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

The concept of chromatic hybridity provides an important conceptual means of understanding how film colors were being presented in the 1920s. Richard Misek claims that prior to the 1960s “chromatic hybridity required explanation,” whereas in the 1960s a trend emerged in which “black-and-white and color sequences alternate apparently at random.”² Drawing on Raymond Williams’s concepts of the dominant, residual, and emergent, Misek argues that in the 1960s “unmotivated chromatic hybridity was an example of emergence. It was a new practice that developed in dialectic response to Hollywood’s codification of black-and-white and color, and formed part of a broader rejection of the classical Hollywood paradigm of motivation.”³ While the hybridity of the 1960s was specific and historically defined along the lines that Misek lays out, here we use chromatic hybridity differently, as applied to silent cinema during a decade when the classical paradigm was newly emergent and relatively less established than in subsequent decades. We consider Hollywood and European films that not only juxtapose color and black-and-white but also deploy different coloring techniques within the same film. From this perspective, chromatic hybridity in the 1960s can be related to earlier, residual trends that permitted color to be unruly, not subject to easy codification, an unmotivated attraction within otherwise conventional narratives, and a primary visual address of avant-garde practices.

In our usage, chromatic hybridity in the 1920s generally refers to using a combination of coloring techniques—for example, Handschiegl in tinted and toned films, or the partial use of Technicolor amid other coloring practices—within a single film. Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (U.S., 1923), for example, was mostly a tinted film with shots filmed in Technicolor of the Israelites in flight, being pursued over the plains. For DeMille, this was something of an experiment: Technicolor offered him the use of a camera; if he liked the footage shot by Ray Rennahan, he could buy it.4 There was no sense that the combination of color techniques might be problematic or that the Technicolor shots would be considered superior to the tints. DeMille was confident enough to include a relatively new experimental process as part of the film’s technical monumentality that was deployed to match its epic subject matter. DeMille next used two-color Technicolor in King of Kings (1927), an otherwise blue-hued religious epic that also featured hand-colored moonlight effects for the Garden of Gethsemane sequence by Gustav Brock, an important craftsman discussed in more detail later in this chapter and the next. Technicolor was used to illustrate two key scenes occurring at the beginning and end of the film—the feast at the palace of Mary Magdalene and then for the Resurrection. The film thus offered a range of chromatic interest while reflecting DeMille’s commitment to visual storytelling. In the 1920s, the idea of psychological realism residing in black-and-white film was not as strongly established as in later decades. The frame of reference for filmic realism during this decade was invariably a color-tinted and -toned one, against which other color effects could be perceived and evaluated. The effect of mixing different ways of coloring within a single film elicited a modernist, abstract sensibility, even in films that were presented as conventional entertainments.

Practitioners of applied color were convinced of its role in enhancing film drama through its affective, emotional influences on the spectator. Danish-born hand-coloring expert Gustav Brock worked in the United States on Foolish Wives (Erich von Stroheim, 1923), The White Sister (Henry King, 1923), The Navigator (Buster Keaton, Donald Crisp, 1924), and a number of films starring Marion Davies, including Little Old New York (Sidney Olcott, 1923); he continued hand coloring films well into the 1930s, as we discuss in the next chapter.⁵ He also hand colored sections of a 16mm print of Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, France, 1924), donated by Léger in 1939 to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.⁶ It is likely that his labors were only seen in first-run theaters, as he had a close working relationship with S. L. “Roxy” Rothafel, who was famous for the prestige cinemas he managed and produced shows for in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, including the Roxy Theater and Radio City Music Hall.⁷

Brock’s well-publicized views on hand coloring as a form of craft labor drew attention to color’s effect on spectators’ sensorium:

Brock focuses here on color’s relation to the senses—that varying hues are capable of suggesting physical sensations of cold and hot through contrast. Although he emphasized that in tinted films additional hand coloring added realism, he also highlighted its ability to create color consciousness among spectators, “because the coloring has made these scenes more outstanding and impresses itself stronger on their mind.”9 From this perspective, color’s addition within hybridized forms satisfied the desire for greater realism, while at the same time it drew attention to itself as spectacle by completing, as it were, the suggestion of realism through affective sensation. The stark, punctuating impact of color also depended on its relation to other scenes and backgrounds; for Brock, the step toward color consciousness was intimately dependent on positioning colored images within contrasting contextual frameworks. The “life” brought by hand coloring that Brock describes articulates this idea: “As a rule handcoloring is most successfully added to tinted or toned film or to tinted and toned film and by a close cooperation of the laboratory and the artist. The most beautiful effects can be obtained specially in night scenes and interiors, and add much life to the picture.”¹⁰ Again, the emphasis is on the relative use of color, rather than undifferentiated chromatic bombardment. Brock further elaborates on this in relation to color’s suggestion of skin tones and complexion: “The coloring of a picture is like the touch of color on a girl’s face; it can enhance if judiciously used, and its effectiveness, beauty, and force rest with its restriction.”¹¹ This emphasis on the creation of subtle, yet gendered, tactile and impressive (note the use of the word “force”) effects through the selective application of color is a key idea in Brock’s case for hybridized forms as a means of creating affective impressions on spectators’ consciousness.

