Harmonicolor
Description
“Harmonicoior was developed by French chemist Maurice Combes. It was first formally demonstrated in London by Harmonicoior Films Ltd, of 4 Great Winchester Street, on the 23 March 1936 at the Curzon Soho with the film Talking Hands, produced at Nettlefold studios at Walton on Thames. The process used bipack negative in the camera to record two negatives taken through colour filters. These were printed onto double-coated positive film which was stained magenta and yellow orange on one side, and green and blue-violet on the other. The dyes were then fixed to the silver image using a mordant and the silver image washed away. The idea behind using a range of dyes was to leave an image, which had a greater variety of colours than was traditionally achieved through a two-colour process. Thus, on one side of the film lighter areas would be more yellow and, on the other side, green, while darker areas would be orange-red on one side and blue-violet on the other. The chief selling point of the process was that it was relatively cheap, prints costing only 30-40 per cent more than standard black and white.
Apart from the demonstration in 1936 there is no evidence that the process was used for any other films or commercially exploited.”
(Brown, Simon (2012): Technical Appendix: Harmonicolor. In: Street, Sarah: Colour Films in Britain. The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-55. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 273-274.)
Secondary Sources
Klein, Adrian Bernhard = Cornwell-Clyne (1940): Colour Cinematography. Boston: American Photographic Pub. Co.. 2nd revised edition, pp. 211-212. View Quote
Brown, Simon (2012): Technical Appendix. In: Sarah Street: Colour Films in Britain. The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-55. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 259-287, on pp. 273-274. View Quote
Street, Sarah (2012): Colour Films in Britain. The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-55. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, on p. 39. View Quote
Films
Talking Hands (GBR 1936, Ivor Campbell)1
1 Street, Sarah (2012): Colour Films in Britain. The Negotiation of Innovation 1900-55. Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, on p. 39. View Quote
