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“L’Eastmancolor a été la première pellicule couleur monopack à conquérir le marché: elle apparaît en 1950 avec une sensibilité de 16 ASA, passe à 25 ASA en 1952, à 50 ASA en 1959, et à 100 ASA seulement en 1968. Il faudra attendre 1981 pour que Fuji mette sur le marché européen la révolutionnaire Fuji 250 qui titre 250 ASA en usage normal et permettra de tourner enfin en 35 mm couleur dans les conditions qui étaient celles du noir-et-blanc au cours des années soixante⁹. Kodak suivra de très près en commercialisant dès 1982 un négatif Eastman à 250 ASA.

Notes

⁹ Grâce à cette pellicule, Neige, de Juliet Berto et Jean-Henri Roger, a été tourné en grande partie la nuit, à Pigalle, pratiquement sans éclairage, comme avait pu le faire Godard en noir-et-blanc au cours des années soixante.”

(Bergala, Alain (1995): La couleur, la Nouvelle Vague et ses maîtres des années cinquante. In: Jacques Aumont (ed.): La Couleur en cinema. Milan: Mazzotta, pp. 126–136, on p. 129.) (in French)

“Le lavage des bandes virées

Dès 1906, la question du lavage des éléments virés pose problème. On constate en effet que les films virés en bleu sont “couverts d’un léger précipit锹⁷, une forme de cristallisation. Cette situation oblige les ouvrières à essuyer les pellicules à la main, avec du coton, une fois que le positif est séché, ce qui occasionne “une main-d’œuvre exagérée”¹⁸. Dès lors, Dubois étudie la possibilité d’étudier un nettoyage mécanique de la bande. En 1908, une machine à essuyer les films coloriés est inventée afin d’éviter 1’étape du nettoyage manuel¹⁹. Cette machine contient des tampons imbibés d’alcool. Elle semble aussi servir pour le nettoyage des films à pochoirs [Fig. 3].

En outre, les dépôts d’hydrosulfite qui tachent les pellicules après le développement et forcent les ouvrières à nettoyer les copies au coton, entraînent un ajout de deux bains supplémentaires, composés d’acide azotique (ou acide nitrique). Une description précisant la procédure est dès lors notifiée: “1. Lavage à l’eau pendant 10 minutes; 2. Trempage de l’acide azotique 5 à 8 minutes; 3. Lavage à l’eau pendant 20 minutes; 4. Virage, 5. Lavage de 10 minutes, 6. Nouveau passage à l’acide azotique, 7. Lavage d’une demi-heure. Les résultats sont probants et abolissent le nettoyage a la main de l’hydrosulfite”²⁰

¹⁷ Dubois, “Virage”, le Livre de fabrication de la compagnie générale des phonographes cinématographes et appareils de précision, livre de fabrication noº 1, association CECIL et Fondation Pathé, 16 juin 1906, p. 6.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 6.

¹⁹ Anonyme, “la Machine à essuyer les films coloriés”, le Livre de fabrication de la compagnie générale des phonographes cinématographes et appareils de précision, 1908, pp. 430–431.

²⁰ Dubois, “Virage”, le Livre de fabrication de la compagnie générale des phonographes cinématographes et appareils de précision, 23 Juin l906, pp. 10–11.”

(Ruivo, Céline (2013): Le Livre de fabrication de la compagnie générale des phonographes cinématographes et appareils de précision. À propos d’une source pour l’histoire des recherches sur la couleur chez Pathé Frères entre 1906 et 1908. In: 1895. Revue d’Histoire du Cinema, 71, 2013, pp. 47–60, on pp. 52–53.) (in French)