Debates about the impact of tinting and toning also provide insight into contemporaneous ideas about psychological and cultural responses to color. Native American producer, director, actor, and screenwriter Edwin Carewe argued in 1922 that tinting and toning add “class,” eliciting a “quick, warm response” when natural features such as sky are colored.¹² Carewe argued that colors make films “talk,” particularly when used selectively: “A little tinting accentuates the beauty and quickens the imagination…too much is monotonous, I am using colored film only where I think it most effective…where I wish to lay stress on the power of melody over the emotions of mankind.”¹³ The language used here is interesting for its allusion to music, indicating an additional affective register created by color that operated alongside, or over, the imperatives of narrative.

We can observe such contrasting tints used for emotional affect in Smouldering Fires (Clarence Brown, Charles Dorian, U.S., 1925). Tints in the film convey a shift of mood when the opulent interiors of a grand house are first seen in amber tints and subsequently infused with a violet tint for a fireside scene, introducing a romantic theme (color plates 5.1 and 5.2). A violet-tinted fantasy sequence from the heroine’s perspective of a romantic cruise with her would-be lover is inserted into the scene, before the return to normality is signaled by amber. Later, when the heroine starts to lose confidence in holding onto her younger husband, a dancing scene is unusually tinted red, apparently to evoke the heightened emotions of the scene. Brown’s deployment of color to enhance mood anticipates Loyd Jones’s theories on the artistic potential of tinted stock, as developed at Kodak. In his consideration of the Sonochrome tint “purplehaze,” for example, “a bluish-violet or lavender, rather pastel in character,” Jones observes:

The color of fires and flames is another topic that generated discussion in the trade press. For tinting, it was a long-held, commonplace assumption that bright scarlet was the color to use for scenes featuring a conflagration of fire or even for scenes with smoke indicating a fire, as used in London’s Free Shows (Harry B. Parkinson, Frank Miller, UK, 1924), an otherwise sepia-toned travelogue shown as part of a varied film program. Bennett argued in 1923, however, that tinting and toning could only reproduce “a mental impression that in the main conveys something of the idea aimed at” rather than true realism, since “flames of fire do not really burn bright scarlet red. The color of them is slightly orange yellow.”¹⁶ This generated further debate in the Kinematograph Weekly when “a Layman” complained about how the red used for fire in a film he had seen was too vivid and crude, neglecting to convey the orange, even bluish color of flames he observed in real fires.¹⁷ Somewhat accidentally, yet perhaps resourcefully on the part of James Stuart Blackton, convincing fire effects were achieved in The Glorious Adventure (UK, 1922). Blackton used Prizmacolor, a recently developed two-color subtractive process that had a tendency toward “fringing,” in which moving objects left a color trail behind them. The film’s drama climaxes with the Great Fire of London, in which the flames and light are particularly effective, appearing as dynamic, flickering shades of orange and red, often shown through doorways and windows. In this respect, any indication of fringing does not matter, as the vitality of the flames and their changing hues are enhanced by the visual sensation of movement.¹⁸

In the main, flames were thought best rendered using color effects that could also capture their visual dynamism. Arnold Hansen was an artist hired by Columbia Pictures in 1925 to hand color inserts for a number of their productions, including Fighting the Flames (B. Reeves Eason, U.S., 1925), The Danger Signal (Erle C. Kenton, U.S., 1925), and The Unwritten Law (Edward J. LeSaint, U.S., 1925). In Fighting the Flames, scenes of flames were colored for a dramatic rescue sequence. The fascination with fire in these films recalls amusement park attractions such as Luna Park, Coney Island’s “Fire and Flames” disaster exhibit in which live performers enacted thrilling fire and rescue spectacles.19 Hand-colored fire sequences in the 1920s pick up on this intermedial tradition by heightening excitement at strategic points in the films. The Fire Brigade (William Nigh, U.S., 1926) features a costume party sequence in Technicolor No. 3 (subtractive two-color, dye-transfer), but its climactic scene of burning flames was reserved for dramatic orange and red tints combined with the Handschiegl process (color plate 5.3). Indeed, Gustav Brock argued that hand coloring was perfect for dramatizing fire effects, particularly when used against otherwise black-and-white film, in keeping with his conception of the relative power of color referred to above. For Brock, “true realism” was the result, making a great impression on the audience by instilling color consciousness through varied chromatic effects.²⁰ As detailed below, Handschiegl represented a high point of the hand-coloring craft, with its ability to convey a particularly intense, tactile experience of chromatic depth and form that realized the artistic and conceptual ambitions of its skilled practitioners.

