Color

Toward the beginning of The Wizard of Oz (1939), as she discovers that her house has landed on the Wicked Witch of the East, the heroine Dorothy (Judy Garland) dons a pair of ruby slippers. Sparkling and unforgettable in their redness, these shoes constitute the center of an important filmic moment: not only do they signal the beginning of the Technicolor era in perhaps the most popular film of all time, they also remain for viewers of all ages among the most memorable objects in twentieth-century screen history. Perhaps their centrality in pop iconography stems from the superior redness of Technicolor red—a red more elusive and more beckoning, more jewel-like and of a denser and greater purity than any other red we can see on the screen, and indeed more saturated and intense than reds we can see in everyday life.

To appreciate the long struggle to infuse color into moving images, one must first understand that in some respects the human eye is more sensitive to color than is film, and that in some respects film is more discerning than the human eye. The subtlest gradations of color and variations in saturation and hue that characterize objects are often beyond what film can record. But at the same time film does record, and intensively, the color temperature of illumination falling on those objects: the characteristic blue of daylight, for example, or the yellow of tungsten light, in either case something that we do not typically perceive with our eyes. Effecting color cinematography has therefore never been an easy task. Color in special effects cinematography is a persistent and vexing problem, especially in the combinations of positive and negative prints used in matte and rear-projection work. But the ability to infuse consistent color into the moving image has itself posed challenges throughout the history of the medium.

TINTING, TONING, AND
EARLY COLOR SYSTEMS

Coloration of moving images goes back to Athanasius Kircher's projection system of 1646, in which sunlight reflected against painted mirrors cast an image on a wall. This was a harbinger of many of the early efforts at tinting films in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In tinting, color was applied by hand to individual frames of a film; in toning, entire shots were bathed in a colored solution. The French company Pathé used a stencil process for hand-tinting, which reduced the variability that was characteristic of American tinted films; prints rented from Pathé tended to be more similar to each other than those rented from, say, Edison. Two of the films on the first program at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York on 23 April 1896, made use of hand-tinted color. The impresario Siegmund Lubin (1851–1923) premiered mono-tinting around 1904, offering films in which various scenes had been tinted different colors; this same technique, used within the context of a narrative strategy, characterized D. W. Griffith's The Lonedale Operator (D. W. Griffith, 1911), where blue and red cast shots were alternated with untinted black-and-white to striking effect.

Hand-tinting can be found in The Great Train Robbery (1903), the most celebrated moment being the reddish gun blast we see when the principal robber fires his gun into the camera. (Depending on the whim of the entrepreneur who rented one of two different versions for showing at his nickelodeon, this shot could have been seen either at the beginning or at the end of the film.) Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) pays homage to that moment in the tinted gunshot at the finale of Spellbound (1945), a film otherwise shot in black and white. Numerous examples of hand-tinted color earlier in The Great Train Robbery include the acidic yellow explosion of the strong-box on the train; the yellow marks made by dancers as their shoes touch the floor; the lavender cloak of the stationmaster's daughter; and the orange explosions of gunfire that are produced by the advancing posse riding toward the camera as they pursue the robbers through the woods. In this film, color has a punctuating effect, enhancing certain moments or features of moments and making them seem hyperreal, exceptionally vivid, penetrating.

Through toning, one obtains a wash of color in a black-and-white image. In Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman, Claude Lelouch, 1966), various black-and-white scenes are colored in this way, one royal blue, one burnt tangerine orange, one sepia. Much of the narrative unfolds in high-contrast black and white (a car ride from Normandy to Paris in the rain, for example, in which the couple, lost in thought about one another, hear on the background radio that "a man and a woman have been killed" in an automobile accident), with these tinted scenes interposed to suggest the subjective, even transcendental, emotional filter through which the two lovers experience their reality together. For other scenes involving memory, untoned color film was shot and slightly over-exposed to wash out the color. The filmmaker's desire to mix directly seen action with remembered action and emotionally desired action determines his use of both the presence and absence, and the type, of color.

