Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s

Our focus in this chapter is primarily on industrial history as opposed to film analysis, which we take up in detail in ensuing chapters. Specifically, our interest is in how new forms of chromatic standardization across the cinematic and industrial fields of production necessitated new, international modes of technical research. To these ends, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production is particularly useful, not only as a model for mapping color’s complex interactions across media and cultural fields of the 1920s, but also for how it emphasizes the dynamic nature of fields, which are open to constant transformation.³ When emergent forces—such as new corporations, trade alliances, technologies, and ideas—enter a given field, its internal structure shifts to accommodate the novelty. Taking synthetic color’s introduction into the fields of production as a starting point, we delineate how color in the 1920s transformed, and was transformed by, the various intermedial, industrial, and cultural spheres that it interacted with—in, around, and through the cinema.

German corporations dominated the conglomerated chemical and colorant industry at the turn of the last century, but with the conclusion of the First World War and the ensuing reparations, the German industrial sector was forced to divest a portion of its international factories and chemical patents. Global colorant production diversified and surged in the ensuing postwar consumer markets, which necessitated new, transferable principles of research and design. The international history of color intersects with what Olivier Zunz has examined regarding the rise of U.S. power in the “American twentieth century.” As he explains, one of the overarching drives of the United States at the turn of the century was “the creation of an industrial economy on a continental scale,” which in turn would grow to dominate global trade, eventually overtaking the German industrial complex during the interwar period.4 As the second half of this chapter details through comparative studies of Eastman Kodak, Pathé Frères, and Technicolor, part of this rise to global power relates to intersecting developments in the U.S. colorant and film industries during the 1920s. Tracking the industrialization of color and cinema in a global context illuminates a structural transformation in knowledge production during the era. Laboratory research, particularly in Germany and the United States, was being professionalized through increasing partnerships between industry and technical universities that accelerated the rate of knowledge transfer. This change in the structure of industrial knowledge was one of the factors—alongside other professionalizing shifts, such as the rise of the studio system and the development of the trade press and organizations such as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers—that enabled cinema to crystalize as an autonomous mass medium.⁵

Industrialized and standardized, color became a hallmark of modernity and modernism, consumer culture, and film and mass media. To make sense of these overlapping concerns, we examine how the standardization of color drove its expansion across fields and media during the 1920s. The industrial networks running through and around cinema experienced new challenges, which developed and sustained symbiotic relationships across media. With the diversification and expansion of aniline production and distribution following the war, the standardization of color values through colorimetry became of increasing importance for the emerging cultures of mass production and consumption, and the professionalization and interconnection of research laboratories played a critical role in this industrial process. It is the development of industrial standards for color research to which we now turn to trace in brief its history before and after the war in order to assess its influence on film research laboratories of the 1920s.

The synthesis of aniline colorants from coal tar in the middle of the nineteenth century defined an initial phase of chromatic innovation in the modern era. Though Great Britain and France had well-established colorant industries, it was Germany that came to dominate the trade as its empire coalesced, controlling upwards of 90 percent of the global market by 1900, a position it maintained until World War I. Lacking an expansive colonial network to supply raw resources for manufacturing in the middle of the century, Germany relied instead upon domestic innovation to compete internationally.⁶ Beginning in the 1860s, emerging companies such as Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik (BASF), Friedr. Bayer et comp, and Höchst AG far outperformed French and British colorant firms. These companies came to hold most of the modern dye patents and factories in the world, while also cultivating close ties to research centers at technical universities that trained a highly skilled workforce of chemists. Such a confluence of technical capability and trained ingenuity led to the continued innovation of aniline production as well as a growing variety of chemical by-products.⁷

Such changes in the industrial field of color enabled the chromatic expansion that occurred in the field of cultural production from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s. However, as aniline colorants flooded the market in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reactions ranged dramatically in the cultural field as the world took on a synthetic face. For some, colored goods—from clothing to chromolithographs to home appliances—were thought beneficial for cultural taste. U.S. chromolithographer and educator Louis Prang, for example, in 1868 suggested that color printing increased access to art, allowing it to be “republicanized and naturalized in America,” thus improving popular taste through increased color consciousness.8 Relatedly, at the turn of the century, after devoting “decades of his career and large portions of his business to shaping the way that American children perceived color,” Milton Bradley “played a crucial role in making bright hues an unquestioned fixture in the life of the child,” according to Nicholas Gaskill. As Gaskill argues, “the ways of seeing fostered in the Bradley system prepared students to enter the emerging world of consumerism both as efficient producers and ready consumers.” Intricately connected to this endeavor was the standardization of color materials that Bradley produced through his company.⁹ New color standards corresponded across production, education, and consumption in his system. These imbricated approaches can be read as being relatively self-serving and utilitarian, as both Prang’s and Bradley’s business was to mass-produce and sell color goods. Yet, they also aspired beyond corporate interests to shape the color sense and consciousness of students for their betterment, in concert with broader pedagogical currents that were reshaping childhood education as well as art instruction, from Montessori to Waldorf and the Bauhaus (see chapter 4).

In the art world, the embrace of new color paints was extraordinary, encompassing the chromatic experiments in the Impressionism of Monet and the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat, the Fauvism of van Gogh, Picasso’s Cubism, and the abstraction of Kandinsky. Moving away from the dull palettes of Analytic Cubism, Picasso enthusiastically embraced the vivid enamels of Ripolin house paint in works such as Violin, Glass, Pipe and Anchor, Souvenir of Le Havre (1912).¹⁰ Few writers celebrated the utopian potentials of modern color more than the German journalist and science fiction writer Paul Scheerbart, who famously published in 1914 his utopian tract The Glass Architecture, comprised of 111 aphorisms about the uses and possibilities of glass and color in design. In this novelistic fantasy, he foresaw that modern color, as fused with transparent, colored-glass bricks, “will inevitably transform our whole lives and the environment in which we live…. So we must hope that glass architecture will indeed transform the face of our world.”¹¹

If these celebrations were one side of the vibrant reception of synthetic colors before the First World War, there were just as many writers and cultural critics who disparaged the chromatic changes: the “metallic, nervous, and discordant effect of commercial dyes,” as Arts and Crafts practitioners at the turn of the last century described the dangers of aniline colorants.12 Max Nordau, the Austrian cultural critic, infamously attacked the influx of color for its effects on the human sensorium. Few escaped his judgments: in the vibrant clothing of the passerby on streets and of the aesthete at the opera, in the violet hues of Manet and the Impressionists, and through the fascination with synesthesia in Symbolist and Decadent literature, color became emblematic for Nordau of the degeneration of culture and the parallel rise of hysteria and other nervous disorders. As he argued, “The curious style of certain recent painters—‘impressionists,’ ‘stipplers,’ or ‘mosaists,’ ‘papilloteurs’ or ‘quiverers,’ ‘roaring’ colourists, dyers in gray and faded tints—becomes at once intelligible to us if we keep in view the researches of the Charcot school into the visual derangements in degeneration and hysteria.”¹³ Entwined with the idea that synthetic color caused physiological impairment was the notion that it was also indicative of the falseness of modern culture—with what Edwin Lawrence Godkin, in his 1874 polemic in the Nation, famously disparaged as the new “Chromo-Civilization.”¹⁴ Color in many of these critical traditions hinged upon its relegation in aesthetic theory to a form of ornamentation, secondary to the primacy of form and line—disegno over colore. As a form of ornament, color is also dangerous: prone to overuse, vivid saturations, ugly contrasts, and lethal bad taste. Functioning in an emotional register, it also could overstimulate and contaminate weaker, supposedly primitive minds, as we discussed in the introduction with regard to H. Baer’s writings on color film.¹⁵