Impressive effects could be achieved using the Handschiegl/Wyckoff process, as in Wings (William A. Wellman, Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, U.S., 1927), where it was applied for shots of aerial combat featuring orange, explosive gunfire from planes and the fiery flame trails from successfully targeted planes as they crash to the ground (color plate 5.4). The color effects enabled the damaged planes to appear chased by a subtle flickering orange mixed with black to capture their fatal downward-spiraling velocity. The process was initially conceived by Max Handschiegl, a craftsman from St. Louis who specialized in lithography and photoengraving, and he collaborated with Cecil B. DeMille, Alvin Wyckoff, and Loren Taylor to develop the coloring process.²¹ Handschiegl was used in a number of motion pictures between 1916 and 1927, by itself or often intermixed with other coloring processes, such as Technicolor, tinting, and toning. The process was complex and labor intensive, developed as it was from the chromolithographic process but on a miniature scale. Dye-transfer printing matrices were prepared for each color to be applied in a sequence. The matrices were developed from duplicate negatives, and each section to be colored was chemically treated to absorb dye. Once prepared, the matrix would then be pressed in registered alignment against the final, positive print of the film to transfer the dye to the print.²² Handschiegl arrests and appears to punctuate an image, attesting to its intermedial heritage, with its emphatic, engraved appearance almost appearing to halt a drama’s narrative progress. Other high-profile films that used Handschiegl include Joan, the Woman (Cecil B. DeMille, U.S., 1916, the first film showcasing the process), The Affairs of Anatol (Cecil B. DeMille, U.S., 1921, discussed in chapter 2), Greed (Erich von Stroheim, US, 1924, featuring 185 shots of golden props, such as a tooth and coins), The Big Parade (King Vidor, U.S., 1925), The Lights of Old Broadway (Monta Bell, U.S., 1925), and The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, U.S., 1925).

In keeping with its arresting quality, Handschiegl was used strategically to enhance the effect of particular shots rather than for an entire film. This was in part because it was such a labor intensive, expensive process, but also because it was thought that using too much of it would distract from the narrative. However, it could be used to announce significant, dramatic moments in a film drama. While the rationale for selective application to achieve maximum visual impact is in keeping with the views of hand colorists such as Brock and Carewe, with Handschiegl the impression of crafted quality is especially heightened. As a punctuated effect, Handschiegl represents the epitome of both intermedial and hybridized color. As Paolo Cherchi Usai observes:

This film also includes a Technicolor sequence in which the Phantom’s sumptuous red cape is first presented as an impressive chromatic effect. In this way, the cloak’s redness, presented via different yet mutually supportive color techniques, acquired an emphatic presence, which was also used extensively for a tie-in campaign for the hue “Phantom red,” as discussed in chapter 2. Two-color Technicolor was similarly imbricated with a hybrid color aesthetic, which is strikingly evident in its use in The Phantom of the Opera among other coloring methods. The film combined various color styles and techniques, including tinting throughout most of the film, toning, Handschiegl, and Technicolor’s first subtractive two-color process, Technicolor No. 2, used for the Bal Masqué de l’Opera sequence and other scenes that are now lost. The Bal Masqué sequence was originally planned in Prizmacolor, but Technicolor was able to win over Carl Laemmle, the head of Universal, for the final contract.²⁴ Several versions of the film have been preserved, including one with sound; the most complete version is Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s 1996 reconstruction through Photoplay Productions. Brownlow and Gill drew primarily from a George Eastman Museum–preserved safety copy of a 1930 international release print. However, for the Technicolor sequences, they used a separate nitrate copy discovered by David Shepard from the 1929–1930 rerelease; this material, though shot in Technicolor No. 2, was reprinted in 1929 through the company’s imbibition, dye-transfer process, Technicolor No. 3.²⁵

The surviving Technicolor footage is stylistically powerful in the Bal Masqué scene, which occurs approximately forty-nine minutes into the film and is broken into two sequences, the first of which lasts four minutes and the second one minute, separated by a four-and-a-half minute sequence on top of the opera house.²⁶ Given that the Technicolor scenes are preceded entirely by tinted scenes, at least as preserved, a more intricate color look is immediately signaled at the beginning of the scene, first through the Technicolor title card announcing the Bal Masqué in two-color flourishes of reds and greens, and then by the ensuing shots of the grand staircase of the theater’s foyer. Beginning with a dramatic extreme long shot that tilts down to showcase the grandeur of the staircase, the scene is populated with rushing, masked figures dressed in red, black, and green-accented costumes. Closer shots allow fuller appreciation of the costumes as the crowd—caught in a frenzy of excitement as the disguised try to identify each other—appears to be waiting for something momentous to happen. The title, “Into the midst of the revelry, strode a spectral figure, robed in red,” cues what is to come. The people make way as a figure—the Phantom, unknown to the revelers—descends the stairs, and a medium cut-in permits full sight of his red costume, black and red-plumed hat, and skeletal-masked face. To complete this terrifying appearance, a contrasting green cane held by the Phantom is topped by a small skull being pecked by a bird’s beak. The contrast between the gray death’s-head visage and the bright red costume is striking, revealing Technicolor in a richly layered image that connotes opera, theatre, melodrama, and horror all at once (color plate 5.5).

The Photoplay reconstruction also illustrates tinting effects for particularly atmospheric scenes, such as the Phantom’s shadow in purple (keyed throughout the film to backstage and underground scenes) as he manipulates the chandelier high above the stage, as it shakes, falls, and sabotages the performance twenty-five minutes into the film. Later, this version of the film displays shots of the Phantom in his red cloak, on the roof of the opera house, that were originally achieved by the Handschiegl color process, though Brownlow and Gill have again reconstructed this footage through colorization. The Handschiegl shots are in the middle of the Technicolor sequences, and this time the Phantom’s deep red cloak is foregrounded against a blue-toned background for maximum impact, drawing attention to the depth of color achievable with the Handschiegl process (color plate 5.6).