One of the earliest additive color systems was Kinemacolor, developed in 1906 by G. A. Smith (1864–1959). Successive frames of the film were tinted alternately red-orange or green-blue, then finally projected through a rotating double-color filter at thirty-two frames per second. Through persistence of vision the eye of the spectator conjured the color onscreen, but not without developing eyestrain and seeing color migrating across the screen from scene to scene. In 1912 two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Herbert Kalmus (1881–1963) and Daniel Comstock, went into partnership with W. Burton Wescott (along with Kalmus's wife, the former Natalie Dunfee [1878–1965]). Kalmus, Comstock, and Wescott wanted to go beyond tinting or toning black-and-white frames, and beyond the crude filtration system of Kinemacolor, to develop a viable independent color process for film. The company called Technicolor was born in 1915, and two years later premiered the first "color film," The Gulf Between (1917). A camera was designed that would take duplicate frames of every image, one through a green filter and one through a red filter. Whereas the Kinemacolor process had projected these different frames sequentially, Kalmus and Comstock developed a pair of identical black-and-white release prints that could be projected simultaneously through different filters with the images combined by means of a prism.

By 1922 Kalmus and Comstock had moved on to Technicolor Process No. 2: rather than adding the color through projection, it would be recorded for the first time as information coded directly on the film, in this case, on black-and-white film that was filtered during shooting. Two color records were made on filtered black-and-white stock, red and green-blue, each showing through highlights and shadows the relative amount of the respective color in the photographed scene. These were transferred to what came to be known as a color matrix, a strip of film half as thick as normal film and coated with a gelatin that could harden. The hardened gelatin had something of the quality of a rubber stamp, with intensively colored areas showing up as troughs and lighter areas as peaks. Each record having been imprinted onto its matrix and the two matrices having hardened, the red and green-blue matrices were dyed either green-blue or red respectively and cemented together for projection. The first feature to exhibit this process was The Toll of the Sea (1922), followed by The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1923). Before the process was superseded in 1927, twenty-four feature films were released, shot all or in part in Technicolor Process No. 2.

Process No. 3 improved on the method by using the two color matrices not for direct projection but as the basis for printing onto blank stock. In a machine that impressed the dyed matrix against the blank stock between pressurized rollers, the stock became colored after it was passed through twice, once for each matrix. This process of pressing dye against a blank, receptive stock is called imbibation. Process No. 3, conceived in 1928, became the basis for all of what Technicolor achieved from that time until, for some years beginning in the 1970s, it went out of business (the company later revived). Between 1928 and 1929, thirty-one silent or part-talkie films were made through this process, culminating in Warner Bros.' The Show of Shows (1929); forty-nine color talkies were made between 1929 and 1933, ending with Warner Bros.' Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933).

THREE-STRIP TECHNICOLOR

Through connection with Walt Disney (1901–1966), the three-strip Technicolor process that achieved worldwide fame was brought into being. In a process of "successive exposure," animated material was filmed three times through a red, a blue, and a green filter to produce three black-and-white records that were transposed onto three dyeable matrices. Important here was the use of panchromatic—rather than orthochromatic—black-and-white stock: this responded not only to blue and violet light but also to yellow and red light, thus making possible a fulsome and richly accurate record in black and white of the full range of color in a scene. The blank stock was rolled three times in order to pick up the three vital color dyes—magenta, cyan, and yellow. In this way twenty-six animated features were made between Flowers and Trees (1932) and Robin Hood (1973), including all of the most celebrated full-length Disney features: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941), Bambi (1942), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and Peter Pan (1953).

HERBERT THOMAS KALMUS
b. Boston, Massachusetts, 9 November 1881, d. 11 July 1963

Herbert Thomas Kalmus, principal founder of Technicolor, remains one of the most important contributors to the development of motion pictures. Like only a handful of technological innovators, Kalmus deftly blended a shrewd but charming business sense—which was instrumental in attracting investors and Hollywood studios—with a probing and imaginative scientific mind. Were it not for Kalmus's persistence and vision, not to mention his business acumen, the industry-wide adoption of three-color processes for shooting films in full color would have occurred indefinitely later. The man who became synonymous with Technicolor thus changed the course of film history. Like synchronized sound, color required an industrial overhaul of every phase of movie making, but what tested the resolve of Dr. Kalmus and his company was the need to enhance and improve the process until Hollywood would start making the switch to color movies—a period lasting some three decades.

