The History of Technicolor
Posted: April 5th, 2008, 11:40 am
I attended yesterday a great conference about the history of Technicolor given by Jean-Pierre Verscheure (who teaches cinema in Brussels University). He is one of the world specialist on the subject and showed some spectacular excerpts of films, always from original prints made the old fashion way (dye transfer). He has a huge collection of prints of classic films. The conference lasted about 4 h!!! I know it sounds like a long time, but, he showed some pretty meaty excerpts from a wide range of films from 1932 to 2002 and time went by very quickly!
Among all the facts discussed, I have learned quite a bit about the company Technicolor itself.
From 1915 until 1932, Technicolor started experimenting with two-strips Technicolor. They produced numerous shorts to try to get the studios interested by their process. At first, they were really struggling. It's not until 1928 that Color suddenly became an issue with the advent of sound. They could promote their films as all-talking, all-dancing and in 'natural color'. But alas, this two-strips system failed to catch on the public as it wasn't that natural after all!!!
Still, in The Black Pirate (1926) by Albert Parker with Douglas Fairbanks Sr, there is a marvellous use of this two-strips process. The Kino edition of the film is really nice.
In 1932 until 1953, Technicolor developed his three-strips process (incorporating Cyan, Magenta and Yellow). They managed to convinced Disney to produces some cartoons with this process. I saw two early examples: Flowers and Trees (1932) and Country Cousin (1935). These two Disney showed the wonderful quality of the process with a myriad of shades. These two original prints were still of stunning quality. The first feature film made in Technicolor was Becky Sharp (1935) by Rouben Mamoulian. From that date, films in color slowly took off. The film taht really launched Technicolor was Disney's Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (1937). from that date, the number of Technicolor films took off until the arrival of a new technical modification that suddenly put a stop to the expansion: CinemaScope.
In 1953, XXth century Fox produced the first ever CinemaScope film, The Robe by Henry Koster with Richard Burton. the complex three-strips camera proved impossible to use with the new anamorphic lens. And Fox turned to a new monopack system: Kodak's Eastmancolor. I saw an excerpt of an original print of The Robe, alas -as with most Eastmancolor films- it had turned pinkish. But the level of sharpness was immensely better than the Technicolor one. Technicolor had to work harder to overcome the problem with the CinemaScope lens. They finally overcame it by 1957. The sharness was now equivalent to that of the Eastmancolor. I saw a wonderful excerpt of Funny Face (1957) by Stanley Donen (so often only available as a ghastly PD print!) which showed the extreme quality of the process.
Technicolor abandoned completely the three-packs process in 1974 and joined forces with Eastman to create a mono-pack. They never stopped experimenting even with film format: Techniscope, VistaVision and so on...
I saw also some incredible 70 mm excerpts from Spartacus (1960) and from A Star is Born (1954) in its original 1:2.55 format! Believe me it's HUGE! And Cukor made the best use of it placing actors at the extreme of the screens. No way you can appreciate that on a TV....
Overall, I felt that the dye transfer system used by technicolor in its golden years (1935-53) was incredibly rich and offered some very stable prints which have kept their pristine colors. On the down side, as it's a dye transfer, you get a bit of diffusion and less sharpness. But this was used by cinematographers to get some wonderful 'portrait' effects of the stars. Particularly red-heads: Deborah Kerr, Rita Hayworth and Maureen O'Hara just to mention a few.
What is your own experience with Technicolor?