The prevalence of color hybridity meant that The Phantom of the Opera’s layered, almost painterly look invited audiences to appreciate its textures and distinguish new developments in color technology. Introducing Technicolor and Handschiegl to punctuate particularly dramatic moments had a double impact, both as announcing key narrative moments and as impressive color spectacles with broad associations. The concentration of red invited the audience to relish chromatic density and, particularly with Handschiegl, a deeply textured saturation. As we saw in chapter 2, the film inspired the U.S. Textile Color Card Association to develop “Phantom red,” a new shade that adorned numerous products, including shoes, lipstick, bags, hats, slippers, and gowns. The trade press reported, “Phantom Red Becomes the Rage,” as commercial tie-ins accompanied the film’s exhibition in the United States and beyond. In this way, the film image was far from being closed off from other medial influences. As the Handschiegl shots attract the eye to experience textures and a tactile sense of color, at the same time the effect is redolent of other media, drawing the viewer both inward and outward as color hybridity invites comparison with paintings, with clothing, with stage sets, and with opera. This exemplifies a central idea of intermediality—that “within a single text of a particular medium, attention can be called to the artifice of that medium by re-creating (or attempting to re-create), referencing, imitating, or evoking the sense of another distinct medium.”²⁷

As a text, The Phantom of the Opera also has a profoundly intermedial heritage, first published as a popular French serial written by Gaston Leroux in the newspaper Le Galois in 1909–1910, and then collected and revised as a novel in 1910. The film adaptation was very much a vehicle for actor Lon Chaney, who had starred in a similar role as Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Wallace Worsley, U.S., 1923), and the monumental theatricality of the sets is central to the appeal of both films. The first screenings further exploited this theme with elaborate, theatrically inspired presentations that unleashed the drama of the story as soon as patrons entered the theater. In the Astor Theatre, New York, for example, an effigy of the Phantom, dressed in red robes, occupied a niche over the entrance. A report notes: “His skeleton face grinning at the throng below sent cold shivers up and down the spines of those who caught sight of him for the first time.”28 The screening was preceded by a ballet performance adapted from Faust, after which the magician Thurston appeared as the Phantom to heighten suspense for the film presentation. In addition, the ushers were in character, wearing red robes to match the Phantom’s costume, their faces partially hidden by masks. Color in the film was also central to the film’s appeal, according to the same report: “The first showing of the gorgeous, natural color sets of the great Paris Opera House…and the celebrated masked ball, a kaleidoscopic riot of color, drew cries of astonishment and wonder.”²⁹ In this way, the film’s different chromatic modes and sensibilities underscored the vitality of its public presentation as a hybrid, multimedia experience that resonated with audiences beyond a single viewing. Indeed, the subsequent exploitation of Phantom-related products such as lipstick and fabrics is also testament to the film’s outward-facing and sustained commercial appeal as much more than a stand-alone motion picture.

A single, identifiable aesthetic signature was not always evident in color films of the 1920s, arising as they did from diverse intermedial cultures. What was often deployed was a mediated, multiple application of color that imported conventions and techniques already in use in other fields. Once again, color style demonstrates a great degree of hybridity, even when new processes were being showcased. Although Blackton’s The Glorious Adventure (1922) demonstrates Prizmacolor as a new subtractive process, the film also encompasses approaches to color associated with tinting, toning, and stenciling. So, while Prizma is the technical “star” of the film, aesthetic approaches derived from applied coloring persist. The set of the “Golden Swan” ship in the film, for example, provides an occasion for an establishing shot with the ship on the horizon framed against the deep blue sea and red clouds (color plate 5.7). The almost translucent qualities of the shot are an example of the lantern-like, stained-glass color effect of Prizmacolor, which stands out as visually striking in ways similar to Pathécolor stenciling of the 1910s.³⁰ Such signature shots alert one to the fact that color was still an attraction that drew on earlier color films seen by audiences. This eclectic, occasionally spectacular approach affected tinting and toning style as well: far from being a mere backdrop, tinting and toning could be vibrant. The tints of the reconstructed Das Weib des Pharao (The Loves of Pharaoh, Ernst Lubitsch, Germany, 1921), for example, are strikingly varied and saturated, as was typical of the period (color plate 5.8).

