tourne, comment on fabrique, comment on exploit un film. Paris: Éditions de ‘Sciences et Voyages’, [192?]. Favre, Louis. La Musique des couleurs et le cinéma. Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1927. ‘Featured Releases’. Movie Makers (January 1935): 6. Fernstrom, Ray. ‘Introducing Dunning Color’. International Photographer (November 1936): 10, 28, 30. Fescourt, Henri. ‘Expériences’. Cinégraphie 4 (December 1927): 60. Fettinger, Theodore S. ‘Creative Force in Advertising: Opinions and Beliefs Concerning Retail Advertising’. Signs of the Times (December 1908): n.p. The Film Daily (1 January 1928): 7. Finamore, Michelle Tolini. Hollywood Before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ‘Flashes From the Eastern Stars’. Motion Picture Classic (October 1924): 54. Flichy, Patrice. Une histoire de la communication moderne. Espace public et vie privée. Paris: La Découverte, 1991. Flueckiger, Barbara. Timeline of Historical Film Colors, 2012; 2013 [Online]. Accessed 10 July 2016. Available from: http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors Flueckiger, Barbara. Visual Effects. Filmbilder aus dem Computer. Marburg: Schüren, 2008.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

––. ‘Material Properties of Historical Film in the Digital Age’. Necsus 1, no. 2 (2012). Accessed 7 March 2016. http://www.necsus-ejms.org/material-properties-ofhistorical-film-in-the-digital-age/ ––. ‘Color Analysis for the Digital Restoration of Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari’. The ­Moving Image 15, no. 1 (2015): 22-43. Fossati, Giovanna. ‘How to Live with Simulated Colours (and Be Happy)’. In Disorderly Order. Colours in Silent Film. The 1995 Amsterdam Workshop, edited by Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996. ––. From Grain to Pixel. The Archival Life of Film in Transition, 117–123. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. ––. ‘Obsolescence and Film Restoration: The Case of Colored Silent Films’. In Conserver l’art contemporain à l’ère de l’obsolescence technologique, edited by Cécile Dazord and Marie-Hélène Breuil, 102-106. Technè, Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France. Paris: Flammarion, 2013. ––. ‘The Archival Life of Early Color Films. Restoration and Presentation’. In Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, edited by Tom Gunning, Joshua Yumibe, Giovanna ­Fossati, and Jonathon Rosen, 41-53. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Frappat, Marie. “‘L’école bolonaise” de restauration des films’. In L’avenir de la mémoire. Patrimoine, restauration, réemploi cinématographiques, edited by André Habib and Michel Marie, 39–45. Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2013. Freeman, Judi. ‘Léger’s Ballet mécanique’. In Dada and Surrealist Film, edited by Rudolf E. Kuenzli, 28–45. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. French, Mary McKenzie. ‘The Motion Picture: Yesterday and Today’. Visual Education 3 no. 4 (April 1922). Frey, Franziska. ‘Untersuchung des Stabilitatsverhaltens von fotografischen Farbmaterialien’. PhD Thesis. ETH Zürich, 1994. ‘Frocks From Callot and Poiret’. Women’s Wear Daily (10 November 1925): 38. Gage, John. Colour and Culture, Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction. Thames & Hudson, 1993. ––. Color in Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Gaumont, Léon. ‘Gaumont Chronochrome Process Described by the Inventor’. Journal of the SMPE (January 1959). ––. A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television, edited by Raymond Fielding, 65–67. Berkeley-Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1967. Gauthier, Christophe. La passion du cinéma: cinéphiles, ciné-clubs et salles spécialisées à Paris de 1920 à 1929. Paris: Association française de recherché sur l’histoire du cinéma. École nationale des chartes, 1999. Genaitay, Sonia and Bryony Dixon. ‘Early Colour Film Restoration at the BFI National Archive’. Journal of British Cinema and Television 7, no. 1 (2010): 131-146.

Bi b lio g raph y

| 287

Gérin, Octave-Jacques. La publicité suggestive: théorie et techniques [1911], in collaboration with Camille Espinadel, 2nd edition. Paris: Dunod, 1927. Gervais, Thierry and Nathalie Boulouch. Léon Gimpel: les audaces d’un photographe, 1873–1948. Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2008. Ghali, Noureddine. L’avant-garde cinématographique en France dans les années vingt. Idées, conceptions, théories, edited by Yumiko Ishikawa and Christian Lebrat, postface by Dominique Noguez. Paris: Éditions Paris Expérimental, 1995. Gilbreth, Frank B. Motion Study. New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1911. Gilbreth, Frank. B. and Lillian Gilbreth. ‘Classifying the Elements of Work: Methods of Analyzing Work in Seventeen Subdivisions’. Management and Administration 8:2 (August 1924): 151–154. ––. ‘Applications of Motion Study: Its Use in Developing the Best Methods of Work’. Management and Administration 8:3 (September 1924): 295–297. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Theory of Colours [1810], translated by Charles Lock

288 |

Eastlake. London: John Murray, 1840. Goodman, Ezra. ‘Flash-Back to Griffith’. In D.W. Griffith Interviews, edited by Anthony Slide. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Gordon, Marsha. ‘Lenticular Spectacles: Kodacolor’s Fit in the Amateur Arsenal’. Film History 25.4 (2013): 36–61. Gréville, Edmond. Trente-Cinq Ans Dans La Jungle Du Cinéma. Lyon: Institut Lumière, 1995. Gromaire, Marcel. ‘Idées d’un peintre sur le cinéma’ [1919]. In Intelligence du cinématographe, edited by Marcel L’Herbier, 239–318. Paris: Corrêa, 1946. Gronostayski, G. Le cinéma substandard. Muet, sonore, en couleurs, en relief. Paris: J. de Francia Editeur, 1938. Gschwind, Rudolf. ‘Restoration of Movie Films by Digital Image Processing’. In Preserve Then Show, edited by Dan Nissen, 168–178. Copenhagen: Danish Film Institute, 2002. Guerin, Frances. Through Amateur Eyes: Film and Photography in Nazi Germany. ­Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Gunning, Tom. ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avantgarde’. Wide Angle 8.3/4 (1986): 63–70. ––. D.W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph. Urbana-Chicago, IL: University of Illinois, 1991. ––. ‘A Slippery Topic: Colour as Metaphor, Intention or Attraction?’ In Disorderly Order: Colours in Silent Film, edited by Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk, 39–47, 39. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996. ––. ‘Colourful Metaphors: The Attraction of Colour in Early Silent Cinema’. Living Pictures 2 (2003): 4–13.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Gunning, Tom, Giovanna Fossati, Joshua Yumibe, and Jonathon Rosen. Fantasia of Colour in Early Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015. Gunther, Thomas Michael. ‘The spread of photography. Commissions, advertising, publishing’. In A New History of Photography, edited by Michel Frizot, 555–580. Köln: Könemann, 1998. Hagener, Malte. Moving Forward, Looking Back: The European Avant-garde and the Invention of Film Culture, 1919–1939. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007. Halter, Albert and Annette Haxton. ‘Paul Dermée and the Poster in France in the 1920s: Jean d’Ylen as “Maître de l’AfficheModerne”‘. Journal of Design History, 1 (1992): 39–51. The Hamilton Daily News (9 February 1925): 9. Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold. Early Discourses on Colour and Cinema: Origins, Functions, Meanings. Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 2006. ––. ‘Symptoms of Desire. Colour, Costume, and Commodities in Fashion Newsreels of the 1910s and 1920s’. Film History, 2 (2009): 107–121. Harrison, Louis Reeves. ‘Studio Saunterings’. Moving Picture World (17 February 1912): 557. Hediger, Vinzenz. ‘The Original Is Always Lost: Film History, Copyright Industries and the Problem of Reconstruction’. In Cinefilia: Movies, Love and Memory, edited by Marijke de Valck and Malte Hagener, 135-152. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. Helmholtz, Hermann von. Optique physiologique [1856–1867], translated by Émile Javal and N.-Th. Klein, 2 vols. Paris: Masson et fils, 1867. ––. ‘L’optique et la peinture’. In Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, Principes scientifiques des beaux-arts: essais et fragments de théorie, 169–223. Paris: Baillière, 1878. Hémet, D.C.A. Traité pratique de publicité commerciale et industrielle, 2 vols. Paris: Bureau Technique de ‘La Publicité’: 1922. Henri-Robert, J. La pratique de la cinématographie d’amateurs. De la prise de vues à la projection. Paris: Publications photographiques et cinématographiques Paul Montel, 1930. Hertogs, Daan and Nico De Klerk, Eds. Disorderly Order. Colours in Silent Film. The 1995 Amsterdam Workshop. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1996. ‘Higher Art Realized in Eastman Theatre’. Variety (September 1922): 46. Holman, Roger. Cinema 1900/1906. Brussels: FIAF, 1982. ‘Hope Hampton Dazzles Eye as She Poses at “Style Show”; Husband Directs Her’. Rochester Democrat (10 January 1925). ‘Hope Hampton Follows the Paris Dictum for Green’. Women’s Wear Daily (29 September 1925): 31. ‘House Reviews’. Variety (6 January 1926): 34.