Orphaned at a young age, Kalmus worked his way into and through Massachusetts Institute of Technology (then called Boston Tech). There he met the school's only other physics major at the time, Daniel F. Comstock, who would become his business partner. After graduating from M.I.T. and then, in 1906, receiving their doctorates in Europe, the pair of young physicists returned to the United States. Between 1910 and 1915, Kalmus worked at Queen's University in Canada, where he performed his first research on the Technicolor process. In 1912, when they teamed up with W. Burton Wescott, an "engineering genius" in Kalmus's estimation, the trio started a patent company called Kalmus, Comstock, and Wescott (KCW). The young firm made several profitable inventions, but it was not long before Technicolor was its exclusive focus.

As early as 1915 KCW took out patents (mainly on special equipment for color cinematography and projection) for the first Technicolor process. Within two years they were shooting their first color film, The Gulf Between (1917), with a special Technicolor camera that used a beam splitter to simultaneously expose two different strips of film, one sensitive to the green spectrum and the other to the red spectrum. However, the procedure was imperfect and costly, and it was not until the fourth Technicolor process, patented in 1935, that they were successful. The first of Technicolor's three-strip processes, it was used with enormous success in films such as The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Gone with the Wind (1939). Later, after inventing a mono-pack color process, which could be shot with a standard one-strip, black-and-white motion picture camera, Technicolor briefly cornered the market and initiated the industry's full conversion to color.

Of the three original founders, Kalmus was the only one to see Technicolor through to its most successful and profitable period, in spite of a series of highly publicized and scrutinized lawsuits by his ex-wife, Natalie Kalmus, who held a stake in Technicolor for decades.

FURTHER READING

Cardiff, Jack. The Magic Hour. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996.

Neale, Stephen. Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Colour. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Drew Todd

Technicolor features were remarkable for the sharpness and saturation of the colors to be seen. No other process before or since has matched the quality of the Technicolor red, for example, or has produced a screen black so intense. There is a potent sense of color contrast that produces at once clarity, saturation, depth and roundness of color, and vivacity. This effect is largely due to the quality of the long-lasting dyes that are used

in the imbibation process. In general in color photography, color effects fade when film is projected repeatedly, or exposed to heat or the air, and the most long-lasting and saturated color effects are possible through dye-transfer printing. Whereas animated cels, themselves quite motionless, could be photographed any number of times through different filters to produce film color, in order to achieve this startling screen effect with live action a new technology was required: actors moving on a soundstage presented a new challenge altogether, as became evident in the first three-strip production, Becky Sharp (Rouben Mamoulian, 1935). With this film, produced by Technicolor shareholder John Hay (Jock) Whitney (1904–1982), it became clear how the increased production cost of Technicolor could make sense in the overall economy of filmmaking. In Becky Sharp the color blue, not present in the earlier two-strip process, was emphasized. Technicolor's investment in motion pictures was literally the startling and enriched color effect it could contribute to the process, luring audiences to see something they could not see anywhere else.

The film historian Tino Balio notes that to guarantee this effect, because Kalmus refused to trust studio cameramen and lab facilities, the company's contract with producers stipulated that they rent camera equipment as well as film stock from Technicolor, arrange all processing through the company, and use a company-approved cinematographer. A special color consultant had to be on set at all times, to consult with, and advise, the director and the cinematographer as to lighting, set design, costuming, and makeup so as to achieve the best possible color effects. Natalie Kalmus favored the dark background as ideal for showing facial tones clearly and strongly. In 1937 Max Factor developed a special makeup called Pan-Cake, yellow in hue, that would allow skin tones to be recorded "naturally" under the intense (bluish) studio light required for the process. All cameras, lenses, and stock had to be procured directly from Technicolor, which took responsibility for the upkeep and repair of the camera and the quality of the black-and-white stock used on set and the matrix and printing stock used in its own lab. A minimum print order of three hundred was typical in the Technicolor contract. Through a process called color timing, it was possible in the laboratory to achieve the precise printing of each black-and-white color record so that once it was dyed and printed an exact coloration could be obtained, shot by shot.

