When colour arrived at the cinema

Silent cinema was not black and white. A large proportion of prints in circulation were coloured by hand, by stencil, or — most commonly — by chemistry applied to the whole frame. Tinting dyed the film base so that the light areas took a colour; toning replaced the silver in the dark areas so that the shadows took it instead. The two could be combined on the same print.

The vocabulary was conventional and audiences read it without instruction: amber for interiors and lamplight, blue for night, green for landscape, red for fire and violence. It was colour used as a caption rather than as a description — nobody believed the night was literally blue — and it disappeared not because it stopped working but because the arrival of optical sound made dyed film stock a technical problem.

Three-strip Technicolor, from 1932, ran three separate strips of black-and-white negative through one enormous camera, splitting the incoming image with a prism and filters so that each strip recorded one primary. The prints were then made by dye transfer, essentially a printing press for film, which is why surviving Technicolor prints have held their colour while later stocks have not.

The cost was light. The process was slow enough that it demanded an enormous amount of illumination on set, and the camera was heavy, loud and rented rather than sold. Technicolor did not sell you the process. It rented you the camera, with its own crew, and with a colour consultant attached.

That consultant was, in practice, the department run by Natalie Kalmus, who is credited on an extraordinary number of colour films of the period and whose brief was to protect the studio and the process from what she considered chromatic excess. The house philosophy favoured restraint: colour justified by the subject, saturation reserved for moments that earned it, and neutrals doing most of the work.

Directors and cinematographers frequently resented it, and the arrangement did produce a house style rather than a set of individual visions. It also produced the coherence people remember. When a film of that era suddenly commits to a full-saturation sequence, it registers as an event precisely because the surrounding two hours were disciplined.

Eastmancolor arrived in the 1950s: a single strip of film, an ordinary camera, no rented crew and no consultant. It ended the monopoly quickly and democratised colour, and it carried a defect that took twenty years to become visible. The dyes were not stable. Enormous numbers of negatives and prints from the 1950s to the 1970s faded towards magenta, losing the cyan and yellow layers and leaving a uniform pink ghost of the original image.

The scale of the loss drove the film preservation campaigns of the 1980s, and it is the clearest modern parallel to the fugitive pigments of painting: a material chosen for cost and convenience, adopted industry-wide, and quietly deleting the work it recorded. The prints that have survived best from the whole colour era are the dye transfer Technicolor ones — the expensive process that lost.

Digital intermediate finished the story. Once the whole image is data, colour is no longer a property of the emulsion but a decision made afterwards, adjustable indefinitely, region by region, shot by shot. The constraint that had shaped every previous era — this stock behaves this way and you work with it — disappeared.

What appeared instead was a convergence. With total freedom available, a great many films of the 2000s and 2010s arrived at the same scheme: skin pushed warm and orange, everything else pushed cool and teal, the most reliable complementary pair in the wheel applied as a default. The lesson is one the atlas keeps repeating from painting — a palette is memorable because of what it refuses, and when nothing is refused there is nothing to remember.