Bi b lio g raph y

| 289

Hübl, Arthur Freiherr von. Three-Colour Photography. Three-Colour Printing and the Production of Photographic Pigment Pictures in Natural Colours. London: W.A. Penrose, 1904. Huntford, Roland. ‘Introduction’. In Herbert G. Ponting, The Great White South [1921], i–xii. New York: Cooper Square, 2000. Hurlbert, Anya. ‘The Perceptual Quality of Color’. In Handbook of Experimental Phenomenology, edited by Liliane Albertazzi, 369–394. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Hurley, Frank. The Diaries of Frank Hurley 1912–1941, edited by Robert Dixon and Christopher Lee. London: Anthem Press 2011. ‘Informations’. Science et industries photographiques (1 June 1926): 62. The Illustrated Bamforth Slide Catalogue. London: Magic Lantern Society, 2009. ‘Illustrations in Color in Style Catalogue’. McCall’s Ad-Sheet (April 1927): 8. ‘Irene Castle-Corticelli Work on New Picture’. Women’s Wear Daily (24 August 1926):

290 |

21. Irvine, A. Ray and M. F. Weyman. ‘The Effect on Visual Acuity of Viewing Motion Pictures’. Journal of the American Medical Association (October 1926). Ives, Frederic. Kromskop Color Photography. London: The Photochromoscope Syndicate Limited, 1898. Ishizuka, Karen L. and Patricia R. ZimmermannE, Eds. Mining the Home Movie: Excavations into History and Memory. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2001. Jackson, Victoria. ‘Reviving the Lost Experience of Kinemacolor: David Cleveland and Brian Pritchard’. Journal of British Cinema and Television 7:1 (April 2010): 147–159. ––. ‘The Distribution and Exhibition of Kinemacolor in the UK and the USA 1909– 1916’. PhD diss., University of Bristol, 2011. ––. ‘The Exhibition Context and the Contemporary Significance of Color: The Case of Kinemacolor’. The Moving Image 15, no. 1 (2015): 1–21. Jacobs, Steven. ‘Tableaux Vivants’. In Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts, 88–120. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Jeanne, René. ‘La Controverse de la Couleur.’ Cinéa, Ciné pour tous (15 January 1927): 27. Jones, Aubrey A. Scott’s Forgotten Surgeon: Dr Reginald Koettlitz, Polar Explorer. Dunbeath, Caithness: Whittles Publishing, 2011. Kalmus, Herbert. ‘The Adventure of Technicolor’, Journal of the SMPTE, vol. 67 (December 1958). Kattelle, Alan. Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897–1979. Nashua, NH: Transition Publishing, 2000. Keller, Christine. ‘Die Simulation historischer Filmfärbung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Lichtes moderner Filmprojektion’. MA Thesis. Bern, 2007.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Kelly, Sean. ‘A Dyeing Art. Research and Documentation as Means of Authenticity in Applied Colour Restoration’. Unpublished MA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2012. Kerr, Walter. The Silent Clowns [1975]. New York: Da Capo Press, 1980. Kindem, Gorham. ‘The Demise of Kinemacolor: Technological, Legal, Economic, and Aesthetic Problems in Early Color Cinema History’. Cinema Journal 20, no. 2 (1981): 3–14. Kinemacolor advertisement, 1911. National Media Museum, Bradford UK. King Features Syndicate. ‘Hubert cartoon’. New York Journal-American (2 February 1946): n.p, Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. King, Rob. ‘“Sound Came Along and Out Went the Pies” The American Slapstick Short and the Coming of Sound’. In A Companion to Film Comedy, edited by Andrew Horton and Joanna E. Rapf, 61–84. Chicester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Klein, Adrian Bernard. Colour-Music, the Art of Light. London: C. Lockwood, 1926. Knowles, Kim. A Cinematic Artist. The Films of Man Ray. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009. Kracauer, Siegfried. ‘Lichtreklame’. Frankfurter Zeitung (15 January 1928): n.p. Kross, Annike. ‘Die Simulation von Filmfärbungen und -tonungen nach dem sogenannten Desmet Verfahren’. [In German] Unpublished MA thesis, Fachhochschule für Technik und Wirtschaft, Berlin, 2006. ‘L’activité Cinégraphique’, Cinea – Ciné pour tous (1 April 1926): 1. Lameris, Bregt. ‘Colourful Projections: Bauhaus Farbenlichtspiele and Their Various Reconstructions.’ In At the Borders of (Film) History. Archaeology, Temporality, Theories. Udine: Forum Editirice Universitaria Udinese SRL, 2015. Langley, Russell. Le guide du Kodachrome. Paris: Éditions Prisma, [1967]. ‘Lasky Chiefs Working on Color Process’. Moving Picture World (9 February 1918). Laville, C. L’Imprimé de publicité, 3 vols. Paris: Jacoub et Cie, 1928. Lawder, Standish D. The Cubist Cinema. New York: New York University Press, 1975. Layton, James. ‘Two-Color Kodachrome at George Eastman Museum – History of Two-Color Kodachrome’. George Eastman Museum / International Museum of Photography and Film, L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation Certificate Program, 2009, unpublished. Layton, James and David Pierce. Dawn of Technicolor: 1915–1935. Rochester, NY: George Eastman Museum, 2015. Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon, 1993. Léger, Fernand. Fonctions de la peinture. Paris: Gonthier, 1965. ––. Functions of Painting, edited by Edward F. Fry, translated by Alexandra Anderson. New York: The Viking Press, 1973. Leigh, Douglas. ‘This Business of Selling Big Spectaculars’. Signs of the Times (December 1934): 18.

