Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism by Joshua Yumibe (review)

There is a growing critical fascination with color and film and, with it, a growing publication list. After many years when color in cinema was seen largely as a technological matter, the intellectual issues that it raises have been covered in such works as Angela Dalle Vache and Brian Price’s Color: The Film Reader, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen’s Early Discourses on Colour and Cinema, Paul Coates’s Cinema and Colour: The Saturated Image, Richard Misek’s Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color, Steven Peacock’s Colour, Sarah Street’s Colour Films in Britain: The Negotiation of Innovation 1900–1955, and Sarah Street, Simon Brown, and Liz Watkins’s Color and the Moving Image: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Archive.¹

The reason for this growth in interest seems to lie primarily in color and the digital image. The manipulability of color in a digital environment, from the colorization of monochrome film archives to digital postproduction techniques through to the rise of Instagram, has made us newly aware of the subjective nature of color. The color on our screens is not a reflection of reality; it is the product of choice. The ways in which color can be altered, distorted, or reimagined—by ourselves as much as by suppliers in a traditional sense—are making us realize how color has an abstract as well as a naturalistic function, making its meaning something worth pursuing for critics and commentators, even as the absolute meaning of color becomes ever more elusive.

The tension between color as something subservient (i.e., contributing to the realism of an image) and something that has a suprareality all its own is fundamental to the understanding of color in the past as well as the color of today, and this is the great strength of Joshua Yumibe’s study of color and early film. That which applies to the digital image of the 2010s applies equally to what was projected on our screens a hundred years ago. Color exists to record, and it exists for its own sake. Exploring the tension between the two helps us understand how early cinema functioned and what its lasting connection is with us today.

As Yumibe relates, color was a part of cinema from the very beginning. Those who consider that color cinema did not begin until Technicolor in the 1930s are overlooking forty years in which color was featured in a large part of motion picture production (indeed, they are overlooking the crucial early years of Technicolor itself). Yumibe’s book looks at color in the early cinema period (roughly the first fifteen years of film), though not comprehensively so. His focus is on applied color, that is, the methods of adding color to what were monochrome productions, originally through hand painting, then through the semiautomated stencil color process of Gaumont and Pathé Frères, and on to the tinting and toning processes that added general color effects. “Natural” color processes, in which color was produced by photochemical means, which for the early cinema period primarily means Kinemacolor, Yumibe acknowledges but then excludes. He argues that applied color has been less studied, hence his book is rebalancing critical bias, but the real reasons seem to be that applied color is more interesting intellectually (to some) and that applied color prints are more readily available. Certainly Kinemacolor prints are hard to track down, and still harder to see correctly in projected form (the color could only be seen when the ostensibly monochrome Kinemacolor print was projected through a rotating red–green color filter), but the absence of Kinemacolor (and the emphasis on documenting the real that it represented) prevents Moving Color from being the definitive work for color cinema at this period, which it would otherwise undoubtedly be.

Hand-painted, stencil-colored, and tinted and toned prints are available in many film archives and can be found on an increasing number of video releases (see, e.g., the British Film Institute’s [BFI’s] recent DVD release Fairy Tales: Early...