“What is curious is that even though the Bioschemes court case drew attention to Kinemacolor’s inability to render blue, Kinemacolor was occasionally admired for achieving blue tones, as one report of the Delhi Durbar film attests: ‘Even the sky, which throughout serves as a frame for the human spectacle, is a thing to wonder at; it is one pure sheet of palpitating light, blue with a blueness of which one can only dream here in grey England, deep, intense, unruffled, like one gigantic sapphire.’⁴⁸ Even though the colour palette achieved with Kinemacolor was clearly deficient as far as blue and purple were concerned, projecting the film onto a light blue screen helped overcome these problems and may explain the enthusiastic comments about blue.⁴⁹ In addition, giving evidence to the court in the Bioschemes vs Natural Color Kinematograph Co. Ltd case, G. A. Smith made the point that even though an image of a Union Jack flag might not have very blue sections, more grey or even black, the viewer’s cultural expectation to see blue could indeed convince her/him that it was actually present.⁵⁰ This example draws attention to the complex factors that come into play when trying to assess the impact of colour; the power of suggestion and symbolism are important influences on colour perception. Commentary in the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Subjects, 1912-13 mentions dark blue in Children Forming the US Flag as ‘unmistakeable’ and the sea in Telemachus: A Mythological Play as ‘a superb blue’. Floral Friends was said to convey a cornflower in ‘remarkable vivid blue’ in spite of the difficulties of obtaining the colour.⁵¹

One must indeed chart a careful evaluative course amid a wealth of contradictory detail about Kinemacolor, not least found in Urban’s archive which contains many scrapbooks of advertising materials, press reviews and reports on Kinemacolor screenings all over Britain and abroad. The phrases used are often similar, inviting the suspicion that many descriptions were taken from the catalogues produced by the Natural Color Kinematograph Company. Colour vision is, indeed, variable, and the excitement around Kinemacolor might well have induced those who saw the films to imagine a fuller range of colours than they actually saw. One report recounted how after a demonstration colour specialist Professor Lippmann insisted on seeing the Kinemacolor projector ‘to see with his own eyes that only two colours were actually employed. He did not believe it possible that such a combination of tones and shades could be obtainable in this manner.’⁵² The wonder of natural colour film was sufficiently novel as to invite positive appreciation from many audiences, particularly when the films were carefully presented and contextualised by the company’s publicity.

In a world in which many lower-class people did not have access to bright-colour clothing, for example, and most colour was seen in advertising materials, its appearance in film was all the more notable.⁵³ While colour was clearly making an incursion into everyday life for those able to purchase coloured wallpapers, clothes and jewellery, one cannot assume that these commodities were available to all. Admissions to Kinemacolor programmes varied and not all exhibitors charged higher prices for tickets. Some halls explicitly stated in newspaper advertisements that they were keeping their normal prices for Kinemacolor screenings – for example, the King’s Theatre Greenock (May 1912); His Majesty’s Theatre, Dundee (September 1912); The Cinema de Luxe, Walsall (March 1913); and The Palace, Durham (August 1913). But higher prices were charged in some halls, such as the Electric Theatre in Bath which increased its prices in April 1912 on the afternoon Kinemacolor arrived. It appears, however, that a significant number of venues chose not to increase prices and this trend occurred throughout the years when the process was being screened in Britain, presumably in an attempt to broaden its appeal.⁵⁴ Urban’s pitch to higher-class audiences was, however, likely to connect with those able to afford the growing commercial availability of colour in other spheres. For this reason new fashion ranges were promoted by Kinemacolor as the only way to fully appreciate the styles in films such as Advance Styles in Ostrich Plumage:

All those who have seen monochrome representations of the latest fashions in dress or in hats, will have realised how powerless black and white motion photography is to reproduce with fidelity and conviction these wonderful creations of the modiste’s art, or to import a true idea of their actual appearance. Thus it is, in this field of colour photography holds undisputed sway, by this process alone is it possible to present on the screen convincing reproductions which are so true to actuality as to awaken the envy and admiration of every woman in the audience.⁵⁵

In this case audiences are invited to admire the fashions and be envious of the women wearing them, implying that purchase of the items would not necessarily be possible for everyone. Indeed, the description ends by remarking on the ‘perfect detail’ of the hats on display and flesh tints of the models as being ‘so life-like … as to complete the illusion that one is gazing, not on a picture screen, but, as through a window upon an actual scene’.⁵⁶ The choice of words is interesting, implying a spectator who gazes from afar, as if from the perspective of someone looking in from a street onto a scene, perhaps seeing an opulent house or shop beyond their own experience or financial circumstances.⁵⁷ A similar sensibility is evident in Kitty, the Dressmaker, a Kinemacolor film about a ‘humble’ dressmaker’s assistant who has a dream in which she is ‘richly dressed, wearing furs’.⁵⁸