The increasingly prismatic environment of modern cities was reflected in films, and tinting and toning functioned as appropriate affective registers of this transformation. Far from being a crude addition to a codified scheme, on occasion tinting could relate to a film’s broad modernist themes. A striking example of elaborate interior and exterior color design from the 1920s is The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock, UK, 1926). Color underscores a design that unsettles the idea that the interior of one’s home can be safely insulated from contemporary developments. The film uses tinting and toning to associate color primarily with exteriors, modernity, fear, and the unknown. The narrative raises suspicions that a lodger (Ivor Novello) living in a large Victorian London house might be a serial killer of young women on London’s streets, one who stabs them and leaves behind a triangular piece of paper signed by “The Avenger.” The film has deeply intermedial origins, as is well known, in Marie Belloc Lowndes’s popular novel of the same name (1913) and in a stage adaptation by H. A. Vachell, Who Is He?, which Hitchcock saw in 1915. It is also indebted to Hitchcock’s experiences in Germany in the 1920s, particularly his familiarity with set-design techniques steeped in modernist theatricality. British crime fiction inspired the “internationally circulating visual vocabulary for London” that is replicated in The Lodger, as in German films of the 1920s, including Paul Leni’s Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, 1923), and later films such as Hans Steinhoff’s Anglo-German coproduction Nachtgestalten (The Alley Cat, 1929) and E. A. Dupont’s Piccadilly (UK, 1929).31 The Lodger betrays these influences in its exteriors and interiors, from London’s dark streets to the studio construction of a three-sided house with narrow walls and ceilings that facilitate varied lighting effects and the glass ceiling constructed to visualize the novel’s anxiety caused by the unsettling sound of the lodger pacing back and forth in his room. British cinema of the 1920s, as Christine Gledhill has noted, was steeped in a “pictorial-theatrical-narrative mode” that involved adapting theatrical staging and pictorial imaging to the needs of narrative cinema.³² Such a convergence of media and cultural traditions was integral to Hitchcock’s early films. At the same time, his experiences filming in Babelsberg Studios, Berlin, in 1924 brought him into contact both with F. W. Murnau, a director profoundly influenced by the theater and lighting designs of Max Reinhardt, and with cinematographer Baron Ventimiglia, who shot The Lodger with such luminary precision.

The company Deluxe 142 worked on the British Film Institute’s restoration in 2012. Since the negative no longer exists, the sources for the digital restoration were nitrate prints dating back to the 1940s. Colorist Stephen Bearman worked to replicate the iron blue tone and amber tints that are so important for the film’s color scheme: the combination of the two colors for exteriors sought to produce “an effect similar to that of the old London pea-soup fogs, the ‘London particular’ the scenes were intended to represent.”³³ At the same time, these hues are also used to delineate spatial boundaries between interiors and exteriors. The “blue for night” coloring is invested with associations that go beyond realistic replication. Rather, iron blue toning underscores the film’s broader theme of encroaching modernity by representing city life as being prone to coldness, to social isolation, darkness, and danger.

The film also uses spatiality to underscore the conflicts of modernity by delineating different, conflicting time frames present in its décor: the interiors of the house are decorated from an earlier, Victorian era even though the film’s narrative takes place in the 1920s. Its large rooms with high ceilings are cluttered with bric-a-brac, candelabras, flowers, ornaments, and pictures, all tinted warm amber. The outside world, however, is full of suspense, the unknown, and danger; it is dominated by the cold, iron blue toning, which not only forms a contrast with the safe, amber interior of the house, but by dual processing the blue tone with amber tinting, also problematizes the safe warmth of the interior. The film’s opening accords with this scheme: after elaborately animated opening titles that are tinted amber and toned blue, a close-up of the face of a terrified and screaming curly-haired woman fades in as she is about to be murdered (color plate 5.9). The tinting and toning replicate the amber and blue title cards that both precede and follow the shot. The preceding title card is an animated frame that splits into triangular shards to reveal the film’s iconic image of a man in trench coat and hat, toned blue against an amber background. The following animated title card continues the amber and blue scheme, depicting a pulsating amber sign that reads “To-Night Golden Curls.” Complexly, the montage of the two titles and shot in the middle presents the presumed murderer, his victim, and the outcome: tonight, the woman with golden-amber curls has been murdered. The ensuing shot confirms this—her stilled body collapsed on the ground in a dramatic foreshortened low angle shot, with abstract city lights in the background, still in the dramatic amber and blue tinted and toned color scheme. The amber “gold” tint with the blue tone thus provides a key linkage across the cuts, particularly from the victim’s curls to the curls of the sign.

The film’s distinctive titles were by E. McKnight Kauffer, a painter and poster designer who developed an avant-garde graphic style, working also with artists such as Wyndham Lewis and T. S. Eliot. The particular, pulsating title about golden curls is emblematic of the way the film’s thematic concerns are underscored by color. Indeed, there are close associations between color, artificial light, modernity, and the sexualized nighttime blue world of showgirls. Throughout the film, the amber-tinted interiors of the house appear to separate it from the dangers associated with the city, most often coded with blue. The irony of this is that the house may not be a safe haven—from another time and out of danger—because the lodger might very well be the killer, as he is set up to be through the film’s staging and mise-en-scène.

The location of a lodging-house in a modern city indeed further problematizes the demarcation between exterior and interior that the film’s color system initially encourages us to believe. As Murray Pomerance points out regarding the film, “in modernity…just as exteriors come inside, so interiors are exteriors.”34 When Daisy and the lodger are outside in the dark, illuminated under a streetlight whose effect is shown by an amber tint against a blue tone, the all-pervasive blue surrounding them serves to emphasize their isolation as vulnerable innocents in the dangerous city. Color is used for a nightmare sequence when the policeman’s growing suspicions are shown: amber-tinted objects such as the lodger’s bag and the quivering ceiling lights as he paces above are superimposed against a blue background to visualize his worst fears. Blue is used to support the dramatic narrative most obtrusively toward the end of the film when an angry crowd frantically turns into a lynch mob and chases the lodger, who they think is the murderer. In this way, the film’s color supports an interior-exterior schema that works toward symbolizing the colliding worlds of the time, just as the color wave emphasized change and the unexpected. The intermingling of colors, media, and spatiality in The Lodger is an important indicator of cinema’s multiplicity and centrifugal connotations. Gustav Brock’s remarks on the impact of contrasting tints quoted earlier in this chapter are indeed exceeded by Hitchcock’s complex use of tinting.

