Technicolor Cinematography
American · Three-Strip Technicolor 1932–1955
Three strips of black-and-white film running through one camera at the same time, each recording a different third of the spectrum, later dyed and glued back together. Technicolor is the most elaborate colour process ever put into industrial production.
Origin
The company was founded in 1915 and worked through several increasingly successful systems. Process 4, the three-strip system introduced in 1932, is the one that matters: Becky Sharp in 1935 was the first feature made entirely in it, and Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz in 1939 established what it could do. The camera was enormous, the process was expensive, and Technicolor rented it as a package — you could not simply buy the stock, you hired the camera, the crew and a colour consultant, and for years that consultant was Natalie Kalmus, whose approval of the colour design was contractually required.
Technique
A beam-splitting prism behind the lens divides the incoming image, sending one path to a green-sensitive negative and the other through a bipack of blue- and red-sensitive negatives. Three separation negatives result. Prints are made by the dye transfer process: each negative produces a gelatin matrix which is soaked in its complementary dye — cyan, magenta, yellow — and pressed in sequence onto a single receiving film, transferring the dye like a lithographic press. The result is exceptionally stable, and original Technicolor prints have retained their colour where later single-strip Eastmancolor prints from the 1950s have faded badly.
The palette
Saturated, high-contrast and controlled by design rather than observation. The dyes produce intense primaries and slightly compressed secondaries, and the process needs enormous light levels — up to four times normal — which forced hard, bright key lighting. Kalmus advocated restraint and a colour script keyed to narrative, but the process itself pushes toward vividness. The ruby slippers, the yellow brick road and the green of Oz are exact demonstrations of what those dyes do best.
Legacy
Three-strip was phased out in the mid-1950s in favour of cheaper single-strip stocks, and the dye transfer printing lines closed in the 1970s, briefly revived in the 1990s, and closed again. Its archival superiority is now widely acknowledged: the studios that shot on Technicolor still have their colour, and a great deal of what came after does not.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.