Technicolor

Technicolor, film colour processes invented by Daniel F. Comstock and Herbert T. Kalmus, who formed the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation in 1915, frequently used as a generic term to describe all colour film systems. Technicolor is a trademark.

Technicolor, along with almost all early colour systems, was originally an additive process by which colour was introduced to film. A beam-splitter in the camera and coloured filters exposed two separate negatives. In projection, two lenses with the same colour of filters were registered together to achieve a colour image. The complications of use, apart from the “colour fringing” (colour mismatch at the edges), which resulted, restricted the commercial possibilities of all additive processes, and Technicolor, therefore, converted to subtractive processes. By 1921 it was simultaneously exposing two frames, on a single film, to filtered light and printing two separate strips of film from it. One was dyed red-orange, the other green and both were welded together back to back. The first film produced by this method, Toll of the Sea, was released by MGM in 1922; in 1926 Albert Parker exploited it for the swashbuckling spectacular The Black Pirate, which starred Douglas Fairbanks.

By 1932 Technicolor had developed its three-strip colour process. A prism was used to divide the light into its green, blue, and red components and each was recorded on to a separate colour-separation negative. The positives which were made from these—”matrices”—were used as printing plates and, in the manner of lithography, the dye image from each was transferred to the final print. Walt Disney used the process for a series of short animated films, which included The Three Little Pigs (1933); in 1935, when the feature Becky Sharp (directed by Rouben Mamoulian) was produced by Pioneer, the process was established. Among the films that followed are the first British Technicolor film Wings of the Morning (1937, directed by Harold Schuster), The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938, directed by Michael Curtiz), and Gone With the Wind (1939, directed by Victor Fleming).

Technicolor had many competitors, notably from processes that were derived from the German system, Agfacolor, but, nevertheless, it dominated colour film-making for 20 years, with such celebrated and influential films as Henry V (1944, directed by Laurence Olivier), Duel in the Sun (1946, directed by King Vidor), and The Red Shoes (1948, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger) making use of it. After 1950, however, Technicolor stock was gradually replaced by the more light-sensitive and less expensive Eastman Color film, which also offered improved colour rendering. The three filtered colours were no longer separate; they were now layered on a negative film that could be used in standard cameras. The large, three-strip Technicolor cameras, therefore, became obsolete and the colour advisers and Technicolor-trained cameramen whom the company always insisted accompany productions using its process were no longer required.

The conversion to Eastman Color was not always clear to the public, however, as film credits continued to announce “Colour by Technicolor”. In effect, this meant that Technicolor had processed the printing matrices that had been made from Eastman Color negatives.