This was also the case in Michel Strogoff, in which stenciling was used to heighten the drama of two sequences: the opening court grand ball and scenes of the Tartar encampment. The latter, a festival at which the captured Strogoff (the luminous Ivan Mosjoukine) is blinded, provides the occasion for elaborate stenciling (color plate 5.11).³⁵ Similarly, in Casanova, stenciling was used for the Carnival festivities and to embellish sets and costumes, particularly those worn by Catherine II (Suzanne Bianchetti), including “a magnificent dark blue cloak emblazoned with the czar’s gold emblem,” and the red, pink and black satin harlequin costume worn in Venice by Casanova (Mosjoukine, color plate 5.12).³⁶ The Carnival sequence’s beautiful effects included fireworks and magnificent gondolas festooned with balloons, leaving trails of color behind them as they glided through the water. Color was thus an integral part of the appeal and attraction of these historical, Russian-shaped films that were prized for their visual magnificence and reputation as quality, prestige cinema.

In many ways, Abel Gance’s epic Napoléon (1927) represented the apotheosis of French cinema’s technical ambitions, complete with expressive tinting and toning, as discussed in the introduction to this book. Gance, in collaboration with Segundo de Chomón, even filmed a reel in the Keller-Dorian photographic color process, but ultimately this was cut from the final edit. As Kevin Brownlow explains, the original prints were toned in five separate colors, though with some versions also in black and white. The 2000 film restoration completed by Brownlow and Gill attempted to re-create the original colors, but as Brownlow explains, “we have still not managed to get the print to look exactly the same. We have been unable to reproduce the blue tone-pink accurately.”37 For the digital restoration of 2016, the tinted and toned colors were reproduced more accurately, with many stunning effects, such as in Act One when light amber tones appear strategically after a succession of black-and-white scenes. The light amber replicates shafts of golden light shining through the window of the great hall of the Club des Cordeliers when the revolutionary crowds hear “La Marseillaise” for the first time. The top of the set, designed by Alexandre Benois, was painted on glass, thus adding even more impact to the luminosity of the shots. Color, light, and music combine to convey the crowd being swept away, as if in a trance.³⁸ When the mob’s fervor escalates into violence, a flagrant pink tone is used as a dramatic backdrop that accentuates the constellation of angry, jostling bodies and flickering shadows, as Napoleon watches from a rooftop attic. After shifting back to sepia for scenes of the National Assembly, the intertitle “The Revolution is a Furnace” is followed by a deep red tint that graphically matches the sentiment. Then Corsica blue-tone, pink-tint shots, which Brownlow refers to, convey in their restored form the beauty of the ocean with the sun glistening on waves (color plate 5.13). In this way, Napoleon’s rise to power is underscored by chromatic choices that punctuate his watching and waiting for greatness. In Act Two, green tints are used for the murder of Marat, and the action then shifts to amber for the first scenes of the Siege of Toulon. Color here punctuates the narrative development, as when the English commander’s confidence in his fleet necessitates an intercut shot of the ships waiting offshore in a blue-green tint. A blue-tone, pink-tint combination is then used again for the preparations for battle, and this changes dramatically to red when Napoleon orders the canons to be fired and battle commences. While the red expresses the gravity of the conflict, it also serves a practical purpose by highlighting action that took place in poor light and wet weather conditions. To some extent, this made up for the poor illumination provided by the arc lights used in filming. Tinting and toning are then used for the conclusion of this episode, Napoleon’s first military victory, as if the chromatic register is heightened to convey its significance.

In the film’s fourth act, contrasting tints are used to enhance the impact of a key scene when Napoleon is alone in the National Assembly hall and he sees the spirits of those who set the French Revolution in motion. A blue tone is used for this nighttime scene, but when Napoleon looks to the seating area, we see from his viewpoint the ghostly figures slowly appearing, shown in an amber tint (color plates 5.14 and 5.15). As the shots cut between Napoleon and the figures, the tints alternate from blue to amber, as we understand that he is being urged to lead France to spread the ideals of the Revolution to the rest of Europe. As we noted in the introduction, the film’s final images—a succession of widescreen frames, consisting of three triple-projected images placed side by side—encapsulate the importance of color to the film’s artistry. In some of the frames a tricolor effect for the French flag is created across a single screen: blue, black-and-white, and red. Expanding to a tryptic of images accentuates the three colors’ relative impacts as they contrast with one another. The three shots are at times synchronized to create a single composite image, but in other instances they show different, juxtaposed battle scenes, time frames, and symbolic imagery, such as an eagle’s head contrasted with shots of Napoleon, marching soldiers, mathematical equations, and the rushing sea (color plate 0.1). As the sequence climaxes, the frames create a kaleidoscopic effect of superimposed images, punctuated by Napoleon in close-up. The succession of tricolor images works as a quick montage summary of his triumph; it is an avant-garde flourish at the end of the film that graphically encapsulates the sum of its heroic sentiment through an aura of historical monumentality. While Napoléon is excessive in its total scope when compared to most silent films, it is significant that its extraordinary technical ambitions included color. The multitude of its effects, including triptych sequences, rapid cutting, and audacious swirling camera movements, are impressive enough, yet the strategic chromatic tinting and toning scheme wields profound visual and emotional resonance when added into the mix.