The three-strip Technicolor camera, a monstrous, noisy, and bulky machine that required special dollies and cranes, as well as a "blimp" to cover and dampen it acoustically, was originally designed by J. Arthur Ball, George Mitchell, and Henry Prouch. The camera was fed with three threaded black-and-white reels of negative stock—with a very low speed rating, thus requiring immense quantities of studio light—and admitted light through a gold-coated prism that would split the incoming beam into two equal parts. One beam was sent directly to the back of the camera, where it was recorded through a green filter on a single piece of film. Because of the directness of the passage of this beam, and the fact that green filtering always produces the highest-quality contrast, this "green record" was the one used later on to control for the contrast of the entire picture. The remaining light went at 90 degrees toward two strips of film laid back to back, hitting them after passing through a magenta filter (that would allow blue and red light to go through). The "blue record" was made on top and the "red record" at the back. As time went by, the coating of the prism was changed to permit more and more specifically controlled light to reach each piece of film. The three black-and-white film records were subsequently converted to matrices, which were dyed and printed directly onto a piece of blank stock. Well over one thousand features were made in the three-strip Technicolor process from 1934 onward.

COLOR STOCK

No consistent and true color film stock was available until the end of the 1940s, at which time Kodak introduced its Eastmancolor negative stock. With this product, a number of changes became possible in shooting technique, all of which decreased production cost and made spontaneity and mobility in shooting easier. Here the color was not printed in by dye-transfer, but was contained in an emulsion layer on the original negative stock in the form of dye couplers—chemicals that would be changed by the effect of color illumination. Eastmancolor prints were actually somewhat sharper than Technicolor prints, although the naked eye of the viewer did not detect this because of the "sharpening" effect of the color saturation of Technicolor. Cameras could now be considerably lighter and more mobile. Intense illumination was no longer required for shooting, and, in fact, it was possible to shoot color film in available light—as, famously, Néstor Almendros (1930–1992) did for Eric Rohmer (b. 1920) in Le Genou de Claire (Claire's Knee, 1970); much of the extensive constraint as to costuming, makeup, set decoration, and lighting was removed. Unless it was exposed meticulously, however, and processed with great care, Eastmancolor gave inferior screen effects when compared with Technicolor. So poor were some of the results, owing to the money-saving casualness of treatment provided at the studios, that Kodak insisted the studios apply their own name to the process, and thus were born Pathécolor and WarnerColor. Most important for later film audiences, films shot in Eastmancolor (principally in the 1970s and onward) had a very short shelf life. Negatives were good for only around one hundred prints, and because these final prints were themselves degraded through projection their color was substantially lost. But the process was cheap, and thus attractive to producers who had to contend with higher above-the-line costs for stars and scripts. By contrast, the original Technicolor negatives were black and white and were used only for the production of the printing matrices. Thus, new Technicolor prints made from original negatives remain as crisp and brilliant as they were originally. DVDs printed from original Eastmancolor negatives make it possible to see films digitally that have, in their original form, hopelessly degraded.