McKernan notes that: ‘Those who criticise Kinemacolor now for its inadequate colour reproduction are ignoring both the prevalent cultural conditions and the physiological processes that enriched the colour effect.’⁵⁹ These included the vicarious acquisition of culturally coded sensibilities with which colour became inextricably associated. In these circumstances an approximation of colour was most probably acceptable to many viewers when combined with the magnificence of a ceremonial occasion, or showing an exotic, foreign location which had been photographed in bright sunshine. These images were less tied to commercial exploitation of commodities or fashions but rather depended on the revelation of new experiences of colour at home and abroad. The description of A Visit to the Seaside, the first ‘scenic picture’ shot in Kinemacolor in Brighton, remarked of a shot of the Cameron Highlanders’ Band that: ‘In colorless Britain one must go to the Army to find rich, glowing hues.’⁶⁰ Films taken in India featured elephants adorned with ‘crimson velvet … at times the whole screen seems to be filled with a riot of gorgeous color as has never been seen before’.⁶¹ But apparently limitless interpretations of such scenes were not acknowledged by the judge in the 1914 Lords Appeal case when Kinemacolor’s claims to ‘approximately’ render all colours from a two-colour method were considered to be empirically unproven, therefore invalidating the patent on which the process was based.⁶²

Kinemacolor was shown extensively in London, particularly at the Palace Theatre leased by Urban in 1911, and there is evidence of considerable dissemination in the provinces. In 1910-14 Kinemacolor films were exhibited in approximately 250 venues in a total of 161 regions across the country, and there is further evidence of screenings in the regions until at least May 1916. Runs were typically short, supplied by touring companies.⁶³ An exclusive licensing system meant that exhibition in London and elsewhere was largely subject to Urban’s control. In August 1912 exhibitors were offered, for example, a programme entitling a licensee to choose ten reels, representing one and three-quarter hours of projection, for £30 a week. With the programme came instruction on musical accompaniment, the installation of modern ‘sound effects’ and ‘the worth, and method of judicious and skilful advertising’.⁶⁴ The aim was to market Kinemacolor as a means by which exhibitors might draw in the ‘upper strata of local society’ to their cinemas, as well as retaining their typical patrons. Urban’s mission involved bringing colour to cities ‘where the prevailing hues are grey, black and brown’, a modern invention being marketed as providing relief from the drudgery of industrialisation.⁶⁵ Provincial Picture Palaces, an independent company, was initially granted exclusive rights outside London to show Kinemacolor in its circuit until the Natural Color Kinematograph Company Ltd (NCKCL) sold licences individually to exhibitors. Kinemacolor (London District) controlled exhibitions in the metropolis, particularly those located in the immediate vicinity of the Palace Theatre. For a time this exclusive system ensured Kinemacolor exhibitions in Britain and overseas could be monitored, although it is likely that in the long term the costs of hiring films and equipment held back mass expansion after the initial, novelty phase. Exhibition and patent rights were also sold all over the world and Kinemacolor did comparatively good overseas business in Japan and, for a time, in America. But after a promising start it proved impossible to repeat the popular success of the Delhi Durbar films, although something of a brief revival was experienced with wartime screenings of With the Fighting Forces of Europe (1914) that was arguably popular more for its subject matter than for its colour. The financial costs of specialised exhibition facilities and prestige venues proved in the long run to hasten Kinemacolor’s demise. In an attempt to offset exhibitors’ reluctance to purchase special projection equipment when the majority of them did not show Kinemacolor films for long periods, the NCKCL developed a projector that could also show black-and-white films. Even so, a long-term commitment to Kinemacolor was rare, a notable exception being T. J. West’s run for approximately two years at the Shaftesbury Hall, Bournemouth.⁶⁶ The rest of Europe proved to be an even more difficult market. After selling the patent rights to a French company in 1912 Urban bought them back at a profit and built the Théâtre Edouard VII in Paris, a costly enterprise that ended in financial disaster.⁶⁷ After the patent was invalidated in 1914 the exclusive licence system broke down; thereafter Kinemacolor was available to all producers and exhibitors. Yet the process did not thrive in a free market since it required considerable technical expertise and financial investment. Urban was forced to retrench, particularly on his worldwide operations, and during World War I shifted his priorities to war propaganda, including successful Kinemacolor screenings of With the Fighting Forces of Europe and Britain Prepared (1915). He collaborated with Henry Joy on perfecting yet another colour patent for Kinecrom, a process that was designed to address Kinemacolor’s technical shortcomings with a non-fringing projector known as Urban-Duplex.⁶⁸