With the use of Handschiegl and various photographic color processes in the United States and elaborate color schemes for tinting, toning, and stenciling in French historical dramas, color in narrative films was largely associated with prestige, quality filmmaking through much of the decade. Hungarian-born Paul Fejos was notable for his experimental, European-styled approaches to late silent American cinema. As noted in chapter 3, his first studio film, Lonesome (U.S., 1928) for Universal, is distinguished by its chromatic hybridity through the three tinted, stenciled, and hand-colored sequences that are used to embellish the Coney Island scenes that comprise the middle of the film. These sequences are relatively unusual for U.S. productions of the time, as they present the three most common forms of applied color relatively late in the decade, when the foci of technological innovation had shifted to subtractive color and sound. Previously, we have analyzed the film’s intermedial connections, from brightly colored illustrations in children’s fairytale books to the increasing ubiquity of colored, neon advertising signs in cities.³⁹ In doing so, Lonesome both celebrates and critiques modernity by drawing attention to color’s mutability in terms of both affect and meaning. Its use of hybrid color provided an ideal reflection of the film’s complex meditation on the need to foster strong human connections against the monotonous, alienating effects of urban life, as critiqued by Siegfried Kracauer in a review of the film.⁴⁰

The colored sequences pull the film spectator into a vivid, reflexive experience of the modern world depicted in the film. Color is used to create sensory impact when the film’s central couple, Jim and Mary, escape the drudgery of their daily lives and meet on a trip to Coney Island during a public holiday. The first color sequence—just as their romance begins to flourish during a long conversation on the beach—involves tinting and then stenciling that dynamizes the emotional register of the scene. The couple’s excitement is matched by pulsating neon lights at the amusement park that dissolve over them, rendered through stencil coloring against the dark night sky (color plate 5.16). The impact of this neon spectacle is all the more impressive because it appears as a temporary attraction, with the film reverting to black and white when the sequence is over. The film’s second colored sequence also involves stenciling, combined with toning for a music-hall setting that combines color, music, and dancing as forms of synesthetic illumination for both the characters and the audience. As we have elaborated elsewhere:

When Charles Urban saw Prizmacolor demonstrated in 1916, for example, he reported that the films were shot in such a way as to conceal fringing, often avoiding movement or restricting it to action either toward or away from the lens:

The most severe test which can be applied to any color process known is to march a body of red-coloured soldiers across the lens of an ordinary march step and reproduce the same without excessive color fringing…. Referring directly to the Prizma exhibit which I saw yesterday afternoon, the photographer has been exceedingly careful in his selection of subjects, both as to color, harmony, lack of action, and insistence on distance…. The portraits of beautiful ladies were most pleasing, only the slightest movements of the hands, body, eyes, and facial muscles were discernible. If one of those ladies started to raise her hand, the moment the hand began to raise [sic] the picture ended abruptly, and any movement close-up in these pictures, as recorded by Prizma methods, would have occasioned very extreme fringing. All of the pictures taken showed action either to or from the lens, at a calculated distance, to the sacrifice of distinctness and detail.⁴³

This report is significant because Urban was particularly sensitive to the defects it describes, given his expertise. Urban’s attempts to develop Kinemacolor ten years earlier were similarly fraught with fringing issues.⁴⁴ Prizma was unable to sustain further momentum after Blackton’s chromatic experiments with The Glorious Adventure were only partially followed up in The Virgin Queen (UK, 1923). Blackton returned to the United States, and Prizma’s Jersey-based laboratories did not move with the rest of the film industry to Hollywood. Claude Friese-Greene’s travelogue was similarly plagued with fringing, and the film was often shown at the wrong projection speed so that its pictorial virtues were lost on the harsh critics of the trade press. Friese-Greene did not continue to experiment with color, reflecting later that the only viable way forward was color values being “embedded in the emulsion,” as in the subtractive approach being developed by Technicolor and others.⁴⁵

For any photographic color process to gain acceptance, fringing had to be overcome—something that was eventually achieved by Technicolor, but only after considerable experimentation. Technicolor grappled with considerable technical difficulties in developing its early systems, particularly problems with implementing its complex subtractive techniques, both the glued and dyed print method of Technicolor No. 2 and the imbibition printing process of No. 3.46 Photographic color continued to be an expensive choice for filmmakers, so the tendency was to use it for spectacle, exotic scenes, or the embellishment of quality historical dramas, which detracted from how it might be used for more everyday scenes. A key issue was the frequently made claim that photographic color processes were capable of reproducing greater chromatic realism than applied coloring techniques. Realism is, of course, a loaded term; as we have seen, hand colorists such as Gustav Brock used it inclusively, to demonstrate how a color could convey the impression of tactile sensations in addition to appealing to notions of verisimilitude. But with reference to photographic color processes, invoking realism tended to serve as a rather limited rhetorical position to differentiate them from tinting, toning, and other applied color forms. This inevitably set up expectations that disappointed viewers, particularly when green and red two-color registers failed to deliver the full range of the visible spectrum, detracting from the wonder of color as sensational effect.

