Kinemacolor imploded amid patent disputes, but not before an intrigued American engineer named Herbert Kalmus brought a fragment of Kinemacolor film back to the US. The first system that captured natural color on film was Kinemacolor, which caused a sensation in Britain in 1908. Even in the earliest days of cinema, motion picture pioneers Thomas Edison and George Méliès had some of their films hand-painted. But the first Technicolor offering wasn't the first color seen by moviegoing audiences. Technicolor brought a vibrant, highly saturated palette to motion pictures that sometimes bathed them in hyperrealism. "This quixotic determination to succeed against what, at the beginning especially, must have seemed like impossible odds, can serve as an important lesson for filmmakers and tech developers alike." In living color
"The men and women of Technicolor tried and failed over and again - Technicolor 1 is radically different than Technicolor 4 - and even after 'succeeding' they never stopped tweaking and perfecting," says Ken Fox, also a project archivist at the George Eastman Museum. A commercial one, too.īut the creators of Technicolor persevered. And like today's 3D flicks - which some call a gimmick designed to make audiences forget they paid extra for a darker, less brilliant version of a film - it was a critical and artistic flop. Like today's 3D pictures, "The Gulf Between," running about 58 minutes, was expensive and hard on the eyes. The failures of the first Technicolor film teach some obvious lessons to anyone looking to bring new technology to the big screen. "They wanted a film they could show to investors and bigwigs in New York to prove this whole Technicolor experiment was commercially viable. "The Gulf Between" was "meant to be a proof-of-concept," says Kelsey Eckert, a Technicolor project archivist at Rochester, New York's George Eastman Museum, home to some of the oldest surviving photography and film materials. Instead, some critics slammed the film for red and green flashes and random objects showing up too bright. But it was a long, long way from sumptuously colorful classics like 1939's "Gone with the Wind" and 1952's "Singin' in the Rain" that will forever be synonymous with Hollywood's golden age. That Technicolor production, "The Gulf Between," a romantic comedy now considered a lost film, premiered on Sept. A hundred years ago, a group of scientists and silent movie stars stepped out of a railroad car into the Florida sunshine to shoot America's first feature-length color motion picture.
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