Bi b lio g raph y

| 291

––. ‘New York “Agog:” Epok: The Greatest Advertising Since Radio’ [c. 1937]. Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. ––. Letter to US Consulate, re: Karl Ullstein, 6 September 1940, Correspondence File, Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. ‘Léon Moussinac, Homme de Passions, Intellectuel Communiste.’ L’Humanité, 2016. Accessed January 14. http://www.humanite.fr/leon-moussinac-homme-depassions-intellectuel-communiste-563915. Lewin, A. ‘Rome Wasn’t Filmed in a Day’. Premiére 13, no. 8 (May 2000): 44. ‘Library Color Films’. Movie Makers (September 1933). Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. The Eloquence of Color, Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age [1989], translated by Emily McVarish. Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford: University of California Press, 1993.

292 |

Liebers, Arthur. ‘Animated Lighting to Sell The Theatre’. Box Office (25 January 1947): n.p. Liu, Jianli, Edwin Lughofer, and Xianyi Zeng. ‘Could linear model bridge the gap between low-level statistical features and aesthetic emotions of visual textures?’. Neurocomputing 168 (2015): 947–960. Loiperdinger, Martin. ‘Missing Believed Lost: The Film Narrator, Then and Now’. In Performing New Media 1890–1915, edited by Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe, 87–94. New Barnet, United Kingdom: John Libbey Publishing 2014. Low, Rachel. The History of British Film 1914–1918, vol. 3. New York: Routledge, 1997. Luckiesh, Matthew. ‘Impressions Received Through Light and Color’. Signs of the Times, 61. 2 (1929): 18. Lyons, Leonard. ‘The Lyons Den’ (c. 1939). Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. Mabberley, Bob, Paul Read, and Sonja Snoek. ‘Recording and Reproducing the Original Tints and Tones of Quo Vadis. A Technical Case Study’. In Tutti i colori del mondo. Il colore nei mass media tra 1900 e 1930, edited by Luciano Berriatúa et al., 151-155. Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis, 1998. ‘Mack Sennett’s Color for Industrial Films’. Variety (4 October 1930a): 1. ‘Mack Sennett and Talkers’. New York Times (30 November 1930): X6. ‘Make the Movies Work For You’. McCall’s Ad-Sheet (December 1928): 4. Marinone, Isabelle. ‘Qu’est-ce que le cinéma « Humain » …?’ 1895. Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze. Revue de l’association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 43 (June 2004): 5–14 Martin, H.C. ‘Enlivening Cards with Color’. Signs of the Times (October 1929): 104, 110–111.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Martin, Marc. Les pionniers de la publicité. Aventures et aventuriers de la publicité en France (1836–1939). Paris: Nouveau Monde, 2012. Maxwell, James C. ‘Experiments on Colour, as Perceived by the Eye with Remarks on Colour Bindness’. Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 21, no. 2 (1857): 275–298. Mazzanti, Nicola. ‘The Colours of the Film d’Arte Italiana’. In Tutti i colori del mondo. Il colore nei mass media tra 1900 e 1930, edited by Luciano Berriatúa et al., 141-146. Reggio Emilia: Edizioni Diabasis, 1998. ––. ‘Footnotes. (For a glossary of film restoration)’. In Restauro, conservazione e distruzione dei film, edited by Luisa Comencini and Matteo Pavesi, 23-31. Milan: Quaderni Fondazione cineteca italiana, 2001. ––. ‘Colours, audiences, and (dis)continuity in the “cinema of the second period’’’. Film History 21, no. 1 (2009): 67–93. ––. ‘Raising the Colours (Restoring Kinemacolor)’. In This Film is Dangerous: A Celebration of Nitrate Film, edited by Roger Smither and Catherine A. Surowiec, 123–125. Brussels: FIAF, 2002. ‘McCall Fashion Color Film Whets “Clothes Appetite” with Parisian Styles’. McCall’s Ad-Sheet (January 1926): 1. McKernan, Luke. Charles Urban, Pioneering the Non-Fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2013. McQuade, Jas S. ‘Chicago Letter’. Moving Picture World (9 September 1911): 698. Mees, C.E. Kenneth. ‘Screen-Plate Colour Photography’. Journal of the Society for Arts 56, no. 2878 (1908): 195–205. ––. The Photography of Coloured Objects. Croydon: Wratten & Wainwright, 1909. ––. ‘Three-Colour Kinematography’. Nature, 87, no. 2191 (26 October 1911): 556. ––. ‘The Organization of Industrial Scientific Research’. Science, 43, no. 1118 (2 June 1916): 763–773. ––. ‘A Photographic Research Laboratory’. Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 68, no. 3539 (1920): 695–705. ––. From Dry Plates to Ektachrome Film: A Story of Photographic Research. New York: Ziff-Davis, 1961. Mees, C.E. Kenneth and Samuel Sheppard. Investigations on the Theory of the Photographic Process. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907. Millar, Pat. ‘A Person Separate: H.G. Ponting – Photographer on Scott’s last Expedition’. The Polar Journal, 1, no. 1 (2011): 76–86. Misek, Richard. Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Colour. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Mitry, Jean. Histoire de cinéma muet. 3 (1923–1930). Paris: Editions universitaires, 1973. Molinari, Luca and Fondazione Piero PortaluppiE, Eds. Piero Portaluppi: linea errante nell’architettura del Novecento. Milan: Skira, 2003.

Bi b lio g raph y

| 293

Moritz, William. ‘Americans in Paris. Man Ray and Dudley Murphy’. In Lovers of ­Cinema: the First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945, edited by Jan-Christopher Horak, 118–136. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995. Morris, Mel. ‘Neon Will Soon Dominate as the Light of the World’. Signs of the Times (October 1927): 49. Moussinac, Léon. ‘Noir et blanc.’ L’Humanité (26 March 1927): 4. Mulvey, Laura. ‘A Clumsy Sublime’. Film Quarterly, 60, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 3. Mundy, Rob. ‘Pioneering Antarctic Photography: Herbert Ponting and Frank Hurley’, The Polar Journal, 4, no. 2 (2014), 389–406. Namias, Rodolfo. La tecnica e la pratica dei viraggi moderni nelle prove su carta, nei film cinematografici e nelle diapositive per proiezione fissa, stereoscopia e ornamento. Milan: Il Progresso fotografico, 1928. ––. La fotografia in colori. L’autocromia, i processi fotomeccanici in colori, la cinematografia in colori. Milan: Il Progresso fotografico, 1930.