The majority of Kinemacolor films were actualities or topical films that could be regarded as a limitation when the film industry was poised for saturating the market with fiction films. An analysis of the Kinemacolor catalogue 1912-13 indeed demonstrates that the majority of films were non-fiction of the British countryside; numerous animal and bird studies; royal events; and many films of military parades and natural scenery in countries including the USA, Canada, European countries, Sweden, India and Egypt. The emphasis on British locales places Kinemacolor within traditions of landscape painting which can be seen to have had a longer-term influence on perceptions of a British approach to colour cinema. While only a very small percentage of Kinemacolor films survive, often in tantalising fragments such as scenes from the Delhi Durbar film, the catalogue’s descriptions of individual films nevertheless gives an impression of what was perceived to be of colour interest to exhibitors and audiences. Eirik Hanssen’s study draws attention to the catalogue’s great value as a source that reveals a sense of what was achieved with Kinemacolor in terms of film form, genre and address, as well as the ways in which it connected with contemporary discourses around colour.⁶⁹ The films demonstrated trends of silent cinema from Gunning’s notion of ‘the cinema of attractions’ to ideas about natural colour processes exemplifying a close relationship between an object and photographic indexicality.⁷⁰ As such the films demonstrated different approaches to engaging spectators by establishing regimes of verisimilitude appropriate for a particular genre. Some films were geared towards showing ‘attractions’ such as magic tricks or travelogues of faraway, exotic places which induced the pleasure of surprise, while on other occasions they presented close approximations of familiar sights such as the seaside, trees, flowers and everyday objects which induced the pleasure of recognition. Italian Flower and Bead Vendors announced Italy to be ‘the land of colour’. It showed stalls and wares with vendors selling coloured beads. Another travelogue that made a spectacle of place and colour was Kingston, Jamaica, which again featured a marketplace and an exotic fruit, the ackeé, ‘somewhat resembling the banana in colour, but having black berries which are not edible … the close views of this fruit are wonderful examples of the powers of Kinemacolor’.⁷¹ In such films unusual objects and locales were so presented that the spectacular values of place and colour were mutually reinforcing.

Trick films in particular made colour an obtrusive feature and were obviously intended to punctuate colour presentation with surprise as cinematic attractions.⁷² […] it is important to convey a sense here of the variety of Kinemacolor’s output. A Kinemacolor Puzzle, for example, had two rotating coloured discs revolving in kaleidoscopic fashion yet ‘in spite of the rapid movement the colors of the discs are perfectly distinct’. The film was described as being ‘in considerable request’. There was clearly great confidence in Kinemacolor’s ability to reproduce colours ‘true to nature’ that would immediately invite audiences to compare what they saw on screen with their own experience of colours for particular foods or objects. The catalogue’s description of Refreshments noted that: ‘If any needed to be convinced that Kinemacolor is not a system of artificial coloring of the film itself, this section would surely suffice.’ The film showed a man pouring water into a tumbler of claret and ‘as the claret diffuses itself in the water, the liquid gradually assumes a deeper hue. The actual process of diffusion and the change in color of the contents of the tumbler are depicted exactly as if the real thing was happening before our eyes.’ The same film featured an orange being cut and squeezed: ‘It is exactly the color of orange juice and is so like the actual thing that one’s mouth positively waters as one watches the picture.’ Such claims were risky, although in this case orange was a colour that tended to reproduce well in Kinemacolor. Studies in Natural Colour went even further by showing the contrast between an ordinary orange and a blood-orange.⁷³

