Early discourses on colour and cinema
by Tom Ruffles
[ bookreviews ]
Despite the volume produced each year, it's quite hard to get to see PhD theses, even assuming one can find out about those that sound interesting in the first place. So Stockholm University is to be applauded for making theses produced there available, in functional paperback editions, to a wider readership than the one that they normally have (supervisor, internal and external examiners and perhaps the odd post-graduate who wants to know what they look like).
However, there is a reason why newly-minted PhDs tend to turn their books into more popular versions for sale through commercial publishers. Academic prose can be extremely daunting, and Eirik Frisvold Hanssen's dissertation, while crammed with interesting information and insights, is not for the faint-hearted. As a random example, one would need to appreciate the difference between tinting and toning (and their respective effects on the black and white areas of the image) from elsewhere in order to be able to follow the argument, as Hanssen does not spend much time on the distinction.
And that is fine, because a PhD thesis is not designed to convey basic information, but readers do need to be alert that the writing is at a fairly high level and presupposes a prior grounding in the subject. To help with understanding the processes discussed, the general reader needs to read Hanssen in conjunction with more basic texts that show what exactly the pioneers were trying to achieve. Primers such as DB Thomas's short The First Colour Motion Pictures (rather dated but still useful), or the colour chapter in Brian Coe's The History of Movie Photography, would help to underpin the theoretical analysis here. Hanssen's bibliography is excellent, though naturally many of the items are only available through specialist libraries.
Not a weakness, because the focus is explicitly elsewhere, but something else to bear in mind when trying to get to grips with the complexities of the subject, is the lack of technical context. Although Part 1 of the book concentrates largely on Kinemacolor, the first commercially successful two-colour additive system, there is no sense of how it came to be developed by George Albert Smith from a pre-existing three-colour additive system, and no examination of the relevant patents. One would already need to know how colour is separated and recombined in Kinemacolor; Hanssen rather perfunctorily informs us (p34) that 'The Kinemacolor process was patented in 1906, and involved black-and-white footage filmed and projected at double speed (32 frames a second) with a revolving shutter and alternating red and green filters in front of the lens', which would need some elaboration for someone unfamiliar with the method to be able to understand.
Nor is there any reference to Smith's relationship with Charles Urban, who exploited Kinemacolor commercially, or the legal disputes with William Friese-Greene that killed it. It could be argued that it is difficult to get a full idea of what Kinemacolor was exactly without considering the personalities of Smith and Urban, particularly the latter's obsession with the educational function of film - the bulk of Kinemacolor output was non-fiction - but there is little to be found about Urban as a person here. The interested reader would need to look at the work Luke McKernan in particular has done to rescue this fascinating character from undeserved oblivion.
A couple of other issues: for a book dealing with colour in cinema one might expect it to be lavishly illustrated, but apart from the cover, showing Pathé frame samples, the book is entirely without pictures, which is a pity as they would have helped enormously to leaven the dense content, though perhaps understandable given the economics of publishing such a specialised text. Finally, there is no index, which limits the usefulness of the book as a reference work.
Having mentioned these drawbacks, what are the strengths of the thesis? We normally think of early films as black and white, just as we think of them as silent. Neither is true. About 85% of silent films were coloured in some form, many prints circulating in both colour and black and white versions, and there was normally a musical accompaniment. Hanssen looks at colour in films from the earliest hand-painted efforts to about 1935, a date marking the release of the first three-colour Technicolor, feature film. He also takes a side trip to the ghastly fad for colourisation popular in the 1980s and '90s (though inexplicably it still pops up from time to time, most recently as a meritless extra on the latest release of Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers).
The major portion of the first section concentrates on the descriptions contained in the Catalogue of Kinemacolor Film Subjects (1912), and this, together with the contemporary accounts of the films' reception in trade papers, reviews and film histories, provides a case study in unpacking precisely what 'natural colour', i.e. colour achieved photographically, was and how it related to alternative practices such as tinting, toning, or (exemplified by Pathécolor, a term first used in 1911 as a riposte to Kinemacolor) applying colour to specific areas of the black and white film strip. It transpires that 'natural' colour was not at the time automatically seen as an advance on black and white, or even on applied colour.
Hanssen unpacks contemporary attitudes, how for example, by calibrating colour verisimilitude on Caucasian flesh tones, Kinemacolor's relationship with reality was culturally constructed; conversely how Kinemacolor, being 'natural' and therefore faithful to reality, was seen by its proponents as morally superior to applied colour; and how ironically Pathé promoted its stencil technique as itself being in 'natural colours' because Kinemacolor only used two colours whereas stencilling utilised a wider palette. He also considers the fundamental issue of how colours have survived, given their often unstable natures and the effects preservation, involving transfer onto different stock, has on them.
The next section looks at parallels between colour and sound, how they related to each and were compared by theorists (notably Sergei Eisenstein, who attempted to fit both into his wider montage theory) both in the period before sound-on-film became the norm at the end of the 1920s and later. After the introduction of sound films, there was an assumption, vigorously exploited by the Technicolor Company, that colour would be the Next Big Thing. However, colour films only became predominant in Hollywood in the late 1960s, with the spread of colour televisions, and Hanssen explores the uneasy history of colour in the early period. He additionally touches on how the avant-garde extended an interest in synaesthesia into an art form - colour music - which linked to other areas in which colour played a significant part, such as print and advertising, firework displays, colour organs, coloured illuminations, clothing (intriguingly many of the dyes used in applied film colour were the same as those used on fabrics), even wallpaper. A final short chapter examines how colour produces meanings in objects, meanings that not surprisingly resist attempts at codification.
Hanssen has done, as one would expect at this level, an excellent job in analysing a wide range of material, bringing it into a framework and illuminating a number of hitherto relatively obscure corners of film as it developed in its first 40 years. For those interested in this area of research, and with the constitution to tackle the prose style (it's worth mentioning that although it was produced in Stockholm by a Swede, the English is by and large excellent) it is an essential contribution to the study of colour during film's early period.