294 |

Neale, Steve. Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Color. London: Basingstoke-­ Macmillan Education, 1985. New Castle News (13 April 1925): 11. ‘Newspaper Opinions on New Pictures’. Motion Picture News (6 February 1926): 727. ‘Newspaper Opinions on New Pictures’. Motion Picture News (3 April 1926): 1528. ‘Novelties at the R.P.S’. Photogram, 1896. Nowotny, Robert. The Way of all Flesh Tones: A History of Color Motion Picture Processes, 1895–1929. New York: Garland, 1983. Nye, David. ‘Electricity and Signs’. In The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, edited by Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, 211–217. New York: Routledge, 2004. O’Barr, William M. ‘The Management of Brands’. Advertising & Society Review 8.1 (2007), Web. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/212243 Accessed Feb 1 2016. Odin, Roger E, Ed. Le film de famille: usage public, usage privé. Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1995. ––, Ed. ‘Le cinéma en amateur’, special issue, Communications, 68 (Paris: Seuil, 1999): 1–301. ––. ‘Il cinema amatoriale’. In Storia del cinema mondiale. Teorie, strumenti, memorie. Parte I, edited by Gian Piero Brunetta, 319–345. Turin-Milan: Einaudi-Il Sole24ORE, 2009. ‘Old Gold Spectacular Provides New Free Show on Broadway’. Signs of the Times (August 1938): 13–15. Press clippings, Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. Oliveira, Joao S. de. ‘Black-and-White in Colour’. In This Film is Dangerous. A Celebration of Nitrate Film, edited by Roger Smither, 117-122. Brussels: FIAF, 2002. Olmeta, Patrick. La Cinémathèque française: De 1936 à nos jours. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2000.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Op den Kamp, Claudy, Franziska Heller, David Pfluger, and Barbara Flueckiger. ‘“Digital Desmet”: Translating Early Applied Colours’. The Moving Image 16, no. 1 (2016): 106–124. Osborne, Hannah. ‘History of Traffic Lights: 100th Anniversary of the First Electric Traffic System’. International Business Times (5 August 2014). Accessed 2- April 2016. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/history-traffic-lights-100th-anniversary-firstelectric-traffic-system-1459680. Otago Daily Times, issue 17892 (24 March 1920). ‘Paris Creations’. Motion Picture News (7 February 1925): 580. ‘Parisian Importations Shown in July McCall Patterns’. McCall’s Ad-Sheet (June 1925): 1. Parth, Kerstin, Oliver Hanley, and Thomas Ballhausen, Eds. Works in Progress. Digital Film Restoration Within Archives. Vienna: Synema, 2013. Pastoureau, Michel. Blue: The History of a Color. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

| 295

Press, 2001. ––. Black. The History of a Color. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Peterson, Jennifer Lynn. Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. ––. ‘Lyrical Education: Music and Colour in Early Non-fiction Film’. In Performing New Media 1890–1915, edited by Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe, 186–192. New Barnet, United Kingdom: John Libbey Publishing 2014. Pictures and the Picturegoer (19 June 1915). Pierce, David. ‘Silent Movies and the Kodascope Libraries’. American Cinematographer LXX, no. 1 (January 1989): 36–40. ––. ‘The Black Pirate’ entry, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 33, Pordonone, (4–11 October 2014):102 ‘Plan Fashion Film’. The Film Daily (17 July 1925): 2. ‘Poiret Fashions in Kinemacolor’. Moving Picture World (October–December 1913): 389. Ponting, Herbert G. Letters, Thomas H Manning Polar Archive, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. ––. British Antarctic Expedition 1910–1913, vol.7, MS/280/28/7 ––. Letter to E.A. Wilson (27 October 1912), MS964/12; D. ––. Letter to Mr R. Hinks, Royal Geographical Society (7 December 1917), MS 964/10/6. ––. Letter to Apsley Cherry Garrard (17 December 1917), MS559/102/2. ––. Letter to Frank Debenham (15 June 1926). ––. Letter to Frank Debenham (30 October 1931). ––. Letter to Frank Debenham (20 May 1933). ––. Letter to Frank Debenham (15 August 1933).

Bi b lio g raph y

Ponting, Herbert G. ‘Mr Herbert G. Ponting’s Cinema Lecture “With Captain Scott in the Antarctic”‘, MS-papers-1225, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand. ––. With Captain Scott in the Antarctic, Animal and Bird Life in the South Polar Regions, cinema programme, Eph-B-Antarctica (1914), PR-08-0409, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand. ––. Lantern Slide Collection, Royal Geographical Society, RGS-IBG, LS/834. ––. The Great White South [1921], New York: Cooper Square, 2000. ––. The Great White Silence, cinema theatre programme, The Bournemouth Electric (11 August 1924): 8. Portsmouth Daily Times (7 March 1927): 3. ‘Pour le noir et le blanc,’ L’Humanité (16 February 1927): 4. Praz, Mario. The Romantic Agony, 2nd Edition, translated by Angus Davidson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

296 |

‘Production papers of Strange Birds’ [n.d., ca. 1930]. Folder 619, Mack Sennett Papers collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and ­Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. Read, Paul. ‘Unnatural Colours. An Introduction to Colouring Techniques in Silent Era Movies’. Film History 21.1 (2009): 9–46. Read, Paul and Mark-Paul Meyer, Eds. Restoration of Motion Picture Film. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000. Reco Advertisement. Cover, Signs of the Times, 50 (4 August 1925): 1. Redway, Sara. ‘About Pirates and Pictures’. Motion Picture Magazine (June 1926): 27, 94, 97. Renoir, Jean. Entretiens et propos. Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1979. ‘Review of A Stormy Sea’. Moving Picture World (3 April 1909): 404. Reynolds Electric Co. Untitled Advertisement. Signs of the Times (March 1917): 25. Ribbat, Christoph. Flickering Light: A History of Neon. New York: Reaktion, 2011. Richmond Theatre programme listing, Richmond Guardian, 17 February 1917. Roberts, Richard M. and Steve Rydzewski. ‘Sennett in the Kodascope Library,’ 2016 conversation on the Silent Comedy Mafia website. Accessed 14 June 2016. http:// www.silentcomedymafia.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1711. Rochlin, Robert. ‘Animated Advertising’. The Cornell Engineer (1944): 10–11, 22. Roderick, Ryan T. A History of Motion Picture Color Technology. London: Focal Press, 1977. Roque, Georges. ‘La Couleur: simultanée et successive’. Fotogenia, 1 (1995): 310. ––. Art et science de la couleur. Chevreul et les peintres de Delacroix à l’abstraction. Nîmes, France: Chambon, 1997. Rosen, Philip E. ‘Belives Color Wll Not Aid Dramatic Cinematography’. American Cinematographer (January 1927): 4.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Rothacker, Watterson R. ‘Motion Pictures in Advertising: Possibilities of this Medium as an Active Aid in Stimulating Interest and Sales for a Product’. Signs of the Times 14. 59 (March 1911): 4. Ruedel, Ulrich, Daniela Currò, and Claudy Op den Kamp. ‘Towards a More Accurate Preservation of Color. Heritage, Research and the Film Restoration Laboratory’. In Color and the Moving Image. History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive, edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins, 219-229. New York: Routledge, 2012. Ruskin, John. The Elements of Drawing; in three Letters to Beginners. London: Smith, Elder & co., 1857. Ryan, Roderick. A History of Motion Picture Color Technology. London: Focal Press, 1977. Santi, Mirco. ‘Petit, simple, bon marché. Storia, tecnologia e pratiche d’archivio del Pathé Baby’. Doctoral thesis, International Research Doctorate in Audiovisual Studies: Cinema, Music and Communication, University of Udine, 2010–2011. Schallert, Edwin and Alza Schallert. ‘Hollywood High Lights’. Picture-Play Magazine (December 1925): 68. ––. ‘Yo, Ho, and a Bottle of Rum’. Picture Play (February 1926). Schneider, Alexandra. ‘Die Stars sind wir’: Heimkino als filmische Praxis. Marburg: Schüren, 2004. Schwartz, Vanessa R. Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Scott, Robert Falcon. Journals, Captain Scott’s Last Expedition, edited by Max Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Scott, Walter Dill. The Theory of Advertising. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1903. ‘SCREEN, HERE & THERE: New Color Pictures’. New York Times (26 February 1922): 74. Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts. New York: Sagamore Press, 1957. ––. An Hour with the Movies and the Talkies [1929]. New York: Arno Press, 1973. ‘Sennett-Color, Nature’s Reflection’. The Film Daily (28 May 1930c). Sennett, Mack. ‘Letter of Reference for C.W. McCann’, 10 December 1930. Author’s Collection. ‘Shooting script of Run, Girl, Run’ [n.d., ca. 1927]. Folder 524, Mack Sennett Papers collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. ‘Shooting script of The Girl From Everywhere’ [n.d., ca. 1928]. Folder 220, Mack Sennett papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. ‘Shooting script of The Swim Princess’ [n.d., ca. 1928]. Folder 635, Mack Sennett Papers collection, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. Signs of the Times (May 1922): 85. Author’s note in MS. of Signs and Wonders, Tama Starr Papers, Artkraft Strauss Collection, New York Public Library.