The emphasis on differentiating Kinemacolor from applied techniques was an important element of Urban’s rhetorical presentation of ‘natural’ colour, in particular emphasising the aim of photographic processes to convey changes in hue or saturation in mimetic rather than symbolic fashion associated with, say, tinting an image in its entirety to convey a generic mood for a frame or scene rather than to ‘capture’ the colours of particular objects. Publicity boasted that, unlike applied colour methods, Kinemacolor ‘instantaneously catches the most unexpected tints with wondrous sweetness and represents the dominant colors not only in their own richness and brilliance, but also in their finest and most delicate shades, presenting an endless combination which in scale of splendour is rivalled only by the band of the spectrum’.⁷⁴ These aims transcended genre, the emphasis being on exposing applied methods as somehow fooling audiences with inaccurate, ‘false’, unscientific representations of reality. This was demonstrated in Gerald’s Butterfly, a comedy film that depicted a boy who paints a butterfly that fools a naturalist when it is dangled over a hedge. The naturalist pays for being taken in by the painted butterfly since his attempts to catch it result in a greenhouse being damaged and him getting thrown into a pond. The catalogue’s description offsets this narrative of disaster wrought by deception with praise for the film’s reproduction of flowers and the countryside as ‘so realistic that it was almost possible to fancy that one could smell the new mown hay’. By means of a dramatic scenario the film can be seen as presenting a somewhat reflexive position on Kinemacolor’s relationship to applied methods of colouring film by hand.⁷⁵ While the naturalist suffers for being taken in by the fake painted butterfly, audiences were encouraged to delight in Kinemacolor’s approximation of flowers and the countryside as a more accurate mode of representation. The emphasis on natural colour eliciting a sensual response from audiences (‘tasting’ the orange or smelling the hay) was a typical claim that linked with Goethe-based theories that conceived of colour perception as subjective, interactive and experiential.⁷⁶ It also engaged with theories which linked sensory experience to colour. The idea that colour intensified the spectator’s pleasure and could even elicit a physical response resonated in subsequent discussions about the impact of screen colour. While some saw this as an opportunity to explore colour’s educational potential, others claimed colour’s enhanced sensorial potential as a point of aesthetic difference from monochrome. Colour was seen to produce psychological and physiological effects, constituting a ‘synaesthesic’ approach which emphasised its impact on emotions, senses and health. These connections were investigated by Loyd Jones, a technician who developed a number of colour technologies at the Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, New York, from the 1910s-50s.⁷⁷

One must, however, be careful not to construct an impression of this period as one in which colour processes were necessarily distinct in people’s minds. While Urban encouraged notions of specificity around Kinemacolor comments on films coloured by other means reveal similar tendencies and aims. The Glories of Sunset, a Gaumont film, seems to have presented variable colour effects:

As the sun sets the toning gradually becomes deeper, giving a most beautiful effect. The various scenes shown represent the sun just before it disappears, entitled ‘Last Rays’, the sun having set, entitled ‘First Shadows’ and concludes with a striking view of the bay by moonlight with a ship in full sail passing across, the silver reflection on the water.⁷⁸

Sunsets of Egypt was a Kinemacolor film that also took pride in showing ‘the red glow of the sun and the changing colours in the sky … the after-glow of the setting sun fills the sky with the richest and most glorious colors imaginable’.⁷⁹ Such examples draw attention to the mutual effect processes were having on each other during a time when the achievement of ‘spectacular realism’ was a shared goal of colourists using a variety of different approaches. Kinemacolor’s success increased exhibitors’ interest in other forms of colour film. The Bioscope reported in October 1911:

Within the year – almost within the last six months – Mr Charles Urban’s Kinemacolor process has come right to the front, and has become a formative influence upon the future of the business, the importance of which cannot be over-estimated. ‘Colour’ has now become a sine qua non of the picture theatre programme, and one cannot pass along the streets without seeing from the announcements of exhibitors that they are fully alive to this, and, if they have not a Kinemacolor licence, they are making a special feature of tinted or coloured films in order to cope with the public demand.⁸⁰

The flurry of experimentation clearly had an impact on applied methods. Kinemacolor drew attention to colour and increased demand for interest in other systems, particularly stencil methods, 1909-16.⁸¹ As films became longer, often dealing with complex narratives and different temporalities, tinting and toning […] could be motivated by an extended range of imperatives. […] the variety possible with dye methods […] outlasted Kinemacolor by being used until the early 1930s. Rachael Low argues that for some time blue tints made up for technical deficiencies in lighting and stock which made night-shooting difficult.