It was in the context of such polemics for and against color that colorant firms promoted their wares. In order to better commodify and control color in this uncertain market, German firms in particular produced color charts and guidebooks from the second half of the nineteenth century on—folios of color swatches ordered in abstract grids that demonstrated for buyers what a company’s paints and dyes looked like on various materials, such as silk, paper, linens, leathers, and even feathers (color plate 1.1).¹⁶ Initially the colors were labeled with their catalog numbers, sometimes along with their chemical compositions, but in the 1900s the charts increasingly described the colors with evocative, and at times deeply racialized, names: “Castilian red,” “Goya” for a deep scarlet, “Narcissus” for a bright yellow, or “Hopi” and “Mesa” for shades of light brown. As we examine further in the next chapter, naming colors coincided with colonial projects of regulating “colored” peoples, regimenting indigenous cultures, and exporting native patterns and hues for commodification through tasteful control. Ann Temkin has noted pointedly that these charts emerged in the 1880s “as a direct result of the mass production of ready-mixed paints for household use and the de-professionalizing of the handyman’s or housepainter’s job…. paint companies mounted ambitious campaigns to convince the general public that it could do its own painting.”¹⁷ The detail that went into many of these color charts was extensive, as they not only illustrated color’s material properties and applicability but also helped codify its usage by demonstrating its effective use on a range of materials, often presenting tasteful combinations of contrasts and harmonies. Manufacturers drew on this material for the design and production of their dyed goods, just as homeowners, artists, and eventually filmmakers could use them to pick the ready-made paints they wished to use.

Given the variegated cultural reception of synthetic dyes, colorant guidebooks were meant to demonstrate that color could be tamed and made useful, meaningful, and valuable across an increasing spectrum of products. As the Textile Color Card Association of the United States (a color forecasting service managed by Margaret Hayden Rorke and popular in the fashion industry in the 1920s) defined color standardization in a 1921 pamphlet on the topic, it was meant as “a color language, so to speak—which could be understood by all related industries and trades” for “a great economic benefit”; rather than restricting creativity, it would expand innovation as part of the “evolution of industrial progress.”¹⁸ Simultaneously, the standardization of color in the industrial field overlapped with larger concerns about color meaning and symbolism, as well as with the physiology of color perception in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁹ The study of color physiology was particularly dynamic during the era, with profound consequences for reshaping how human perception was understood as a subjective phenomenon filtered through the senses, as Jonathan Crary has delineated.²⁰ It was also essential for the invention of the cinematic apparatus, as the physiological study of color afterimages led to the theory of persistence of vision, which formed the scientific backdrop for understanding how moving images could be perceived from still photograms, tricking the subjective perceptions of the eye.²¹ The recoding and manipulation of subjective vision that occur through devices such as cinema, in Crary’s account, help regiment and standardize perception, making observers more attentive, productive, and susceptible to control—for instance, by the affective play of colors in advertising. Across these disparate areas, fields overlap and cross-pollinate color’s multivalence, and exploiting this variability for industrial practice has since antiquity meant cultivating taste cultures to hierarchize color value. We take seriously the Foucauldian critique of control that grounds Crary’s analysis—the sense of bureaucratizing perception to systemize and control experience and knowledge—but it is also important to note the productive nature of these developments in chromatic standardization. As discussed in later chapters, these processes were incredibly generative in the 1920s for fashion, modernist art and design, and certainly film, enabling the resplendent productions of the culture industry, as well as modernist critique of the decade’s color culture.

Various other theorists and practitioners of color, such as Michel Eugène Chevreul, Wilhelm Ostwald, Robert Ridgway, and Albert Munsell, can be cited for their influence on the standardization of color culture. Munsell, for instance, established at the turn of the century the Munsell Color System, which became one of the most influential standards for color management in art education, design, and industrial production of the twentieth century.22 His system was innovative in terms of how it separated hue, value, and chroma into different dimensions of a three-dimensional color space and accounted for both the physiological variations of human perception and standards for color harmony. He devised various evocative charts, color spheres, color trees, and color chips (like the later Pantone system) to illustrate his system. Importantly, Munsell, like most color theorists of the era, was in dialogue with a range of international research. He had studied and met with Chevreul at the Gobelins national tapestry works in Paris, which Chevreul directed. Munsell was also well acquainted with Harvard’s experimental psychology lab, which Williams James founded and Hugo Münsterberg directed; Münsterberg, in fact, invited Munsell to lecture at the lab in 1910, as did other psychologists of the era.²³ Building on the work of earlier pedagogues like Prang and Bradley, Munsell believed strongly in the importance of art education for training people’s color sense, but he put an even stronger emphasis on the importance of providing them with systematic tools for accurately describing color values. This increased emphasis on standardization dominated 1920s pedagogy, particularly through the influence of the A. H. Munsell Color Company, which he founded just before his death in 1918 to continue the promotion of the Munsell Color System.

Based on the work of theorists such as Munsell, the field of colorimetry developed rapidly in the interwar period. Colorimetry originated in the second half of the nineteenth century through the work of Clerk Maxwell and Hermann von Helmholtz as the science of measuring color and color perception.²⁴ Its expansion in the 1920s came through national and international research boards such as the Optical Society of America (founded in 1916 to advance the study of light and optics), the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (founded in 1901 to systematize scientific measurement for laboratory research), and the International Commission on Illumination (CIE, founded in 1913 to coordinate standards of artificial lighting and color). These various collaborative research boards all dealt with color standards in various ways, constituting a form of scientific management applied to color design and production. Each was charged with developing new measurement and application standards for color that, in turn, were meant to spur industrial innovation and competition. As historian Sean Johnston explains:

The industrial need for color metrics nevertheless continued to increase dramatically after the war. In the British dyestuffs industry, for example, the production of colors rose four-fold between 1913 and 1927. In America, the idea of “standardization” was touted as a means of reducing commercial complexity and improving the country’s competitiveness in products. The regulation of light and color were key components of this scheme. The [National Bureau of Standards] instigated programs for setting standards for electric lamps, gas purity for lighting systems and the color of railway signal lamps.²⁵

During the shortages of the war, international color usage diminished overall but expanded outside of Germany, and following the breakup of Germany’s chemical patents as part of war reparations, color production surged internationally. In the United States, this was an era of massive development for the domestic colorant and chemical industry, with the formation of American corporations such as the National Aniline and Chemical Company in 1917. As Mira Wilkins explains, “U.S. dyestuff production, which had been $2.5 million in 1914, by 1917 soared to $57.8 million. The general price index had risen, but nowhere near this extent.” Much of this domestic production was through German subsidiaries, whose foreign holdings were seized during the war.²⁸ Reflecting upon this shift in domestic production, an editorial in a textile trade journal noted a corresponding change in the color consciousness of the U.S. public:

Under the stress and storm of war excitement the emotional psychology of a nation becomes peculiarly disturbed and apparently this is directly reflected in the color consciousness of the people. Instead of fabric colors becoming more and more limited in range, they become more and more extended. Anyone noticing the riot of color shown in the shops during the past few years must acknowledge this fact. There was no relation at all between the public’s desire for all manner of bright and bizarre color combinations and the dyestuffs available for the production of those colors of proper fastness.²⁹

Cinema’s embeddedness within these transformations was pronounced, for it was an exemplar of innovation in the cultural field in the early twentieth century. The medium’s transformation into a classical form of entertainment and corporate structure at the end of the 1910s presaged the coalescence of mass culture in the 1920s, as industrial modes of production and consumption became increasingly integrated. In the midst of 1920s modernity, classical cinema, as Miriam Hansen has argued, became “the single most inclusive cultural horizon in which the traumatic effects of modernity were reflected, rejected or disavowed, transmuted or negotiated.”³¹ Cinema’s technical appropriation and deployment of color during the period was a vital component of how it crafted, recoded, and mass-produced a chromatically appealing new sensorium within this cultural horizon.

