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Cinema history3 min read

LESSON 134

Cinema technology 3: colour and widescreen

Kinemacolor to CinemaScope, 1906 to 1970.

IN THIS LESSON

  1. Early colour
  2. Technicolor
  3. Wider screens
  4. What lasted
  5. Practice: looking closely

Early colour

Experiments with colour film began in the late nineteenth century. Edward Raymond Turner made the oldest surviving colour films around 1902. George Albert Smith invented Kinemacolor in 1906, the first commercially successful colour process, used from 1909 to 1915. It was a two-colour additive system: black-and-white film was exposed through red-orange and blue-green filters in turn and projected through red and green filters. Kodak's Kodachrome reached amateurs on 16 mm in 1935 and on 8 mm in 1936. Long before that, around 1908, colour film had first become commercially viable.

Technicolor

Technicolor's first process appeared in 1916. Its famous three-strip process, Process 4, used a camera with a beam-splitting prism that exposed three black-and-white films at once, one for each primary colour. Walt Disney's Silly Symphony Flowers and Trees of 1932 was among the first films made with it and won the first Academy Award for an animated short. Becky Sharp of 1935 was the first feature shot entirely in three-strip. It was used for The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. In the 1950s single-strip colour negative, led by Eastman Color, replaced the bulky three-strip camera.

Wider screens

Television threatened cinema in the early 1950s, and studios answered with spectacle. Cinerama, premiered on 30 September 1952, projected three synchronised 35 mm films onto a deeply curved screen. CinemaScope, from 20th Century Fox, used anamorphic lenses to squeeze a 2.55 to 1 image onto ordinary 35 mm film and could be shown with existing projectors and an adapter; The Robe in 1953 was the first feature shot with an anamorphic lens. VistaVision ran film sideways. 70 mm prints carried six tracks of sound on magnetic stripes.

What lasted

CinemaScope as a lens system was made obsolete, largely by Panavision, but its anamorphic format continues, and film-makers still call wide presentation scope. The flat 1.85 to 1 ratio of 1953 also lasted. By the 1970s most films were made in colour, and IMAX, founded in Canada in 1967, took the large-format idea further with very big screens and film running horizontally. Colour and width both became defaults rather than events. Today a film shot in black and white or in a narrow frame is the exception that needs a reason.

Practice: looking closely

This is working practice. Watch a three-strip Technicolor film and a 1950s CinemaScope film. Note how strongly the colours are saturated and how the wide frame is used for groups and landscapes. Then frame a scene of your own for 2.39 to 1 and think about how you would fill the edges. Wide frames reward careful placement of people across the frame, and they punish empty space that has no purpose. Try placing two people at opposite edges and see what the space between them says.

Try it today

  1. 01Watch a scene from a three-strip Technicolor film.
  2. 02Watch a scene from a 1950s CinemaScope film.
  3. 03Describe the colour and the use of the frame in each.
  4. 04Frame your own scene with 2.39:1 guides.
  5. 05Grade one shot to imitate saturated three-strip colour.