Two-color Technicolor had problems, for example, rendering blue and yellow. This deficiency appeared in films that perhaps mistakenly promoted a color that the process had difficulty reproducing. In Irene (Alfred E. Green, U.S., 1926), a fashion show sequence in Technicolor No. 2 featured the film’s star, Colleen Moore, wearing an “Alice blue gown,” as discussed in detail in chapter 2. But when the best that Technicolor No. 2 could deliver in Irene was pale green, the problems of using specifically named colors on-screen became apparent. Moore later stated in an interview, “I had a sweet little Alice green gown…Technicolor couldn’t make blue.”⁴⁷

Such visible deficiencies influenced debates among Technicolor personnel. Caution prevailed to such an extent, as noted in chapter 3, that the color scheme for The Black Pirate (Albert Parker, U.S., 1926) was designed to be restful, with no distracting bright colors. Restraint was the watchword, advocated by Albert Parker and lead performer Douglas Fairbanks as the most appropriate style: “Greens of all the softer shades, and brown running the whole gamut from the lightest tint of old ivory to the deepest tone of mahogany.”⁴⁸ This strategy paid off and the film’s color was praised, but problems including “incorrect handling and sloppy projection standards” and variable environmental conditions in theaters meant that the company’s business soon slumped.⁴⁹ In spite of the care taken over the film’s color palette and Fairbanks’s meticulous historical research with illustrations and paintings, Technicolor was unable to control how the film was exhibited. Color continued to be a frustrating technical challenge, leading to intensive work on the development of Technicolor’s dye-transfer process, the new imbibition-blank process (I. B.) that eventually constituted its unique selling point.

Similar ideological predispositions are evident in nonfiction, as in Cosmopolitan London (Harry B. Parkinson and Frank Miller, UK, 1924), a short film in the Wonderful London series produced by Graham Wilcox Films. Cosmopolitan London takes viewers on a tour of London’s districts shot from the perspective of those curious to see what the first intertitle describes as “strange faces and scenes reminiscent of foreign climes.”51 As with other travelogues depicting “foreign climes,” scenes that take us to relatively safe—in terms of the film’s address—white areas, such as the Italian and French restaurants of Soho or “Little Italy” in Clerkenwell, are contrasted with locales where the people are presented as strange, exotic, or even threatening, such as the Jewish inhabitants of Whitechapel or the Chinese of Limehouse. Although the film is sepia toned, it nevertheless uses lightness and darkness in the composition of shots to further emphasize the ideology of the intertitles that are steeped in discourses of racial otherness. Berwick Street, for example, is described as a “Ghetto of the West,” and the following frames are very dark, showing glimpses of shadowed figures at market stalls rather than highlighting their faces or expressions, in comparison with the lighter images of Little Italy that follow an intertitle that jauntily references the pleasures of “macaroni, chianti, hokey-pokey and ice cream.” A woman dressed in flapper attire and wearing a cloche hat walks briskly past a French café to indicate a fashionable locale associated with sophisticated taste and modernity. But when the tour takes us to what is described as “the unsavory Whitcomb Street district,” we see a white woman apparently thrown out of a restaurant “famous for its negro clientele” and where “white trash are not encouraged.” As the film documents Limehouse and then Pennyfields, the word “sinister” is used to describe an environment associated with opium dens and people who do not readily look at the camera. Yet an image of an Asian woman and her mixed-race child challenges this perspective, inviting us to share an intimate encounter that transcends the film’s otherwise condescending tone (color plate 5.18). The final sequences of Cosmopolitan London once again lighten—visually and thematically—to show sites associated with Britain’s colonial heritage, such as Australia House and the spectacle of marching guards. In this way, a film that uses only a single tint strategically varies lightness and darkness in the filming of its different locations to underscore its message; color, shade, and tone are never neutral but imbricated with ideologically inflected sensibilities.

As these examples indicate, perceptions of cinematic color were multifarious in their appreciation so that the apparent conventional uniformity of a tinted frame by no means indicated a mise-en-scène that was unremarkable or unrecognizable. The continued interest in hybridized color attests to the pursuit of variety, attraction, and experimentation at a time when the institutionalization of cinema was supposed to have curtailed these intermedial impulses. The key point is that cinema’s confidence was not associated with a sense of static maturity, accompanied by a loss of momentum and innovation. Rather, cinema’s dynamism in the 1920s was characterized by flux, repetition, and difference as it negotiated its place across multiple contexts. The total experience of color during this period was essentially an intermedial one, informed by the many intersecting areas of life, art, and commerce. As cinema was becoming more institutionalized, the many influences with which it interacted were similarly at different stages of development. The resulting collision of manifestations of the color world underlines the complexities of mapping intermedial exchange during this dynamic period. While a growing perception of what cinema was capable of and what made the medium distinct was evident, its profoundly intermedial connections, more typically associated with an earlier phase of development, were not foreclosed in the 1920s. Instead, intermediality produced a chromatic vibrancy in the art and cinema of the era that still resonates today.