ABSTRACT

The first commercially exploited ‘natural colour’ processes in the cinema industry have been based on the additive synthesis of colours. They were complex systems, involving very heavy economic constraints and, today, specific restoration problems. This contribution describes the particular case of the 2008 reconstruction of 1908 Kinemacolor films at the Screen Archive South East (Brighton, UK). In retrospect, additive processes have appeared to historians as an obviously bad solution to the ‘natural colour’ problem. But, if this was such a wrong direction, then why was it dominantly adopted at the time? Technological reasons alone cannot account for this choice; it is rather related to the circulation of technological and epistemological models between media or, on a wider scale, between industries.

KEYWORDS

film colour; technology; Kinemacolor; film restoration; digital cinema

Most of the early ‘natural colour’ processes in film technology were based on the additive synthesis of colours, meaning that the final colours were obtained by mixing primary-coloured lights during projection. That is a strange historical fact. In particular, the processes that reached the stage of commercial exploitation, Kinemacolor and Chronochrome, were all additive. Kinemacolor was patented in Great Britain in 1906, based on research that had already led to a patent in 1899, even though that first process had remained unsuccessful. It was exploited from 1908 to about 1915, with notable success. Several years after the first Kinemacolor events, Gaumont started to organize commercial projections of its own process, Chronochrome. Still, in 1917, the first process proposed under the name Technicolor by Herbert T. Kalmus and his collaborators was, again, an additive one – as opposed to anything that Technicolor later developed. By comparison, the first natural-colour photographic process having known an industrial level of distribution, the Lumière Autochrome, exploited from 1907 onwards, was also an additive system.

Additive processes can be very different from one another, but they have common characteristics. Whereas the subtractive synthesis of colour is based on the mixing of light-absorbing pigments from three well-chosen primary colours that filter the final coloured image as inscribed on paper or filmstock, additive synthesis works by mixing three modulated coloured lights, of different primary colours, to produce the final coloured image during projection.