THE COLOR EFFECT AND COLOR FILM

By the late 1940s Hollywood was confronting several threats to box office sales: the new medium of television, the effects of the Paramount Decree (the popular name for the Supreme Court antitrust decision that led to the dismantling of the studio system), and the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings into an alleged Communist Party presence in Hollywood. Technicolor and other color technologies became vital selling tools, providing viewers with an optical experience that could not be obtained outside the movie theater. Beyond Dorothy's ruby slippers, one can name countless unforgettable objects of color on the screen: Gene Kelly's red carnation in the ballet in An American in Paris (1951) or the one Gael García Bernal grips in his teeth in Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education (La Mala Educación, 2004); Ripley's orange cat in Alien (1979); the sunset into which Luke Skywalker gazes as he resolves to go forward to meet his future in Star Wars (1977); the yellow fumes coming out of the smokestack at the end of Antonioni's Il Deserto rosso (The Red Desert, 1964); the Emerald City; Peter O'Toole's famous blue eyes in Lawrence of Arabia (1962); the purple flowers Rock Hudson buys for Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk, 1954), or the brilliant fuchsia walls of the Miami Beach hotel in Written on the Wind (Sirk, 1956); the pink panther; the Blue Meanies. Color also described people, scenes, and moments as objects: the swarthy brownness of Natalie Wood when pallid John Wayne and not-so-pallid Jeffrey Hunter discover her at the end of The Searchers (1956); avocado green Jim Carrey in The Mask (1994); the mauve atmosphere of Wyoming in Shane (1953); the subtle and rich palette of browns and beiges that describe the desert love dream of Zabriskie Point (1970); the intoxicating green apartment in Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003).

Although the history of cinema has been inscribed by numerous exceptionally talented cinematographers (working with brilliant designers, costume designers, makeup artists, and lighting technicians—all of whom necessarily collaborate in the production of screen color), nevertheless the decision to use a color stock for the purpose of shooting a motion picture does not guarantee that the color onscreen will play a significant role in the film. A color film can fail to function in, even if it is shot in, color. Color film stock guarantees that there will be color onscreen, technically speaking, but nothing more. When we come away from the film and think back on it, very often we remember no object or scene or point of concentration in which color is the determining variable. In Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984), for example, there is one moment when a large amount of viscous and extremely dark red—almost plum red—blood oozes across a floor. That is a true color moment in a color film, but it is the only such moment in that film, all of which is shot in color. Nicholas Ray (1911–1979) was an architect before he was a filmmaker, a man who saw the world as form-in-space; in Party Girl (1958), for example, he dresses Cyd Charisse in a spangling red dress and has her extend herself anxiously but beautifully along the length of an orange velvet sofa. The tension between the color values of that dress and that sofa creates an electricity that energizes the entire film.

A similar, albeit considerably more expensive, application of this same process is to be seen in a long sequence in the black-and-white film, Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, 1993). A little girl in a red overcoat wanders through the streets in the face of an augmenting chain of Nazi atrocity, marching soldiers, and an overall atmosphere of bleak despair. Finally, she is seen dead, her red overcoat a pungent reminder that she was once a discriminable, sovereign person. Here, the effect is obtained through frame-by-frame computerized tinting—photoshopping the coat while leaving all other aspects of the sequence, and the film, in what now appears to be stark and passionless black and white. When a computer process rather than an artist's hand technique is used to color frames, consistency between frames is obtained mechanically and thus a quality of continuous color is achievable. In Pleasantville (1998) computer colorization and optical printing together make possible the gradual infusion of color into specific parts of a black-and-white environment. The effect of mixing color and black and white in that film might appear to reflect what was done in The Wizard of Oz as Dorothy opened the door of her little house and stepped out into a fully Technicolored Oz, but in Wizard a sequence of sepia-tinted black-and-white film was joined to a sequence of full-color film to produce the startling effect.

At the end of Schindler's List, the narrative leaps forward to the present day in Israel, as remaining survivors of the Holocaust saved by Schindler gather in Jerusalem to remember him. This sequence is shot in full color, rendering everything that preceded it as neutral in retrospect as a desiccated historical record, certainly important factually and yet bleached of the thrilling color of "present" reality. In the black and white The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), a radically different effect is produced by shooting the culminating parade sequence in full color. All through the film a "solid gold Cadillac" has been invoked in the dialogue, but we have been denied the opportunity of seeing it directly; now, at the end, Judy Holliday and Paul Douglas are seen riding in this vehicle while crowds cheer all around. The goldness of the car is made especially intense by virtue of being visible directly in color; it is an especially "golden" golden car, because in comparison to the black and white by means of which we have been learning about it, it is seen now in the relatively "golden"—that is, valuable—medium of Technicolor.