Since the cinema’s emergence in the 1890s, it reflected the intermedial splendor of turn-of-the-century chromatic culture, and the new medium showcased the transformation of the colorant industry over the ensuing decades. Edison, for example, screened two color films at his first public exhibition of projected moving images, in April 1896, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City: the Leigh sisters’ Umbrella Dance, which began the screening, and a serpentine dance that ended it. These films were hand colored frame by frame, and throughout the silent period a variety of other applied color processes, including tinting, toning, stenciling, and Handschiegl, were used in film. Most of the early processes deployed before the First World War used German aniline dyes to create their wondrously saturated images. This influence can be seen particularly through the process of film tinting, in which films were dipped in vats of aniline dye so that color spread across the entire image to produce reds for fire, blues for night, greens for a pastoral scene, or yellow for a hot sunny day in the tropics. In the 1910s and 1920s, film-stock companies sold pretinted stocks; a producer could print a film directly onto these stocks, thus alleviating the need to dye prints individually.

To market film tinting, toning, and pretinted stocks, in the 1910s and 1920s companies such as Pathé, Kodak, and Gevaert began to distribute tinting and toning guidebooks modeled on the aniline color charts produced by the colorant industry of the nineteenth century. These film-stock color charts typically came bound as short books, with technical data about the chemicals and formulas used in their opening sections, and in the latter sections, galleries of tinted and toned film frames mounted in cardboard stock. Like color charts for other media, these galleries were neatly organized, labeled in grids, and arranged by hue and process for easy selection. The colored frames often came from picturesque nonfiction films as well as from dramatic films, demonstrating the range of color effects possible for various genres. The Eastman Kodak guidebook from 1927, for example, showcases tinting and toning effects on both nitrate and safety base film stocks (color plate 1.2). Neatly organized in rows of three, the frame selections present a range of sparkling, classical close-ups and medium shots from dramatic films, as well as bucolic nature scenes of forests, bears, and the Grand Canyon and tinted shots in red and blue of the Luna Park at Coney Island, thus hewing close to American iconography.³² Some of the film-coloring guides from the 1920s also take on a relatively more ornate look. Still rationally organized, tinting books by the Belgian company Gevaert for “Positif Color Film” (1925) and by Pathé for “Supports teintés Pathé” (n.d., ca. 1925) also take on a distinctly Art Deco look, through their symmetrical design and font patterns. The Pathé guide, for instance, is on gray cardstock with tasteful brick-red text and a patterned design forming a series of rectangular patterns, with the Pathé rooster logo at the bottom (color plate 1.3). Each page of the tinting section has three sample hues: on one page, 1. Rose, 2. Rouge, 3. Orange; on the next page, 4. Violet, 5. Bleu, 6. Vert; and so forth. Each tint is illustrated by several frames of clear tinted leader (approximately four frames on the left and right and five frames in the center), and above each leader of pure color is a single exposed frame of different scenes in the hue. The pages are remarkably abstract, yet tasteful, in their reference to Art Deco style.

Like the earlier color charts and colorimetry guides, tinting books were meant to expand the color market by demonstrating the technical possibilities of color design in film. They also helped to codify color usage, particularly in the 1920s, for the manuals not only included technical descriptions of tinting but also provided aesthetic suggestions that often recapitulated the sensory prescriptions for color design deployed in other fields. Their aim was to tame and professionalize the unruly application of color in film, which might otherwise overpower narrative legibility if color’s attractive powers were not held in check. Cecil B. DeMille, along with promoting standardized color codes for tinting and toning, advocated using color “to heighten a certain effect…and in most cases the audiences are not conscious that a color is ever used,” which is a hallmark of the unobtrusive style of classical Hollywood cinema.33 Paralleling DeMille’s aesthetics for color, Kodak also took a standardized approach to color meaning with the Sonochrome pretinted film stocks it developed at the end of the 1920s. One description of the Kodak stock notes: “A table of psychological values for Sonochrome tints has been worked out on a scientific basis in the expectation that changing tints may be used—where natural color is too expensive—to influence the mood of the various scenes of a photoplay.”³⁴ The emphasis on the scientific nature of these claims was grounded in color theory of the time, which emphasized the physiological aspects of color perception. Indeed, one discussion of Sonochrome explains, “Our response to this color [“Verdante” green] has become so definitely fixed by association with it in Nature that wherever it is used it tends to produce the same physiological effect, which is a step away from the feeling of complete ease and tranquility towards the stimulative side.”³⁵ At the same time, the physiological nature of color is inseparable from the psychological—the mood-inducing potential of color to underscore, like unobtrusive musical accompaniment, the emotional and narrative legibility of a film. Such ideas at Kodak were also grounded in color literature of the era. In his various writings, Loyd Jones, who was instrumental in developing Sonochrome at the Kodak Research Laboratory, references work on color psychology, metrics, and nomenclature by theorists such as George Field and Matthew Luckiesh, as well as the Committee on Colorimetry of the Optical Society of America, which was at the time attempting to “construct a rational terminology” for color research and usage.³⁶ These interweaving ideas indicate how the new chromatic sensorium of the 1920s was scientifically conceived through collaborative knowledge production that sought to contain the distractions of color while innovating new stylistic modes of design.

Film-coloring guidebooks also reveal much about the transformation of the colorant industry after the First World War. Based on their chemical formulas, in the teens film-stock companies primarily used German dyes, but during and after the war, there is a marked shift. In the United States, for instance, Kodak had relied solely on German dye companies with distribution centers in New York City, but according to the Kodak guides, during the war there was a decline in color films because of the Allied blockade of German dye exports. The preface to Kodak’s second edition of its tinting guide (1918) notes, “Owing to the difficulty of obtaining foreign made dyes, a revision of the first edition of the publication has been made necessary.”37 The revisions of the guide detail that Kodak had to turn from the German companies to less-established U.S. dye manufacturers such as the National Aniline and Chemical Company. After the war, at least in the United States, film companies continued to work with domestic suppliers, even if most of these firms employed German émigré chemists and German dye formulas. Our inquiry for the remainder of this chapter, then, pertains to what happened to color in the 1920s, in and around cinema, during this period of intense chromatic expansion and standardization.

Grounded in pre- and postwar developments in colorant production, chromatic standardization and innovation accelerated during the 1920s in ways that profoundly affected the film industry. These changes both expanded the reach of colored commodities and inculcated a new color consciousness amongst public taste cultures. As Kodak’s tinting guidebooks illustrate, the effects of World War I and its aftermath on these changes are significant. In terms of the globalization of colorant and chemical innovation, the disruption of Germany’s dominant chemical industry not only spurred the development of national industries elsewhere but also expanded the process of knowledge transfer on a global scale, in the forms of colorant patents, expertise in engineering and chemistry, technology, and aesthetics, all of which became increasingly interconnected through transnational circulation. Tracing the flows of technical and aesthetic knowledge in the 1920s provides a way of mapping these intermedial and cross-field connections of color as it surged internationally.