Bi b lio g raph y

| 297

Silverman, Edward B. ‘Warner Bros. Big 115 Ton Electric.’ Signs of the Times (March 1930): 36–37, 106. Smith, G. Albert. ‘Animated Photographs in Natural Colours’. Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 57, no. 2925 (1908): 70–76. Sobchack, Vivian. ‘The Line and The Animorph or “Travel is More Than Just A to B”‘. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 3.3 (2008): 251–265. Sobieszek, Robert A. The Art of Persuasion. A History of Advertising Photography. New York: Abrams, 1988. ––. Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Sorlin, Pierre. Les fils de Nadar. Le ‘siécle’ de l’image analogique. Paris: Nathan, 1997. Starr, Tama and Edward Hayman. Signs and Wonders: The Spectacular Marketing of America. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Stern, Douglas. The Interpersonal World of the Child: A View from Psychoanalysis and

298 |

Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic, 2000. Stone, Melinda and Dan StreibleE, Eds. Small-Gauge and Amateur Film, special issue, Film History, 15.2 (2003). Street, Sarah,= and Josh Yumibe. ‘The Temporalities of Intermediality: Colour in Cinema and Arts of the 1920s’. Early Popular Visual Culture 11, no. 2 (2013): 140–157. Streible, Dan, Martina Roepke, and Anke MeboldE, Eds. Nontheatrical Film, special issue. Film History, 19.4 (2007). Swan, W.B. ‘Preach “Color and Motion” to Electric Sign Salesman’. Reco Advertisement, Signs of the Times, 50 (4 August 1925): 42. ‘Tentative Report of the Optics Committee’. Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, No. 12 (May 1921): 28–29. Tepperman, Charles. ‘Color Unlimited: Amateur Color Cinema in the 1930s’. In Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive, edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street, and Liz Watkins, 138–149. New York-London: Routledge, 2013. Tell, Darcy. Times Square Spectacular: Lighting Up Broadway. New York: SmithsonianHarper Collins, 2007. Timeline of Historical Film Colors: http://zauberklang.ch/filmcolors/cat/chromogenicmonopack/The Times (28 May 1910): 8. Thomas, David B. The First Colour Motion Pictures. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969. Thorp, Dunham. ‘How Fairbanks Took the Color out of Color’. Motion Picture Classic (May 1926). Townsend, Derek. Filming in colour. London: Fountain Press, 1960. Troland, L.T. ‘Some Psychological Aspects of Natural Color Motion Pictures’. Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers XI, no. 32 (1927): 680–698. Troland memos. Technicolor Corporate Archive, George Eastman Museum.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Trumpy, Giorgio. ‘Dust BW. Detection of Dust and Scratches on Photographic Silverhalide (black/white) Material by Polarized Darkfield Illumination’. PhD Thesis, University of Basel, 2013. Trumpy, Giorgio and Barbara Flueckiger. ‘Light Source Criteria for Digitizing Color Films’, Proceedings of the Colour and Visual Computing Symposium 2015, CVCS, Gjøvik Norway, August 2015, IEEE. ‘Twosome’. The Saturday Evening Post (30 June 1928): 134. Vance, Jeffrey. Douglas Fairbanks. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Venturini, Simone. Il restauro cinematografico. Principi, teorie, metodi. Udine, Italy: Campanotto, 2006. The Waco News-Tribune (23 January 1927): 5. Wall, E.J. History of Three-Color Photography. London: Focal Press, 1970. Ward, Janet. Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Watkins, Liz. ‘Herbert G. Ponting’s Materials and Texts’. In Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive, edited by Simon Brown, Sarah Street, Liz Watkins, 230–242. New York-London: Routledge, 2013. Whissel, Kristen. Picturing Modernity: Traffic, Technology and the Silent Cinema. ­Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Wilkening, Anke. ‘Die Restaurierung von Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari’. Beiträge zur Erhaltung von Kunst- und Kulturgut, Verband der Restauratoren, Issue 2 (2014): 27-47. William J. Hammer Papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. ‘Will Run All Season’. Wilson on Broadway Column. New York World Telegraph (1 August 1937): n.p. Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903–1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. Wilson, Edward A. Captain Scott’s British South Pole Expedition 1910–13, Catalogue of an Exhibition of Antarctic Sketches & Water Colours, Drawings of Norwegian and Swiss Scenery etc., City of Hull Municipal Art Gallery, April 1914. ––. Southern Sledge Journey – sketchbooks (1911–12) MS797/1-2; BJ, Thomas H Manning Polar Archive, University of Cambridge. ––. Wilson, Edward A. Letter to Mr and Mrs R J Smith. 19 October 1911, MS.559/142/9, Thomas H Manning Polar Archive, University of Cambridge. ––. Wilson, Edward A. Lecture Notes 1910–1913, MS1225/3, Thomas H Manning Polar Archive, University of Cambridge. Winchell, Walter. ‘Walter Winchell on Broadway’. Daily Mirror (1935): n.p. Douglas Leigh Papers. Wrigley Co. ‘The Wrigley Company Returns to Times Square’. Press Release. 19 June 2001. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/19/business/media-business-advertising-aftermore-than-40-years-wrigley-set-for-flashy.html. Accessed Nov 19, 2017.

Bi b lio g raph y

| 299

‘You Never Need a Ticket to the World’s Greatest Show: Animated Sign Productions’. Parade, Washington Post Magazine 8 (1941): 19–23. Douglas Leigh Papers, 1903– 1999. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C. Yumibe, Joshua. ‘Silent Cinema Colour Aesthetics’. In Questions of Colour in Cinema: From Paintbrush to Pixel, edited by Wendy Everett, 41–56. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007. ––. ‘“Harmonious Sensations of Sound by Means of Colors”: Vernacular Colour ­Abstractions in Silent Cinema’. Film History, 2 (2009): 164–176. ––. Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. ––. ‘Colour as Performance in Visual Music, Film Tinting and Digital Painting’. In Performing New Media 1890–1915, edited by Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, and Joshua Yumibe, 293–302. New Barnet, United Kingdom: John Libbey Publishing 2014.