SOME IMPORTANT COLOR FILMS

Notable uses of color in film include Sven Nykvist's (b. 1922) symphony of red and green in Viskningar och rop (Cries and Whispers, Ingmar Bergman, 1972, in Eastmancolor) and the sunset-lit palette Nykvist utilized in What's Eating Gilbert Grape (Lasse Hallström, 1993); Jean-Luc Godard's (b. 1930) primary-colored text blocks as part of the rhythmic design of Weekend (shot by Raoul Coutard in Eastmancolor, 1967); and the effects produced by the cinematographer Gordon Willis (working with designer Mel Bourne, decorators Mario Mazzola and Daniel Robert, costume designer Joel Schumacher, and makeup artist Fern Buchner) for Interiors (Woody Allen, 1978), in which a perfectly coordinated, subdued, even shackled bourgeois environment set out in a range of beige tones—costumes, walls, curtains, vases, complexions, shadows, everything—is suddenly disrupted after a matriarch's suicide by the appearance of the father's new girlfriend, dressed in explosive scarlet.

Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jacques Demy, 1964), was shot on Eastmancolor by Jean Rabier (b. 1927), with design by Bernard Evein. The little village of Cherbourg is configured as a grouping of tiny shops and apartments, alleys, corridors, and a garage. In virtually every setting, the walls are decorated with bizarre and supersaturated patterns and designs, often mixing brilliant red and yellow with brilliant lime green, purple, orange, and turquoise. There is a candy-shop quality to the images that perfectly matches the fairytale quality of the story and the lyrical quality of the dialogue, every word of which is sung to orchestral accompaniment. In the final sequence, which takes place in a winter snowfall and at night, red, blue, and yellow framed against the nocturnal blackness are the only colors that remain—as the former lovers discover one another again after many years and realize that their past is irretrievable. The boy, in fact, has become the owner of an Esso station, which is photographed to look like a giant toy garage. For The Ladies Man (Jerry Lewis, 1961), the set design of Ross Bellah and Hal Pereira, decorated by Sam Comer and James Payne, and shot in Technicolor by W. Wallace Kelley, features a giant boardinghouse in which nubile girls dressed by Edith Head in pastel pajamas wake up in variously colored rooms.

The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953) has a number of startling color sequences, in particular Fred Astaire's "Put a Smile on Your Face" dance routine. On a set designed by Preston Ames, Harry Jackson's Technicolor camera shoots a kaleidoscopic arcade with Astaire, in a light gray suit with royal blue socks, dancing his troubles away with a shoeshine man in a green Hawaiian shirt and hot fuchsia socks. In the celebrated "Dancing in the Dark" duet, Astaire and Cyd Charisse, both in elegant white against a vivid green-and-blue background of Central Park at twilight, move to Arthur Schwartz's music as the color of the set—not quite real, not quite fake—suspends and lulls us into a trance of engagement. In a stunning moment we see the horse that has pulled their carriage to this location pausing to drink from a fountain in which the water is sapphire blue—the blue of dreams, of pure wonder.

SEE ALSO Cinematography;Lighting;Technology

FURTHER READING

Balio, Tino. Grand Design: Hollywood as Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema: 1907–1915. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Buscombe, Edward. "Sound and Color." In Movies and Methods: An Anthology, Vol. 2, edited by Bill Nichols, 83–91. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.

Fielding, Raymond. The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography. New York: Hastings House, 1968.

Gunning, Tom. "Systematizing the Electric Message: Narrative Form, Gender, and Modernity in The Lonedale Operator." In American Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, edited by Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp, 15–50. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

Haines, Richard W. Technicolor Movies: The History of Dye Transfer Printing. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1993.

Musser, Charles. The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Winston, Brian. "A Whole Technology of Dyeing." Daedalus 114, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 105–123.

Murray Pomerance