At the turn of the century, for instance, U.S. production of synthetic colorants was underdeveloped in comparison to that of European firms, yet the United States had one of the largest textile industries in the world, which the German colorant industry profited from immensely.38 In the decades before the war, the U.S. approach to trade tariffs fluctuated between protectionist and minimalist policies; to bypass import fees, various German companies such as Bayer purchased controlling interests in some of the few U.S. dye producers, such as Hudson River Aniline Color Works in Rensselaer, New York, and brought in German chemists to recalibrate production. German companies also founded a variety of sales and distribution offices in the United States to coordinate these efforts. In the lead-up to the American entry into the war, German subsidiaries operating in the United States increased domestic production to avoid escalating tariffs; during the war, the U.S. Office of Alien Property Custodian was established to take control of German properties, including patents, which also boosted the domestic industry. The situation after the war was complex and mired in legal challenges, as the Office of Alien Property Custodian attempted to liquidate German holdings by selling them to domestic corporations. Eventually, over the course of the 1920s, many German companies were able to reenter the market and reclaim much of their holdings, though the U.S. colorant corporations were by this time more firmly established. Following the consolidation of the German colorant and chemical industry into IG Farben in 1925, Germany dramatically expanded its global holdings once again, though in a diversified way in which German exports were increasingly balanced by German-controlled production overseas, in the United States and elsewhere. This global diversification of the colorant industry in the 1920s produced some of the earliest multinational chemical corporations of the modern era, and it is their innovations that led to the dramatic expansion of chromatic culture during the decade.

Importantly, the United States was not the only market targeted in these international ventures, though much of the secondary research into the colorant-chemical industry has focused on U.S.-German corporate relations. Akira Kudo has traced similar industrial developments in Japan during the interwar period, analyzing IG Farben’s trade history and industrial investments aimed at controlling the Japanese and East Asian markets; Ulrich Marsch has delineated a different, though related, pattern in Great Britain.³⁹ The war—and specifically Germany’s chemical weaponry that was an outgrowth of the colorant and pharmaceutical industry—spurred Great Britain to seek increased independence from German colorant and chemical imports by fostering the growth of domestic industry, though modeled on the research and technical structure of Germany. These developments in Britain also influenced industrial changes in the United States, where corporations such as E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company followed this model in the 1920s by developing its own domestic chemical products based on German innovation while attempting to avoid control by foreign interests. As Wilkins explains, “Du Pont wanted German technology, yet it did not want to be in any way junior to the Germans. It wanted to be informed. It was ready to cooperate only on its own terms. It was fiercely competitive. DuPont was far happier cooperating with the British or the French chemical industry than with the German one.”⁴⁰ For these reasons, to break into the film-stock industry and to find an outlet for the excess nitrocellulose it was producing as a by-product from it synesthetic textiles and explosive divisions, DuPont partnered with Pathé in 1924, forming the DuPont-Pathé Film Manufacturing Company, to produce color and black-and-white film stocks. In these ways, such international constellations become vital for the expansion of color film technologies during the decade.⁴¹

An examination of the global restructuring of the colorant industry in the 1920s makes it clear that a highly advanced process of knowledge transfer was emerging across the industrial field. Increasingly, the colorant industry became globally interconnected and intermedial in how it modernized a range of chemical products emerging from innovations in Germany. Wilkins delineates this process in the U.S. context:

In the film industry, these developments affected not only the types of dyes used on films during the decade but also the transfer of technical knowledge and skills among a network of technicians and researchers that dynamized the innovation of photographic color processes. A variety of earlier color film processes had been developed prior to the war, the best known being William Friese-Greene’s various systems, Kinemacolor, and the first Technicolor additive process. These color systems were remarkable but also by and large difficult and unwieldy two-color additive systems that required complex equipment to capture as well as project color images. Because of these complications, they were never widely adopted, though Kinemacolor was the most successful in both the UK and the United States.⁴³ The development of subtractive color processes became the focus of innovation at the end of the 1910s and throughout the 1920s, and key aspects of this work can be connected to the transfer of knowledge that was occurring after the war. While earlier additive systems were complex at the level of the apparati deployed for image capture and projection, subtractive systems required a new level of chemical complexity within the emulsion of film, and mastering these systems necessitated increased technical expertise. The three comparative case studies that follow—of Eastman Kodak, Pathé, and Technicolor—illustrate this international diffusion of knowledge and expertise throughout the film industry.⁴⁴

The Kodak Research Laboratories closely followed international technical developments and research methods. Mees, for instance, was British, educated at the University of London; Kodak hired him from the London firm Wratten and Wainwright, Ltd., where he was a co-owner. Mees’s work at Wratten and Wainwright focused on the development of panchromatic stocks and aniline-dyed color filters for balancing light temperatures in photographic work; the numbering system he developed at the company for grading the filters, “Wratten numbers,” is still in use today.46 His first major publication on color, The Photography of Coloured Objects, derived from this research.⁴⁷ It was this innovative work that led Kodak to acquire the entire company in 1912 as a means of recruiting Mees to Rochester, New York, where he took over the Kodak’s research division until his retirement in 1955. Mees wrote extensively about industrial research and laboratory organization, particularly in the early years of the laboratories.⁴⁸ In these early writings, color features prominently, particularly in the charts used to delineate the organization of research at Kodak: dyes, color filters, colorimetry, and color-sensitive materials were all investigated in relation to physics, chemistry, and optics.

In order to master these various areas of research, Mees brought together and managed a remarkable team of university-educated scientists such as John G. Capstaff (Armstrong College, now Newcastle University), hired by Mees from the UK, and Loyd Jones (B.S. and M.S. in Physics, University of Nebraska), recruited in 1912 from the U.S. Bureau of Standards, where he had worked on a variety of projects related to standardization, colorimetry, and visual sensitivity.⁴⁹ As Mees’s obituary notes, he “gathered around him a brilliant staff, and inspired them with his remarkable philosophy, which was a blend of pure, unfettered intellectual research, and the practical down-to-earth development of the fruits of this research.”⁵⁰ Under Mees, Jones became Kodak’s chief physicist in charge of research in 1916, a position he maintained until his retirement in 1954. Growing out of their earlier work, Mees, Jones, and Capstaff, together with the rest of the lab, innovated a range of color technologies and standards at Kodak throughout their careers, particularly with their work on Kodacolor, Kodachrome, and Kodak’s various pretinted film stocks in the 1920s, including Sonochrome. A fitting graphic emblem of the Research Laboratories’ technical organization can be found in Mees’s 1917 article on research laboratories, which outlines the expertise in physics, chemistry, and photography required for running a research facility such as Kodak’s, with colorimetry playing a key role.⁵¹