300 |

Yusoff, Kathryn. ‘Configuring the Field: Photography in Early Twentieth-Century Antarctic Exploration.’ In New Spaces of Exploration: Geographies of Discovery in the Twentieth Century, edited by Simon Naylor and James R. Ryan, 52–77. LondonNew York: I B Tauris, 2010. Zimmermann, Patricia R. Reel Families: a Social History of Amateur Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Zola, Émile. Écrits Sur L’art. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to acknowledge the contributions of a number of individuals and institutions that made this book and the conference it derives from possible. First off, both the presenters at the conference and the authors herein have been invaluable and inspiring in countless ways. The EYE Filmmuseum was the perfect venue for our discussions and screenings and thanks go to the staff, especially Sandra den Hamer, Gerdien Smit, Marike Huizinga, Anne van Es, Tessa Janssen, Loes Bouvrie, Hannah van der Poel, and Inge Scheijde. The event was inspired by the 1995 Amsterdam Workshop, and was also by the Leverhulme Trust-funded Research Project Colour in the 1920s: Cinema and Its Intermedial Contexts, as well as by the book project Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, which was launched at the conference. In addition, the following institutions gave their generous support: Screen, Michigan State University, the Universities of Bristol and St. Andrews, and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. We are also grateful for the enthusiasm and editorial guidance for this publication by Amsterdam University Press, in particular from Jeroen Sondervan, Maryse Elliott, and Chantal Nicolaes. Finally, the editorial team applauds and thanks Joshua Wucher in Michigan who provided excellent editorial assistance throughout the production of this book.

| 301

INDEX 90º South (1933): 57

Agfacolor: 33–34, 42, 46 afterimages: 107, 201–202, 215nn24–25

a

Alimi, Benjamin: 262

Aan de kust van Istrië [On Istria’s coast]:

American Society of Cinematographers: 126

242, 248 abstraction: 85, 119, 205, 229

amateur cinema: 34–46, 157, 192

additive processes: see Chronochrome;



cultural and social uses of colour in: 35, 41, 45

Kinemacolor; Technicolor

Italian: 37, 41, 48n9

170–71, 173–74, 188, 199, 202–203,



relationship to early cinema: 45

210

Anckarman, Tina: 262, 265

advertising and colour: 13, 163–68,

aesthetics:

animation: 148, 163–64, 166, 168–70, 172–74



aesthetic theory: 81, 104–105, 119



gender and: 80, 132, 169



in amateur cinema: 39



in slapstick cinema: 135–36, 140



in Romantic tradition: 12, 78–79,



89

Arnheim, Rudolf : 126, 222

intermediality and: 59, 60, 63,

art cinema: 222–24, 231–32

128–131, 197, 204, 211

artificial colouring: see hand colouring,

realism and: 66, 86, 88, 101, 126,

avant-garde cinema: 196, 201, 205–209,

applied colour: 23, 36–38, 52, 59, 65–67, 70n7, 76–78, 81–83, 85–86, 146, 200–201, 242, 245, 247, 250, 252

211, 213n5

132, 186, 222, 228–29, 231 restoration and: 241–42, 250, 264 sensation and: 52, 119 sublime: 80–81 An Affair of the Follies (1927): 190 Agee, James: 127

materiality of: 78, 84



advertising and: 196, 201, 204–205, 210, 212

The Aviator (2004): 122n4

| 303

b

Chromatrope: 119

Bachelard, Gaston: 117

Chronochrome: 110

Les Bains Des Dames De La Cour (1905):

cinema of attractions: 45, 61, 67

131

Cinémathèque française: 224, 266

Balázs, Béla: 126

Clair, René: 205, 224–25, 233n14

Baldassini, Guglielmo: 12, 37–38,

Clark, Nicholas: 114, 116

Ball, Arthur: 102–104

Claude, George: 168, 207

Ballet mécanique (1924): 201, 209–12,

Clerge, Pierre: 197, 199

216n37 Batchelor, David: 80, 231

colour:

affect and meaning: 26–27, 60, 68,

Bazin, André: 84

85, 166, 200, 228

The Black Pirate (1926): 97–101, 103,

as distraction: 12, 40, 99 as promotion: 179–80, 190–92

105, 226–31

304 |

Blotkamp, Hoos: 15, 23, 25, 28

archiving: 19–23, 25, 27, 112,

Blue (1993): 78

221–22, 237–42, 244–45, 249, 261,

Brandi, Cesare: 249

263–69, 273 –78

Brakhage, Stan: 27

cinematography: 12, 33, 39, 66, 127,

British Bamforth & Co: 81

140, 142, 151, 154, 156

Brulatour, Jules: 180–81, 183–84, 191

emotion and: 76, 79, 88–89, 197,

Brunius, Bernard: 14, 223–26, 228–31,

199–202, 211, 228 eye fatigue and: 99–100, 107n8,

223n14 Buchan, Suzanne: 164

201–202

Buell, Lawrence: 80

fashion and: 185–92

Burke, Edmund: 80–81

fading: 166

Burton, Harry Payne: 185

historiography and: 54, 68, 76, 80, 116, 126, 221, 231

c

lyrical function of: 66, 78, 84–85,

Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet

87–88 movement and: 27, 54–55, 57, 78,

of Dr. Caligari, 1920): 243–45 Callier effect: 243–44, 256n19

80–81, 86, 89, 118–21, 148, 170,

The Campus Carmen (1928): 129

174, 230

The Campus Vamp (1928): 138

preservation: 14, 20, 22–26, 47n5,

Cappiello, Leonetto: 202

113, 222, 269–71, 277

Capstaff, John: 155, 180, 182

restoration: 11, 13–15, 29, 57, 67,

Carlos, Michelle: 272–75, 277–78

109–16, 121, 232, 233n14, 238–242,

carnivals: 43, 45

253, 254n2, 262–65, 267–68, 270,

Castle, Irene: 183

272, 277

Cauda, Ernesto: 36



heritage and: 267–68

Chaplin, Charlie: 69, 127, 139, 224

spectacle and: 54, 63, 66, 98,

Chevreul, Michel Eugène: 201

164–66

chromophobia: 11, 41, 80, 231

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

style transfer and: 249, 253

colouring labs: 103, 105, 110, 116, 151, 152, 154–56, 180, 238, 241, 244, 275

RestoGUI: 253

uses of, social: 35, 41

colour appearance: 238, 240, 242,

colourants and dyes:



texture and: 252–53



168–70 colour experiments: 52, 99, 100, 103,



for hand coloring: 60



for stenciling: 75, 78, 252



for tinting: 27, 75, 78, 101, 240, 242–45, 252, 271

107n9, 147–49, 153, 155, 180–81, 213n6, 222, 230

colorant industry: 149–52, 154–56, 183

color consciousness: 40, 97, 99 colour effects: 12, 55, 63, 68, 69n3,

blackened dyes: 97, 102–104, 108n27

250–55



for toning: 27, 36, 75, 78, 240, 243– 45, 252

colour harmony: 100 colour influence and narration:



monochromatic dyes: 27, 85



in amateur cinema: 40



printing process: 102–04, 108n27,



in classical Hollywood cinema: 97, 105

139–40, 154–56, 180–82, 229

symbolism: 36

colour music: 230

colour space: 132, 166, 246, 248, 265

colouring methods: 102, 106n4, 146–56

consumerism: 183–88

colour perception: 14, 64, 101, 111, 118,

Conway Castle (1898): 83

199, 223, 238, 243, 273

von Courten, Angelo: 129

colour pleasure: see affect and meaning

Cowan, Michael: 196, 205

colour prints, pricing: 105

Crary, Jonathan: 198

colour psychology: 85, 148, 197

La Cucaracha (1934): 102

colour reproduction: 12, 34–38, 103, 141, 239–41, 262–64, 271–73

d

colour style:

Dark Road (1921): 77



attractions and: 45, 52, 164, 192,

debayering: 252, 258n37

204

deCordova, Richard: 183



in Italian amateur cinema: 43,

de Groot, Emmy: 22



in slapstick films: see slapstick

de Klerk, Nico: 10



narrative and: 97

de Kuyper, Eric: 24, 222

colour theory:

Delannoy, Thierry: 262



cinema and: 84, 126, 204, 221, 230

Delaunay, Robert: 119, 264



color practice and: 112, 119, 197,

DeMille, Cecil B.: 97, 99

230

de Montparnasse, Kiki: 210



modernity and: 40, 119, 205

Desmet method: 20, 238, 257n33, 267,



photography and: 49



realism and: see aesthetics and realism



273 Desmet, Noël: 20–22, 24, 28, 238, 242, 249–50, 257n33, 267, 273

vision and: 107n8, 201

INDEX

| 305

DIASTOR: 239, 241–42, 244–45, 247–49, 253, 272–74, 277

f

Fairbanks, Douglas: 97, 99–100, 102–

digital colour: 57, 114, 265, 270, 277 digital culture: 9, 121, 157, 237–42, 251, 264, 266–70, 273, 275, 278 digital restoration: 232, 233n14, 238–

306 |

105, 227–28, 231, 234n30 fairy films: 262 Favre, Louis: 230 Feeding the Baby (1895): 83

42, 253, 254n2, 272–78

Fescourt, Henry: 230

scanning and: 245–50, 252–53, 266,

Fettinger, Theodore S.: 167

272–74, 278

Filmliga: 23–24

A Disaster at Sea (1835): 79

Finamore, Michelle Tolini: 190

Dixon, Bryony: 262–63, 265, 269

Fior di Male (1915): 22, 25, 165

Dixon, Robert: 54, 59, 66

fireworks: 43

Don Q, Son of Zorro (1925): 107n9

Flichy, Patrice: 46

The Dressmaker From Paris (1925): 190

Flueckiger, Barbara: 146, 239–40, 245,

Dubois, Philippe: 130, 197, 204

253, 273–74, 276–77

Dufaycolor: 33–34, 46

Føreland, Tone: 262, 271

Dulac, Germaine: 205

Fossati, Giovanna: 10–11, 20, 25, 238,

Dumbo (1941): 168

257n34, 261, 263, 267, 271–75, 278

Dunningcolor: 139–40

The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981):

e

Funny Little Bunnies (1936): 172

77 Eastman, George: 151, 154, 180–81, 183, 191 Eastman Kodak: 13, 34, 114, 116, 121, 139, 151, 154, 156–57, 179, 181,

g

Gamble, William: 149 Gaumont Company: 70n9, 71n24, 85–

183–84, 188

86, 110, 180, 226

Eastmancolor: 114, 116, 121, 139, 156

Genaitay, Sonia: 261, 264, 270

Eckert, Charles: 183

genre:

Edison Manufacturing Company: 83



dance films: 83–84

electrical spectaculars: 165–74



educational film: 68, 85, 138

Emak Bakia (1927): 206



fashion film: 183, 185–92, 215n21

Entr’acte (1924): 205, 206



scenic and nature films: 76–77, 84,

entertainment

137



industry: 23, 137





public: 13, 52–54, 66, 69, 70n7, 131,

Gérin, Octave-Jacques: 198–99, 205

137, 165–67

Gérôme, Jean-Léon: 131

travelogues: 70n7, 75–76, 136

Epardaud, Edmond: 227–28

Gilbreth, Frank B.; 119

EPOK: 172–73

Gilbreth, Lillian: 120

Evans, Delight: 182

Gimpel, Léon: 207 The Girl From Everywhere (1927): 129 The Girl From Nowhere (1928): 129

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

Gladiator (2000): 131



liminal colours: 53–, 54, 58, 60, 66

The Glorious Adventure (1922): 229



painting and: 52, 63, 129–30

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: 79, 90



performance and: 52, 54, 57, 61, 66

Goodman, Nelson: 245



sensationalism and: 52, 61, 67

Les grandes eaux de Versailles (1904): 84



synaesthesia and: 170, 174

The Great White Silence (1924): 57

Ives, Frederic: 147

Griffith, D.W.: 83 Gromaire, Marcel: 200

j

Gude, Oscar: 163, 166–67, 169–70

J’accuse (1919): 270

The Gulf Stream (1899): 79

Jackson, Victoria: 150

Gunning, Tom: 11, 25, 45, 52, 61, 65–66, 69n3, 70n8, 73nn49/50/57, 76, 84,

Jazz Mamas (1929): 134 Jeanne, René: 228–29, 232

91n25 k h

Kalmus, Herbert T.: 99–100, 103, 110, 116, 226

Hampton, Hope: 13, 179, 181–82, 184–91 hand colouring: 22, 27, 36, 61, 72n40, 83–84, 146, 183, 264, 266 Handschiegl process: 99, 106n4

Keaton, Buster: 127, 143n9 Kerr, Walter: 127 Kessler, Frank: 222 Kinemacolor: 13, 76, 88, 107n8, 109–14, 116, 119–21, 122n6, 145–51, 153–

Hanssen, Eirik Frisvold: 183

55, 157n5, 183, 226, 261, 279

Harrison, Louis Reeves: 86 Hertogs, Daan: 10

King, Rob: 135

Higgins, Scott: 105–106

Kodachrome: 33–34, 42–43, 139, 145, 155–56, 179–85, 187–92

home movies: see amateur cinema Helmholtz, Hermann von: 107n8, 157, 201 Hurley, Frank: 54, 57, 59

Kodachrome (1953): 44–46 Kodacolor: 33–34, 42, 46 Kodak internegative: 267 Kodascope Film Library: 138–39, 141

i

Koettlitz, Reginald: 52

Impressionism: 228

Kracauer, Siegfried: 174

In the West of England (1917): 87

Kross, Annike: 262–63, 271, 274

L’Inhumaine (1924): 223n14

Kupka, František: 119

Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique: 130 intermediality: 12–13, 60, 65–66, 121,

l

168, 170, 197, 204–12

Langdon, Harry: 127, 139, 143n9



animation and: 168, 170, 172

lantern slides: 27, 51, 52–55, 57–62, 68,



coloring practices: 53



historiography and: 65, 119



in advertising: 163–65, 168, 197,

Laville, C.: 202–203

204–12

Layton, James: 106, 180

70n7 and 9, 72n34 and 40, 80–82, 89, 118–19, 131, 147, 152, 154

INDEX

| 307

Ledoux, Jacques: 222

n

Léger, Charles: 224

natural colour:

Léger, Fernand: 202, 209, 211–12

processes: see Agfacolor,

Leigh, Douglas: 163–66, 171–72

Dufaycolor, Kodachrome, and

The Light in the Dark (1922): 182

Kodacolor

Ligue du noir et blanc: 221–25, 227,



229–32, 223n14

theory: 39–40, 110, 155, 223, 229, 231–32

Long Pants (1927): 143n9



in nature films: 52, 55

Lord Kelvin: 146, 154



in slapstick comedies: 126–28, 130,

Love at First Flight (1928): 128 Lumière brothers: 83, 153

132, 134, 136, 140–42 Nederlands Filmmuseum: 15, 19–24,

Lyrical Nitrate (1991): 11

222 neon: 168–69

m

308 |

nitrate prints: 21, 23, 26, 248, 257n53, 261, 264–65, 267–73, 275

Mademoiselle Modiste (1926): 190 Maks, Frans: 21–22, 28

nonfiction film: 12

Der Märchenwald – Ein Schattenspiel



affect and colour in: 76, 83, 85

(The Fairy Tale Woods – A Shadow



hand coloring of: 52, 83

Play, 1919): 242, 248



tinting and toning: 77–79, 84–86, 88

Martin, H.C.: 168 mass culture: 80, 209



mass production: 36, 197

o

Matchmaking Mamma (1929): 129

Op den Kamp, Claudy: 273–74

Maxwell, James Clerk: 118, 146–47

optical: 29, 37, 143, 145, 156, 201–202,

Mazzanti, Nicola: 86, 112–13

211, 239, 245–46, 249

McCall Colour Fashion News: 179–80, 183–92

p

Mees, Kenneth: 145, 151–57, 180

panchromatization: 111

Ménilmontant (1926): 208

Parapluie Revel (1922): 202

The Merry Widow (1925): 229

Parker, Albert: 98, 100, 102, 227, 231,

Metropolis (1927): 225

234n30

Misek, Richard: 46, 76

Parisian Modes in Color (1926): 187–88

Mitry, Jean: 224, 231

Pathé Film Exchanges: 128–29, 131, 138

modernism: 196, 207, 209

Pathécolor: 85, 226

modernity: 40–42, 80, 119–20, 170, 174,

Penrose’s Pictorial Annual: 148–49



196, 198, 205, 213n3

perchloroethylene: 266

visual culture in: 14, 51, 53, 120,

Peterson, Jennifer: 51, 68

163–64, 195–97, 205, 207–208

Pfluger, David: 272, 275

Moussinac, Léon: 229–30 Mulvey, Laura: 81

T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

photochromoscope: 147, 154

photography: 39, 53–54, 69n2, 72n40, 99, 110, 117–19, 121, 127, 146, 149,

Rough Sea at Dover (1896): 77 Royal Geographical Society: 52–53, 57, 60–62, 72n34

151–55, 165, 200, 204, 207, 209–10, 239, 249

Ruedel, Ulrich: 261, 264, 266, 269

Pierce, David: 138

Run, Girl, Run (1928): 129

Poiret, Paul: 183

Ruttmann, Walter: 196, 201, 222

Pollard, Daphne: 128

Rydzewski, Steve: 139

Ponting, Herbert G.: 52, 54–55, 57–61, 63, 66, 68

s

Portaluppi, Piero: 41–43, 45, 49n21

The Sands of Dee (1912): 77

Portrait of Jennie (1948): 77

Schwartz, Vanessa: 88

postcards: 45, 80–81, 89, 131, 223

scientific expedition: 52, 63, 65–66, 68

Praz, Mario: 78, 89

Scott, Ridley: 131

Prizmacolor: 76

The Sea Beast (1926): 77

physiology and psychology:

Seldes, Gilbert: 127



Sennett Bathing Girl series: 128–32,

in theories of advertising: 196–99, 201–203, 205, 211–12

| 309

139–40 Sennett Brevities: 133–37

q

Sennett, Mack: 126–27, 129–30, 134–35, 137–38, 141

Quo Vadis (1913): 131

Sennett-color: 127, 134, 136–37 r

sensation and senses:

The Raft of the Medusa (1819): 79



cinema and: 52, 209–12

Rainbow Ravine: 164



color design and: 165–66, 182

Ray, Man: 206, 208–209, 216n38



modernity and: 166, 173–74

realism:



perception of: 53–54, 101, 170,



197–99, 205

anti-realism versus: 85, 88, 201, 228–29



realism and: 81, 89

classical film theory and: 84, 126–



sensual: 51–53, 61, 66, 68, 84–85, 88, 174, 205

27, 222

classical style and: 196



sublime: 27, 79–80, 170



in amateur cinema: 39, 45



subjectivity and: 79



in nonfiction film: 81, 83–85, 88



synaesthesia and: 170, 174



indexicality: 84–85

Seven Chances (1925): 143n9

Renoir, Jean: 120

Sheppard, Samuel E.: 152, 154, 180

Reynolds Electric Co. of Chicago:

single-reel era: 76–77

165–66 Roberts, Richard M.: 139 Rocks and Waves (1911): 77

slapstick: 126–28, 130–35, 138–42 Smith, George Albert: 112, 114, 119, 145, 147–50, 153–54

The Rogue Song (1930): 143n9

Sobchack, Vivian: 169, 190

Roque, Georges: 118

Sorlin, Pierre: 43, 46

INDEX

La Souriante madame Beudet (1923): 205





monochromatic dyes and: see colourants and dyes

spectatorship: embodiment and: 83, 196, 199, 205,



211–12

The Toll of the Sea (1922): 102, 231

pre-tinted film stocks: 36, 252

Stage Struck (1925): 229

toning

stenciling: 75, 77–78, 85, 106n4, 131,



appearance: 38, 67, 85, 233n14, 242–45

183, 252, 262, 266 stereoscopy: 35, 48, 87, 147



frequency: 38, 85, 233n14

Stern, Daniel: 174



meaning: 85–86, 233n14

Storm at Sea (1900): 83



methods: 38, 238, 242–45, 254n3

Storm at Sea (1912): 77



monochromatic dyes and: see colourants and dyes

Strange Birds (1930): 133–34 subjectivity: 79



subtractive processes: see Eastman

Toulmin, Vanessa: 25, 265, 268

310 |

Kodak

pre-tinted film stocks: 36, 252

tourism: 78, 80, 137

Surf at Long Branch (1896): 83

trick films: 45, 84

Surf at Monterey (1897): 83

Troland, Leonard: 100, 102–103

Sutton, Thomas: 118

Trumpy, Giorgio: 247

synaesthesia: 170, 174

Tsuneishi, Fumiko: 262, 266, 271 Turner, Edward: 147

t

two-reel films: 138–39

tableau vivant: 131 Take Your Medicine (1930): 134

u

Technicolor: 14, 39, 98–102, 104–106,

Urban, Charles: 147, 150–51, 154,

107n9, 110, 112, 116, 120–21, 126,

156–57

129, 134, 136, 139–40, 143n9, 144n29, 155–56, 168, 172, 181,

v

226–28, 231, 234n27, 239

van der Made, Frank: 21–22, 24

That Royle Girl (1925): 190

Violette, Mme.: 140

Timeline of Historical Film Colors, 47n6, 89n1, 91n27, 146, 157n1,

w

237–59, 277

Wanderer of the Wasteland (1924): 107n9

Times Square: 163–67, 171–72

Warwick Trading Company: 147

tinting

water imagery: 75–77, 81–83, 86, 88



What Happened on Twenty-Third Street

appearance: 67, 85, 103, 141, 233n14, 242–45, 251

(1901): 169



frequency: 85, 141, 233n14

Wilson, Edward: 55, 57, 63, 65, 68



meaning: 85–86, 233n14

With Captain Scott R.N., to the South Pole



methods: 99, 101, 238, 242–45, 254n3, 262



T H E CO LO U R FA N TA S T I C

(1911 and 1912): 57 Who’s Who in the Zoo (1931): 134 The World Flier (1931): 134

y

The Yankee Clipper (1927): 77 Young, Thomas: 118 Yumibe, Joshua: 10–11, 25–26, 70n7–8, 76, 84, 90–91, 215, 255n9, 267 z

Ziegfeld (Ziegfeldized comedy): 128, 131, 136, 139 Ziegfeld Jr., Florenz Edward: 131 Zola, Emile: 131

| 311

INDEX