Color Film history

Nearly 200 years later, in 1861, a young Scottish physicist, James Clerk Maxwell, conducted an experiment to show that, in fact, all colours can be made by an appropriate mixture of red, green and blue light.

In 1891 Gabriel Lippmann, a professor of physics at the Sorbonne, demonstrated a colour process which was based on the phenomenon of light interference—the interaction of light waves that produces the brilliant colours seen in soap bubbles.

The first process to use this method was devised by Dr John Joly of Dublin, in 1894.

The Joly process was introduced commercially in 1895, and remained on the market for a few years.

world earliest colour film was made by edward raymond turner in 1901

In 1905, The French production company Pathé began using pantographs to make stencils cut into each frame of a film and could handle up to six colors.

In 1912, Rudolph Fischer had patented a proposal to use what later became known as colour couplers.

By 1913, the Lumiere factory in Lyon was producing 6,000 autochrome plates every day.

While Kinemacolor lasted until 1914, it was never a financial success.

The birth of Technicolor in 1915 is remembered as a decisive event in the history of coloured films.

The first practical tripack system was introduced by Frederic Ives in 1916.

The results were so disappointing for Technicolor only one film, “The Gulf Between (1917),” was produced using this process.

One of the first successful subtractive processes was a two-colour one introduced by Herbert Kalmus’s Technicolor Corporation in 1922.

In 1926, Technicolor introduced their version of the dye transfer process that eliminated the sandwiching of the two strips of film.

Invented in 1928 by Dr DA Spencer, who later went on to become Managing Director of Kodak Ltd, Vivex was a modification of the Trichrome Carbro process in which sheets of cellophane were used as temporary supports for the pigment images.

Unsurprisingly, Colour Snapshots Ltd went bankrupt in December 1929.

It is said it was the principal color photography process in use until the advent of subtractive color in the mid-1930’s.

Consequently, it released a three-strip process in 1932, where two 35mm strips of black and white film negatives, one sensitive to blue and the other to red, ran together through an aperture behind a magenta filter.

Becky Sharp (1935) was the first full-length feature Technicolor film.

The first supplies of 35mm Kodachrome reached Britain in 1937.

Toland thought black and white to be so important that he said in an article for Theater Arts magazine shortly after “Citizen Kane’s” release in 1941, “Color will continue to be improved but will never be a hundred percent successful.

Technicolor remained the gold standard for color motion pictures into the 1950’s.

In 1952, it introduced Eastmancolor, a one strip colour negative process or ‘monopack’, and its high quality convinced most of Hollywood’s studios.

But Technicolor’s three strip and dye transfer process couldn’t be matched and continued until 1954.

The dye transfer process yielded such superior quality prints, Technicolor was able to adapt it to convert single strip color emulsions, such as Eastmancolor, and continued it until the early 1970’s.

Excerpted from The Complete Idiot's Guide to Movies and Film 2001 by Mark Winokur and Bruce Holsinger.

Over a decade later their work was completed and a digitally restored “A Trip to the Moon” became the opening night highlight of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.