Mees marshalled a wealth of international expertise for this work and guided the Research Laboratories not only to follow closely international technical innovation but also to shape it. This was carried out in part through the close participation of laboratories’ technicians in national and international research associations such as the Optical Society of America, founded in 1916 in response to the war, under the leadership of Kodak researchers Perley Nutting and Loyd Jones, to promote U.S. innovation in optics as a means of countering Germany’s technical dominance.52 Still in existence today, it was conceived as a scientific society that comprised academics and industrial researchers, and numerous figures from the film industry were closely aligned with it, including Nutting and Jones (who served as its president in 1930–1931) as well as Mees, Capstaff, and Leonard Troland of Technicolor (who served as its president in 1922–1923). Kodak researchers were also closely aligned with other research societies such as the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (where Perling and Jones had previously been employed), the International Commission on Illumination, the Inter-Society Color Council, and of course the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, whose founding bylaws of 1916 included as a primary goal increased standardization in the film industry.⁵³ Through active participation in organizations such as these, and with the network of researchers they brought together, Kodak became a major collaborative force in developing color knowledge across international fields in the 1920s, particularly in the area of colorimetry. In his study of colorimetry during the interwar period, Sean Johnston describes this cooperative approach to color research in the industrial and scholarly fields:

In the post First World War political climate, such technical panels embodied growing efforts to improve the cooperation of science and technology on an international scale. The war had demonstrated the benefits of national organization in and between technologically intensive industries; after the war, these concerns shifted from military to commercial competition. The new committees sought the consensual solution of pressing industrial problems and the promotion of scientific activities by rationalizing standards. The situation for light measurement was a particular case of the increasing bureaucratization of international science.

The case of colour measurement highlights how this new bureaucratization operated. During the 1920s, the problem of quantifying colour came to the fore.⁵⁴

The effects of Kodak’s participation in these national and international societies can also be seen in the specific research that its laboratories carried out, as documented in its published journals, Abridged Scientific Publications (beginning in 1913) and Monthly Abstract Bulletins (beginning in 1916). Abridged Scientific Publications collected research articles published by the laboratories, while Monthly Abstract Bulletins reviewed and summarized technical developments and patents from around the world. Read together, these journals provide a complementary and interrelated perspective on the inward as well as outward research going on at Eastman Kodak, as the innovative work the company was carrying out in its Research Laboratories and documented in Abridged Scientific Publications was inseparable from the study and absorption of international technical and scientific developments reviewed in Monthly Abstract Bulletins. Within these journals, one can trace the development of Kodak’s color technologies from the 1910s into the 1920s and beyond, along with its investigations of international patents and research developments, particularly of German, British, French, and U.S. origin.

The Monthly Abstract Bulletins were divided into five sections covering a range of innovations in photography, physics, chemistry, technology, and international patent summaries. For example, in one entry just after the war that abstracts a German article regarding the current state of research laboratories (specifically of the electrical engineering firm, Siemens and Halske, today Siemens AG), the Monthly Abstract Bulletins translates and summarizes:

With the aftereffects of the war being felt industrially around the world, Kodak was clearly following international research developments. During and immediately after the war, the patent summaries were largely dominated by U.S. and British research; in October 1919, fifty U.S. patents, seventeen British patents, but only seven German patents were summarized. By the 1920s, however, these numbers began to shift dramatically; in June 1920, fifty-two of the patent summaries were American, thirteen British, and thirty-nine German, indicating the reemergence of German industry in the film and photography fields. These numbers shifted monthly in the 1920s, but Germany’s technical and chemical innovation continued as a major focus throughout the decade.

Under Mees’s guidance, the film and photographic topics summarized in the Monthly Abstract Bulletins were broad ranging—from tripod heads and Carl Akeley’s innovations in camera technologies to the nitrate industry in Chile to developments in aerial photography. Thus, the journal provides a cross section of technical development during the period, but within this, on almost every page during the late 1910s and 1920s, color features prominently. New innovations in tinting and toning formulas from Europe and the United States were outlined; patents filed by Technicolor, Kodak, Gaumont, and a variety of German firms for various color systems were detailed; and essays on the physiology of color perception—for instance, by Harvard professor and Technicolor engineer Leonard Troland—were summarized.⁵⁶

From the remarkable overview of research and development during the period provided by Kodak Research Laboratories’ Monthly Abstract Bulletins, one can map the ways in which international innovations and new technical standards permeated the industrial field of the time. Further, by comparing the journal to Kodak’s Abridged Scientific Publications, one can see how knowledge transfer also produced the technical basis for new innovations in chromatic technologies at the company. Over the same period in which the Kodak researchers were reviewing international technical and chemical developments on color, they were also carrying out their own well-known innovations in film and photographic technologies and publishing widely about them, as summarized in the journal. Mees wrote articles on the laboratories’ development of the Kodachrome process.57 Loyd Jones published on the physiological optics of two-color perception and on submarine camouflage through physiological trickery (a research project he worked on for the U.S. government during World War I); with Lewis Townsend, he explored the heritage and potentials of color music with reference to Alexander Scriabin, Mary Hallock Greenewalt, and Thomas Wilfred and describes the experimental projection of colored light onto theater curtains before screenings.⁵⁸ Jones’s 1913 article on physiological optics is useful for showing the networked and international nature of the research going on at Kodak—and importantly, optics is a field he mobilized in his later discussion with Townsend of color music, referencing standardization research carried out by the Optical Society of America.⁵⁹ Displaying a clear sense of the color science of the day, Jones began his earlier essay on physiological optics by noting:

A profound engagement with international technical and theoretical research was at the core of Kodak’s innovative work on color in the early twentieth century, and it is these types of technical and aesthetic flows of knowledge that established and standardized the industrial framework of the chromatic world of the 1920s. The approach to industrial research at Eastman Kodak can best be summarized by Mees: “Scientific research is the yeast of business…. It leavens the mass, transforming it into a system which results in the continuous production of new and valuable inventions. At the same time, like yeast, science grows as it is nourished by the industry which it is transforming. Thus the association of science and industry strengthens both, and this is reflected in material prosperity and intellectual progress.”⁶² For Mees, as Marzola delineates, the success of industrial research was based on the open exchange of scientific knowledge: “Mees held the view that confidentiality in scientific research was basically impossible, and he showed little concern about it […and] encouraged his staff to present at conventions of national scientific societies.”⁶³ Based upon its innovative research and development, Kodak flourished in the 1920s even in the face of increased competition from firms such as DuPont. It expanded internationally into France in 1927 with the establishment of Kodak-Pathé, and even into Germany in 1931, through Kodak AG in Stuttgart, with the purchase of the camera equipment company Nagel.

As Stéphanie Salmon has thoroughly examined, a long history of industrial exchange between the two companies preceded the formation of Kodak-Pathé in 1927.⁶⁶ Negotiations between Pathé and Kodak date back to the early 1900s, particularly around the establishment of the Motion Picture Patents Company in the United States, which George Eastman was instrumental in convincing Charles Pathé to join in 1908.⁶⁷ Again in 1916, Eastman visited Pathé’s Vincennes factory on the outskirts of Paris in an attempt to negotiate, unsuccessfully, the purchase of its factory in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Significantly, these maneuvers on the part of Kodak were to keep international innovation in check. George Eastman hoped to hold Pathé within Kodak’s sphere of influence for the sale of film stock, thus limiting Pathé’s need to produce its own stock and also keeping it out of the hands of Kodak’s competitors, Lumière and especially Agfa, both of which were renovating their film-stock lines at the end of the first decade of the 1900s. One can clearly see Kodak’s influence at the time in the Pathé notebooks, as Pathé’s technicians such as Dubois frequently tested the capabilities of Eastman film stocks, along with the stocks of Lumière and Agfa—all during the period when George Eastman was visiting Charles Pathé in France to negotiate terms for the MPPC in 1908.⁶⁸ Pathé was clearly trying to determine technically as well commercially if an agreement should be made.