NOTES

⁴⁸ The Bioscope, 8 February 1912.

⁴⁹ Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema, p. 29.

⁵⁰ G. A. Smith, unpublished evidence in URB 7/2/6, pp. 292. This reference is also cited by McKernan, ‘”Something More than a Mere Picture Show”‘, p. 179.

⁵¹ Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, 1912-13, (Natural Color Kinematograph Co.).

⁵² British Journal of Photography, colour supplement, vol. XVI no. 189, 4 August 1922, p. 31.

⁵³ This point was made by Nick Hiley, in Hertogs and de Klerk, ‘Disorderly Order’, pp. 31–2.

⁵⁴ Victoria Jackson, ‘The Distribution and Exhibition of Kinemacolor in the UK Provinces, 1909-15’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bristol.

⁵⁵ Kinematograph Monthly Film Record, April 1913, pp. 24–5.

⁵⁶ Ibid., p. 25.

⁵⁷ One is reminded of the ending of Stella Dallas (1937), when Barbara Stanwyck gazes through the window at her daughter in an opulent house.

⁵⁸ Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, p. 125.

⁵⁹ McKernan, ‘”Something More than a Mere Picture Show”‘, p. 180.

⁶⁰ Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, p. 16.

⁶¹ Ibid, p. 309.

⁶² For the relevant documents on the case see URB 7/2/6 and summary in The Bioscope, 9 April 1914, pp. 141–2. McKernan also discusses the case, ‘”Something More than a Mere Picture Show”‘, pp. 182–9.

⁶³ URB 3/2, p. 60. See also Jackson, ‘The Distribution and Exhibition of Kinemacolor’.

⁶⁴ Kinemacolor Supplement to the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 15 August 1912.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 29 August 1912.

⁶⁶ Jackson, ‘The Distribution and Exhibition of Kinemacolor’.

⁶⁷ McKernan, ‘”Something More than a Mere Picture Show”‘, pp. 163–72.

⁶⁸ Urban, ‘Terse History’, URB 9/1, p. 14.

⁶⁹ Hanssen, Early Discourses on Colour and Cinema, pp. 31–87.

⁷⁰ Tom Gunning, ‘The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde’, in Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (eds), Early Film (London: BFI, 1989). The idea is that early cinema was primarily a demonstrative mode in which visual display and attraction was the major source of appeal rather than continuous narrative development. The spectacle of colour can be usefully linked to this idea as developed in Gunning’s ‘Colorful Metaphors’ article.

⁷¹ Kinematograph Monthly Film Record, March 1913, p. 6.

⁷² All subsequent descriptions of Kinemacolor films are taken from the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, 1912-13.

⁷³ Kinematograph Monthly Film Record, May 1913, p. 102, emphasis in original (referring to Studies in Natural Colour).

⁷⁴ Kinemacolor Supplement to the Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 10 October 1912.

⁷⁵ The relationship between Kinemacolor and applied methods is discussed in Bregt Lameris, ‘Pathécolor: “Perfect in their Rendition of the Colours of Nature”‘, Living Pictures: The Journal of the Popular and Projected Images Before 1914 vol. 2 no. 2, 2003, pp. 46–58.

⁷⁶ See Hanssen, Early Discourses on Colour and Cinema, p. 40.

⁷⁷ Joshua Yumibe, ‘”Harmonious Sensations of Sound by Means of Colors”: Vernacular Colour Abstractions in Silent Cinema’, Film History vol. 21 no. 2, 2009, pp. 164–76.

