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  • Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s
  • Lisa Schmidt
Scott Higgins . Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s. Austin: U of Texas P, 2007. 312 pp. $55.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

From where we sit in 2008 it may be tempting to assume that color in cinema is a vanquished territory. With the technology available to us we can modify the color of the light in a given shot with the click of a mouse button. We can alter the hue of an object, a scene, or an entire film. As for the name "Technicolor," it signifies a different Hollywood, a different time and place in moviemaking. It invokes the palettes of that time, shades of the real, the hyperreal, and the little-too-intense-to-be-believed. All too often these shades have faded with time; in some few cases we have reconstructed glories available to us, such as with the restored Vertigo of a few years back.

The fact is, few of us have seen a film in Technicolor. As Scott Higgins explains, original but degraded prints were restored to something different from what they once were, reissued, transferred to video, and restored again. Once we realize this we are only part of the way toward understanding how elusive color continues to be both in cinema and in a wider sense. Higgins's masterful work is, in his own words, an attempt to "answer color's challenge" (8). Color is highly subjective, changeable, and, in the context of a medium like film, vulnerable to a myriad of factors that alter how it is perceived by an individual set of eyes.

In a very real sense, then, Technicolor is lost to us, yet Higgins brings us as close as possible, via an act of intense academic energy combined with perceptual imagination, to seeing some of the old Technicolor classics "as they were." Following an outline of the familiar history of color in cinema—from hand tinting, stenciling, tinting and toning, to some of the more well known color processes such as Hanschiegel and Pathechrome—Higgins proceeds to examine Technicolor as business venture, as process, and as aesthetic history. He explores in fantastic detail the history, objectives, and accomplishments of the Technicolor Corporation. Initially a venture to "solve the problem of color in motion pictures" (4), Technicolor became all but synonymous with color cinema, holding a virtual monopoly until the broad adoption of color negative film (Eastmancolor) in 1952.

There was a time, however, when the motion picture industry had its doubts about the viability of any color process as more than a novelty. Higgins takes us back to that time in the early 1930s; indeed, Higgins's historical energies focus on the transition from two-strip to three-strip Technicolor and how the latter eventually became incorporated into the vocabulary of filmmaking throughout the 1930s. He traces a fascinating bit of reception history in relation to two-strip Technicolor, from wonder at the technological accomplishment, to a perception of overuse and abuse, to weariness with the method's limitations. As is well known, the two-strip method could not produce a "true" or full color spectrum; the results are flawed but oddly beautiful artifacts like The Toll of the Sea (1922) and The Black Pirate (1926).


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As Higgins demonstrates, Hollywood was conscious of the challenge faced by Technicolor, not merely to meet the demands for a truer color range but also to prove that color cinema could be aesthetically credible. Technicolor had to prove that it could be a part of the filmmaker's standard vocabulary. It had to be capable of depicting reality rather than providing an occasional visual novelty in the form of mere spectacle. [End Page 72]

From the perspective of Technicolor's chief officers, the two-strip process had been a temporary stop along the way to a three-strip solution, but the viability of three-strip was not merely a technological puzzle. It also depended upon a successful and consistent aesthetic strategy.

One of the many historical gifts of this book is a glimpse into the role of Natalie Kalmus...

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