The engineering notebooks also shed extensive light on the precision of the technical innovations that Pathé was carrying out in its various color processes during the silent era. The notebooks include extensive lab records about the refinement of tinting, toning, and stenciling methods—dye formulas and rich technical details that are worth further study for what they reveal about the international colorant trade before and after the First World War. A telling example is a September 1908 report by the technician Dubois on “organic toning,” which is a version of dye toning, or “mordanting,” in which the film image is bleached and then dipped into a dye that seeps into the emulsion in the darker areas of the image that had been bleached away. Significantly, Pathé was drawing primarily from the German firm of Bayer AG for its toning colorants (for example, for its blue tone number 3, the company used 250 gr. of “Bleu rhoduline Bayer”), with some additional materials sourced from the German firm Farbwerke vorm. Meister Lucius & Brüning AG, aka Hoechst AG (for blue tone number 1, “Bleu de méthylène B.B. [Meister Lucius]”).69 Given Germany’s preeminence in the colorant field before the First World War, it is of little surprise that German chemicals were dominant in Pathé’s colorant laboratory. As Alan Milward and S. B. Saul explain regarding the colorant situation in France before the war, “By 1914 only 11 percent of the synthetic dyestuffs consumed in France were produced there, the rest were imported from Germany or Switzerland; and of the synthetic dyestuff factories only one, the Compagnie des Matières Colorantes de St Denis, was French, the rest were German-owned works.”⁷⁰ After the war, Pathé began to test a more diverse range of non-German colorants from sources such as the Swiss Geigy Company of Basel and the French St. Denis company.⁷¹

Also of interest regarding the international nature of tinting and toning experimentation at Pathé are the technician Pinel’s reports in August 1924. Chemical sources are not listed, but the report reveals how the company was systematically examining and charting the recipes by Kodak and Agfa, among others, in relation to its own, thus tracking closely developments in the international field.72 Other Pathé technicians in the 1920s, such as Vacher, were also looking comparatively at tinting to figure out new ways and mechanisms for the rapid application of colorants at Pathé-Cinéma, and he sketched out new technical systems in his notes from October 17, 1923.⁷³ Significantly, if one looks only a few pages and days later in the notebooks, to October 31, 1923, it is clear that Vacher was carrying out international research on parallel developments, as he provides a close analysis of U.S. patents that overlap with his early sketch for rapid tinting.⁷⁴ This type of research thus parallels what is found in the Kodak lab journals regarding keeping up to date on international patent innovations in order to spur in-house development.

With regard to photographic color systems, it is worth noting that Technicolor’s J. A. Ball and Kodak’s Loyd Jones both make appearances in the Pathé notebooks. Barbier’s reports from the Society of Motion Picture Engineers conference in the United States in May 1924 detail Ball’s early work at Technicolor, as presented at the meeting—though Ball could not attend and sent his paper to be presented by someone else who, according to Barbier, unfortunately read it so poorly that it was completely unintelligible.⁷⁵ Six months earlier, at the Society of Motion Picture Engineers conference in Ottawa in October 1923, Barbier’s reports reference Jones on the “Thermal Characteristics of Motion Picture Film.”⁷⁶ These examples illustrate the ways in which Pathé’s research laboratory was becoming internationalized and outward looking.

A final case in point is worth examining with regard to the relationship between Kodak and Pathé around color processes during the era.77 In her industrial biography of George Eastman, Elizabeth Brayer discusses the development of the Kodachrome process in Kodak’s Research Laboratories in the 1910s. Significantly, Kodak devised the process in reaction to international innovation, specifically by Pathé. Brayer quotes an internal report from George Eastman in January 1914 noting, alarmingly, that Pathé “is about to bring out a color process which will revolutionize the industry…. Invented by a man named Berthon…the colors are in the film, reproduction is simple…finished positives costing scarcely anything extra for color…and projected by any machine with trifling alterations…on the market in four months.”⁷⁸ Brayer then explains that “Eastman stepped up in-house efforts and by the fall of 1914 John Capstaff had devised a two-color subtractive process that produced seductive portraits but unsatisfactory colors for landscapes. Known by a new trademark—Kodachrome—the negatives were taken through red and green filters and transformed directly into positives.”⁷⁹ Rodolphe Berthon was a Lyons engineer and astronomer who had been working on color photography and film since the early 1900s. He drew from the work of Gabriel Lippmann to develop a lenticular system of color photography, for which he applied for patents in France, the UK, and the United States in 1908 and 1909. According to the research of François Ede, Berthon worked with the industrialist Albert Keller-Dorian in the 1910s and 1920s to apply his lenticular system to film.⁸⁰ Before the rediscovery of Pathé’s engineering notebooks, the known connection between Keller-Dorian and Kodak was specific to the 1928 development of Kodacolor for amateur 16mm color cinematography, which was thought unrelated to Pathé. The Société du Film Keller-Dorian struggled throughout the late 1920s to turn a profit with its color technology; to make up for losses, in 1928 it sold patents to Eastman-Kodak, which became the foundation for Kodacolor. According to Kenneth Mees in Kodak’s Abridged Scientific Publications, discussions about patent sales between Keller-Dorian and Kodak had been going on since 1925.⁸¹

Pathé’s engineering notebooks further illuminate the history, specifically in relation to Brayer’s comments about Pathé’s involvement in these exchanges dating back to 1914: it was not just Kodacolor that was connected to French color innovation, but also Kodak’s earlier subtractive two-color process, Kodachrome, from 1915. Kodachrome was not based on Berthon’s lenticular system but was motivated by it, as Capstaff’s earlier 1913 innovations at Kodak for subtractive color photography were hurriedly adapted for cinematography in 1915. The Pathé notebooks confirm this and add another chapter to the history of Berthon. Before working with Keller-Dorian, and after working with Maurice Audibert, Berthon worked at Pathé trying to implement his color patents between 1913 and 1914, which is documented through the large notebook of his reports regarding his experiments with color cinematography and other technical matters for Pathé.82 It was this work that pushed Kodak competitively to bring the Kodachrome process to market in 1915.

The history found in the engineering notebooks adds significant details about the long relationship of Pathé and Kodak and the types of corporate as well as research exchanges that were occurring. The back-and-forth interrogation of international patents, especially around color technologies beginning in the 1910s, is what led to the massive expansion of photographic color processes in the 1920s. In comparison with Kodak’s two in-house journals founded in the 1910s, Abridged Scientific Publications and Monthly Abstract Bulletins, Pathé’s engineering notebooks are not as formally polished and published, as they were proprietary in the French industrial mode of the time. But they are also incredibly well organized and convey similar intentions—to formalize international research strategies for industrial innovation and document breakthroughs in an era not only of expanded invention but also of international litigation. Coming out of the patent battles of the first decade of the 1900s, when Edison was filing lawsuits against everyone else in the film industry for patent infringement, these documents were meant not to conceal technical secrets but rather to protect and enable invention, as the rate of laboratory innovation greatly accelerated in the scientific modernity of the early twentieth century.