⁷⁸ Kinematograph and Lantern Weekly, 18 February 1909, p. 1121.

⁷⁹ Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects, 1912-13, pp. 216–7.

⁸⁰ The Bioscope, 26 October 1911, p. 283.

⁸¹ Jackson, ‘The Distribution and Exhibition of Kinemacolor’.”

(Street, Sarah (2012): Colour Films in Britain. The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-55. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, on pp. 15–19.)

“Beginning in 1905, a technique of hand-stenciling color directly onto film was first used by Charles Pathe in short subjects (Aloha Land, Land O’Lea). The method was tedious but the results were often stunning. Pathe’s process, called Pathecolor, was one of the first to be identified commercially and was used, starting in 1914, in a series of colorful full-length productions. Among them were A Rose Among the Briars, The Life of Our Savior, The Three Masks, and Cyrano de Bergerac. Of Cyrano, one New York critic noted: ‘The characters appear in eye-smashing creations, consisting of purple trousers, pink shirts and green capes or blue gowns, yellow hats and indigo hose.’ The reviewer added that the film possessed ‘all the artistic effectiveness of a succession of penny postal cards.'”

(Basten, Fred E. (1980): Glorious Technicolor. The Movies’ Magic Rainbow. South Brunswick: Barnes, on p. 14.)

“Les combinés teintage et virage

Le 28 juillet 1906, il semble que l’équipe réalise son premier combiné teintage et virage réussi sur le titre la Vie au Japon, les rapides de la rivière Ozu³⁰. Ainsi le virage sépia est associé à un teintage bleu. Dubois reconnaît qu’il est cependant difficile pour le combiné d’atteindre une régularité parfaite³¹.

³⁰ La Vie au Japon, les rapides de la rivière Ozu, film réalisé par André Legrand, production Pathé, 1906, n° 1493 (voir catalogue Bousquet).

³¹ Dubois, “Virage”, le Livre de fabrication de la compagnie générale des phonographes cinématographes et appareils de précision, livre de fabrication noº 1, association CECIL et Fondation Pathé, 1906, p. 52.”

(Ruivo, Céline (2013): Le Livre de fabrication de la compagnie générale des phonographes cinématographes et appareils de précision. À propos d’une source pour l’histoire des recherches sur la couleur chez Pathé Frères entre 1906 et 1908. In: 1895. Revue d’Histoire du Cinema, 71, 2013, pp. 47–60, on p. 56.) (in French)

La poule aux œufs d’or (FRA 1905, Gaston Velle)

“Si pensi al motivo magico dell’oro presente in tanti racconti fiabeschi, tradotto visivamente nella féerie attraverso l’uso abbondante del giallo per dare risalto a oggetti magici, tesori nascosti o ambienti regali e lussuosi. Il motivo ricorre in molte vedute, come La poule aux œufs d’or della Pathé (La gallina dalle uova d’oro, Velle, 1905), ispirata alla favola in versi di Jean de La Fontaine, da cui mezzo secolo prima aveva preso spunto il drammaturgo Adolphe d’Ennery per una féerie teatrale dal medesimo titolo⁴³.

[…]

In La poule aux œufs d’or, la forma monocroma accompagna il normale svolgimento della vicenda (la piazza del mercato, il cortile, il pollaio), mentre la colorazione a pochoir subentra in corrispondenza di effetti pirotecnici e accadimenti soprannaturali (la personificazione della gallina, la visione della testa di Satana dentro l’uovo, l’esplosione dell’uovo).

⁴³ Cat. Pathé n. 1311 (cfr. Bousquet 1996, p. 916). Sulla féerie di d’Ennery (Cirque National, 1848), cfr. Ginisty 1910, pp. 198–199.

Bibliografia

Bousquet, Henri (1996), Catalogue Pathé des années 1896 à 1914. 1896 à 1906, Bousquet, Bures-sur-Yvette.

Ginisty, Paul (1910), La féerie, Michaud, Paris.”

(Pierotti, Federico (2012): La seduzione dello spettro. Storia e cultura del colore nel cinema. Genova: Le Mani-Microart, on pp. 43–47.) (in Italian)