The invention of cinema in colour

II. The invention of natural colour
 
2. Colour reproduced on the projection print
The first person to find a solution was doctor Herbert Kalmus. Founder of the Technicolor Company, whose name was synonymous with cinema in colour for several decades, Herbert Kalmus worked on this cinema principle from 1917.
As additive synthesis didn't allow him to have colour on the projection print (Technicolor n°1), Kalmus turned towards a different principle, the subtractive synthesis of colour.
This principle consisted in subtracting excess luminous intensity from the three primary colours that represent white light.
 
Subtractive synthesis
For each primary colour the tinted positive of the colour resulting from the mix of the two others called a complementary colour was used  as a filter.
The three overlaid positives (cyan, magenta, yellow) allowed all the colours to be restored.
This technique frequently used in printing is obviously more difficult to apply to cinematographic images whose size does not exceed 3 cm. Initial trials were therefore limited to using two colours (green and red).
 
Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, Rupert Julian, 1925
Technicolor n°2
During filming with the Technicolor n°2 system, each green and red colour selection was recorded one after the other on a single negative, whose sensitive surface, the emulsion, was always in black and white.
While it is relatively easy to print positives from each selection and tint them, this time there was no question of restoring the image in colour by projecting these two films at the same time. The whole problem now lay in reuniting and overlaying the two coloured emulsions on the one and the same film, ready to project. Technicians first of all had the simple idea of sticking the two positives together. The first film in a subtractive system was born.
It took Kalmus and his team no less than twenty years of research and two other commercial releases to achieve the wonderful Technicolor n°4, undoubtedly the most wonderful system of cinema in colour ever invented.
During filming in Technicolor n°4, the colour was recorded at the same time on three different black and white negatives through three tinted filters.
 
Tulips Shall Grow, 1942
Technicolor n°4
The genuine invention of Technicolor consisted in printing colours one after the other on a single film for projection. And these were the three complementary colours (cyan, magenta and yellow) from subtractive synthesis that were used.
The result was extraordinary. Blue combined with green gave a palette until then unknown on screen; as for red, saturated in the extreme, it reinforced dramatic intensity as well as romantic exaltation. This flamboyant red was the signature of Technicolor. No other procedure allowed it to be restored with such presence and vividness.
Filmed in 1935 Becky Sharp was the first feature length film entirely in colour in the history of cinema. It was the beginning of the golden age of Technnicolor, which would last two decades and would be the only technique for making feature length films in 35mm and in colour during this period.
 
Technicolor n°4 camera
in its soundproof box
Technicolor n°4 camera
But the Technicolor camera, which had to take three images at the same time, was extremely heavy and hard to handle. Only twenty-four were built in the world. It was advisable to develop the procedure to have a single image in colour from the take.
 
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