Parallel to the professionalization of the Kodak Research Laboratories, the success of Technicolor was grounded in the talent of the technicians that Comstock, Kalmus, and Wescott recruited from the academic sector. They included engineers such as the British chemist Edward J. Wall, hired in 1916, who was a professor at Syracuse University; Joseph A. Ball, also hired in 1916, who had just graduated from MIT with a B.S. in physics; and Leonard Troland, hired in 1918, who completed his B.S. in biology at MIT in 1912 (taking courses with Comstock) and went on to complete his Ph.D. in psychology in 1915 at Harvard.

Troland’s career in particular is worth focusing on with regard to the company’s attention to international research trends. During the 1915–1916 academic year, he was a Harvard Traveling Fellow at General Electric’s Nela Park Research Laboratory in Ohio, where he began investigating the physiological aspects of vision (color perception, afterimages, flicker effects), along with his ongoing research into psychophysics, metaphysics, and the occult (psychic phenomena, telepathy, ESP, and conjuring); his work was also read with enthusiasm by Theosophists of his day.86 Troland returned to Harvard in the fall of 1916, becoming the Richard Hodgson Fellow in Psychical Research and an instructor of psychology based in Hugo Münsterberg’s psychology lab, and in 1922 an assistant professor. It is unclear if Troland studied with Münsterberg for his Ph.D., though they certainly knew each other on Troland’s return to Harvard, overlapping in the psychology lab during the fall of 1916. As Troland’s contract was finalized, Münsterberg even forwarded him a copy of his recently published The Photoplay: A Psychological Study on April 30, 1916: “I take pleasure in sending you today a little book from the periphery of the field of optical psychology, a study of the photoplay. I become more and more interested in this art of the film.”⁸⁷ Though they would share a profound interest in film and psychology, based on the correspondence, Münsterberg was concerned that Troland’s psychic research would harm the lab’s reputation and tried to block some of that research; Münsterberg was overruled.⁸⁸ Ultimately, they would overlap in the lab for only a few months because of Münsterberg’s untimely death in December 1916.

During his research at Harvard, Troland concurrently joined Comstock, Kalmus, and Wescott, Inc., as chief engineer in 1918. From his start at the company, he focused largely on developing the imbibition printing system for Technicolor system #3, though he also worked on a range of innovations, including monopack color stocks, and theoretical research that he prolifically published. When Comstock, Kalmus, and Wescott split in 1925, Troland continued with Kalmus at Technicolor and was promoted as the company’s director of research; there, along with continuing his work on imbibition printing, he was largely responsible for investigating competing technologies and patents domestically as well as internationally. As Troland recounts in his research journal from March 11, 1926, “Dr. Kalmus tells me of the plans to push Technicolor extensively in Europe, and asks for data on our patent situation,” and in the ensuing years, one can find entries on his examination of, among others, Kodacolor, Prizma, DuPont, and Gaumont technologies and patents.⁸⁹

While working officially for Comstock, Kalmus, and Wescott, Inc., Troland was able to remain in the Boston area to maintain his ties with Harvard, but the transfer to Technicolor, which was by then centered in Los Angeles, reduced his ability to juggle his many commitments, and he eventually resigned his academic post in 1929. A letter from Kalmus calls attention to the difficulty of this decision for Troland. Illuminating the personal complexities of corporate-academic collaborations at the time, Kalmus notes that he does not want to get “into the Harvard situation again at length” with Troland:

I have already iterated and reiterated that my experience satisfies me that a double connection with an active industry and with a University or technical school invariably works out unsatisfactorily to one or the other of the two connections. I can remember when Dr. Whitney, head of the General Electric laboratory, tried to do both. He had to give up his Technology connection…. Both Comstock and I tried it, etc. for a long list. Not only has it considerable to do with energy and hours, which we have already discussed at length, but it has even more to do with attitude and point of view or with freedom to move from one place to another for moderate periods of time practically without notice…. The practical point, however, my dear Leonard, is that a decision must be made and in this instance I prefer to leave that decision to you.⁹⁰

The knowledge base that Troland gained and expanded through his Harvard affiliation was immense and profoundly influenced his work on color, both theoretically and technically, through his engagement with international color technologies and patents. Particularly in his theoretical writings, one can see the ways in which his academic grounding in psychology helped adapt aesthetic and theoretical knowledge about color, particularly of German origin, into the industrial sector. As Sean Johnston has delineated, Troland’s physiological and chemical research was crucial to the innovation and standardization of industrial color practice during the 1920s.⁹² This can be particularly seen in his work with the Optical Society of America, where he was intimately involved with the Society’s Committee on Colorimetry and authored its influential 1922 “Report of the Colorimetry Committee of the Optical Society of America,” with the collaboration of Loyd Jones and others.⁹³ In the extensive report, Troland worked through the color systems of Munsell, Ridgeway, and Ostwald, seeking to establish a coherent system of quantifying color for industrial application. Troland’s contribution to the committee as a psychologist was vital, as it was otherwise comprised entirely of physicists who approached color as an optical phenomenon in ways broadly in line with a Newtonian view, seeing color as an aspect of light rather than a perceptual-physiological phenomenon. As Johnston details, Troland, particularly with his background in the German theories of perception that Crary maps out in Techniques of the Observer, was crucial in introducing a psychophysiological perspective into the Colorimetry Committee, which sought to balance optical approaches to standardization with physiological ones. Troland’s perspective was moderated through Gestalt psychology as well as Hermann von Helmholtz, whose theory of trichromatic vision in the 1850s was central to the emerging discipline of physiology as well for the development of additive and subtractive color systems.⁹⁴ The blending of optical and perceptual approaches to color that Troland brought to the committee can be seen from the outset of his 1922 report, in which he defines color as “the general name for all sensations arising from the activity of the retina of the eye and its attached nervous mechanisms, this activity being, in nearly every case in the normal individual, a specific response to radiant energy of certain wave-lengths and intensities.”⁹⁵ Establishing ways of standardizing those wavelengths and intensities for industrial application then became the focus of the report, but Troland’s continued emphasis on psychology and physiology in the 1920s became increasingly important for expanding the committee’s approach to colorimetry. Beyond studying the optical nature of color, it also took into account color’s perceptual aspects, thus combining objective and subjective approaches to colorimetry.

Troland’s psychophysiological approach not only influenced domestic industrial applications in the United States during the 1920s, but also shaped international color standards. In 1913, the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) was established to help coordinate uniform standards of artificial lighting and color around the world. Its official languages were initially French, German, and English, but during and following the war, German was dropped, and German researchers were by and large ostracized from the commission during the 1920s. As Johnston explains, “in 1919, the International Research Council, sponsored by the Allies, had advocated policies of ostracism for German scholars. This exclusion was in effect during the formative years of the CIE. German attendance at conferences and commissions such as the CIE was almost nil early in the 1920s, and only increased in 1926 when the IRC lifted its bar against the Central Powers.”96 Because of this exclusion of German researchers, U.S. as well as British methods of colorimetry came to dominate. Troland’s approach was crucial for navigating between optical and perceptual approaches to the matter, a psychophysical approach that eventually came to dominate CIE and the establishment in 1931 of the CIE color space, which continues to affect color standards and define digital color formats today.⁹⁷

Beyond Troland’s importance within the international field of colorimetry, his work at Technicolor illustrates the overlapping fields of industrial and cultural production in the 1920s. The focus of this chapter has been on the ways in which new structures of industrial research and knowledge enabled innovative forms of color technologies to emerge out of the aniline industry, specifically the various subtractive processes in the 1920s that were profoundly complex in chemical and technical composition. Troland was at the epicenter of these transformations in both the industrial and cultural fields. His theoretical straddling of the divide between the optical and physiological aspects of colorimetry was essential for Technicolor innovation, particularly as the company turned to two-color subtractive processes in the early 1920s. The technical detail of these systems was profound, requiring all of Troland’s expertise to finesse them into workable systems of dyes, prisms, gears, and nitrate. Close attention to the optics of color was obviously essential for this work, as Troland’s Technicolor diaries illustrate in their detailed critiques of Technicolor as well as various other color systems and patents. A two-color image cannot reproduce a full spectrum of color only through red and green filters. To fake it, to trick the spectator’s eye to sense color that is not optically there—a blue sea in The Black Pirate (1926) or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in The King of Jazz (1930), both of which could actually only be shown in Technicolor shades of turquoise—also required attention to the psychology of vision, how colors feel even when they are absent and appear where they are not. This was where Troland’s genius lay, working out the technical and chemical problems of the systems’ optics as well as their perceptual ones in the research laboratory of Technicolor.

The farcical costume drama was promoted heavily, and in its early stages was even planned as a “talker in color,” specifically two-color Technicolor, which Fairbanks was well acquainted with from The Black Pirate (1926).98 The Shakespeare adaptation, however, had to be filmed in black and white because in 1929 with the success of Technicolor’s third system, its two-color imbibition process, demand for Technicolor had expanded beyond the company’s production capacity. As Kalmus explained in a letter to Troland, the key developer of the imbibition process:

The Technicolor ending of the film did not materialize, and though the film was far from a flop, it is not widely remembered today.100 However, in a 1930 article on “The Evolution of Film,” Kodak curiously cited the film for its use of color, specifically for incorporating the company’s Sonochrome colored stock in release prints: The Taming of the Shrew “used a single, uniform tint throughout to suffuse the picture with a warm Italian atmosphere.”¹⁰¹ As detailed earlier, films had been tinted since the 1890s, and beginning in the 1910s, companies such as Kodak began to sell pretinted stocks. According to “The Evolution of Film,” tinting provided films “greater expressiveness and the more pleasing appearance on the screen made possible by the addition of hues,” though curiously enough The Taming of the Shrew apparently restrained its expressiveness to only one hue.¹⁰²

With the coming of sound, and specifically sound-on-film prints, film tinting had proven problematic. As Kodak explained in “The Evolution of Film,” the inclusion of soundtracks set off a myriad of changes in the film industry, “One of the most marked” from Kodak’s perspective was

An important context for this technical development was the expansion of color in commodity and media production throughout the 1920s—a “chromatic revolution,” as commentators noted.¹⁰⁵ Cinema was vital to this transformation, industrially as well as aesthetically. The scientific research into color carried out by the film industry led to a range of new standards for application and design, and Technicolor’s third system in 1928 was a benchmark of industrial innovation. Given the technical precision of the imbibition dye-transfer process, Technicolor was able to keep its dyes isolated to the image without seepage into the soundtrack. However, it was an additional expense for producers to use the process, and as Kodak’s advertisements noted, one of Sonochrome’s main appeals was that it was more affordable: “The public wants color. These positive films supply it, through beautiful, over-all tints—at black-and-white cost. The public’s appetite for color has been whetted. Colored Pictures are the cream of the show.”¹⁰⁶ Thus, film producers could appeal to the color craze that was expanding at the end of the decade through Kodak’s new, more affordable stocks.

Ultimately, Kodak’s effort with Sonochrome was only a minor success—much like Pickford and Fairbanks’s The Taming of the Shrew. The stock worked with soundtracks, but the industry did not return to film tinting in the 1930s in any major way, though as we discuss in greater detail in chapter 6, it remained a minor practice in feature films until the 1960s when Kodak phased out the Sonochrome stock. Pretinted stocks still required splices in a positive print if one were to alternate the colors, and such splices would make optical soundtracks crackle and pop when passing over a projector’s soundhead. These problems made the stocks less appealing, and then as well as now, the use of pretinted stocks in the 1930s and beyond was overshadowed by the continued development of Technicolor into its three-strip phase.

The issue of crackling soundtracks is perhaps why The Taming of the Shrew was reduced to a single Sonochrome, which is a stark shift from the chromatic hybridity exhibited only a few years earlier in films such as The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, U.S., 1925), as discussed further in chapter 5. Promotion, if not usage, of Sonochrome largely ended in 1930, yet despite its lack of success, the type of technical labor, innovation, and promotion by Kodak is instructive, as it exemplifies the industrial and intensely competitive standardization of color that was taking place in the 1920s. Colorants were constantly being refined and calibrated for new fields throughout the decade across mass media and commodity markets.

In this process, it was not just the technical aspects of new colorants that were being refined; it became vital as well to standardize the meanings and effects of color for the cultivation of new chromatic taste cultures, as we discuss in the next chapter. In these ways, color played a pivotal role in the emergence and proliferation of mass society, bringing together the industrial and affective fields. This industrial emphasis on codifying the meanings of color within the film industry is readily apparent in the work of scientists such as Jones, Troland, and others who were actively in dialogue with one another through institutions such as the Optical Society of America and the International Commission on Illumination. Research into colorimetric values was carried out to help regiment, standardize, and restrain the connotative meanings and physiological effects of color, making it relatively unobtrusive for filmic narration. This is reflected in Kodak’s description of the single tinted hue of The Taming of the Shrew, which was supposed to “suffuse the picture with a warm Italian atmosphere,” yet in its singularity, it could slip unobtrusively into the background of the image and not compete for attention with the narrative. The specific tint used on the film was not noted by Kodak and remains unknown, but the embellished description of the hue is indicative of manuals of color standardization of the period, such as Matthew Luckiesh’s influential The Language of Color: yellow and orange “are symbolic of light and warmth.”107 Luckiesh’s work was well known in the film industry. He was the director of General Electric’s Lighting Research Laboratory at Nela Park, Ohio, and he interacted with researchers such as Troland and Jones through organizations such as the Illuminating Engineering Society; Jones even cites The Language of Color in his writings on Sonochrome.¹⁰⁸

As these networked examples indicate, cinema was vital to the processes of knowledge transfer in the 1920s, both as a chromatic exemplar of the decade’s new culture of mass entertainment and as an industrial system that was integrated into broader structures of research and production. As we have largely focused on the industrial field here, what emerges are the ways in which the film manufacturers, and in particular their various research laboratories and scientists, played a central role in innovating and standardizing color meaning and technologies for the emergent mass culture. The new subtractive color systems that developed from this industrial work ushered in a color revolution during the decade, and the networks of knowledge that circulated both nationally and internationally through these research centers—from Germany through Europe to the United States and back—helped new ideas about color flourish. Beyond the technical proficiency necessary to master subtractive color systems, innovative notions about the affective use of color in advertising, fashion, and décor grew influential just as new practices of color design exploded in architecture and the arts. Cinema’s prismatic views of the 1920s were shaped by such new aesthetic horizons. It is these types of technical and aesthetic flows of knowledge that established and standardized the industrial framework that enabled the chromatic world of the 1920s to flourish. In the midst of a rapidly expanding color culture in the 1920s, cinema helped codify and instrumentalize color’s role in art, advertising, fashion, and design around the world. It is to these fields of cultural and industrial production that we now turn, demonstrating in the next chapter how color’s impact on the consumer was increasingly harnessed in the 1920s when film played a critical role in the dissemination of ideas about color consciousness, fashion, and taste.