Then the “talkies” came. For good or bad, they were a development—a stirring of the mass, a prod in the back of the industry. Film thought began to move. Tradition loosened, changed, broke. New men came into the studios, bringing with them fresh interests and knowledge—the idea of film entertainment grew beyond the old limits of a flat black-and-white image on a silent screen. The film with a voice made more possible and more desirable the film with colour and plastic form. The new men set to work to make actualities out of the old daydreams, and the pace of invention in the studios and laboratories is at the present moment so breathless that no one can prophesy with any certainty what the next week’s development is going to be.
—Observer (1929)
The development of color and cinema in the 1920s was highly variable yet also interwoven, as each integrated profound changes in art, technology, and industry during the decade. As we have traced, color and cinema were hallmarks of the new mass culture of the era and central foci for modernist and avant-garde experimentation. The various transformations and exchanges between color and cinema across overlapping fields and media comprise what we have referred to as the chromatic modernity of the 1920s. The Observer’s forward-looking editorial from 1929 reflects such exchanges, inflected with a British point of view yet one invested in international developments, citing The Virgin Queen (J. Stuart Blackton, UK, 1923) alongside the Soviet work of Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, Cirano di Bergerac (Augusto Genina, France/Italy, 1923/1925) and The Toll of the Sea (Chester M. Franklin, U.S., 1922).1 The editorial’s attention to sound in relation to color—as being generative of new ideas, knowledge, medial convergences, and international innovation—is testament to the central place of color in the ever-changing understanding of what a total cinema might look like. André Bazin also saw color, alongside sound and stereoscopy, as vital to the myths that drove cinematic invention: the grasping for “an integral realism, a recreation of the world in its own image.”2 What such an image might be is both ancient, as Bazin elucidates, and also evolving: who knows what next week will bring, as the Observer points out. In these ways, technical change is both innovative and repetitive: just as new aesthetic horizons remediate the past, they expand the realm of possibilities. From the 1890s into the 1920s and ongoing through to our new century of digital imaging, color has always been integral to the myths and practices of total cinema—as in Abel Gance’s Napoléon (France, 1927), with which we began this book. At another level, color’s place in such accounts illustrates how cinema was itself interwoven with the chromatic modernity of the 1920s. Interrogating the dynamism of this relationship also reveals much about the intermedial legacy and future of color in the moving image.
In the 1920s, as well as now, cinema’s intermedial engagements function, in the words of Ágnes Pethö, as “a kind of excess, a surplus in the cinematic image, as the medium is reaching beyond its own conventional boundaries,” particularly at moments of transition.3 Color embodies these excesses. It was conceived as being integral to the totality of the filmic image, yet also as spilling out of it. As such, it opens a multitude of possibilities for intermedial and cross-field exchange in cinema, even in the dominant classical structure that it coalesced into in the 1920s. The ability to move through color between and across media and cultural formations dynamically expands cinema’s reach beyond itself. As we have shown, these leaps are often dynamized in filmic moments of chromatic tableau in which color comes to the fore and crystalizes its points of external reference.4 The vibrant Technicolor red of The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, U.S., 1925)—which envelops Lon Chaney’s Phantom when he is introduced and literally brings a raucous ball to a stop—resonates beyond the film itself with the “Phantom red” hue of its tie-up campaigns for fashion design and makeup, as we have discussed. Such excessive moments of chromatic exchange illuminate the transformations that cinema underwent during the 1920s, as it flourished as a mass cultural form of production and reception deeply interwoven within the cultural and industrial fabric of the time.
However, the intermediality of the era was not the same intermediality that structured the emergence of cinema in the 1890s, as an inchoate technology developed symbiotically out of an already established set of media and cultural forms, nor is it the exact structure of exchange for what has followed. Each era redefines the possibilities for medial exchange, and in the 1920s, with the medium entering its classical phase, cinema came to direct intermedial flows with increasing power, as the history of color delineates. With the coming of sound and the relative decline of tinting, toning, and other applied methods, it would seem that the rich, chromatic channels of exchange that had characterized the decade receded. However, it is crucial to recognize that rather than disappearing, cinema’s intermedial engagements shifted again at the end of the 1920s, adjusting to different aesthetic, economic, and structural imperatives defined by technological change, increasing nationalist imperatives, and worldwide Depression. Cinema theaters remained colorful sites of exhibition, though the extravagant musical preludes and live shows associated with the silent era began to wane. The 1920s’ building surge of new movie palaces had peaked, but it left an enduring physical legacy: the opulent foyers, complex lighting setups, colored stained-glass and tiled panels, vibrant advertising displays, and effervescent spirit of showmanship remained, as if in defiance of the Great Depression. This rich chromatic legacy still resonates today in a material sense through surviving movie palaces, such as the magnificent 1921 Art Nouveau Tuschinski Theatre in Amsterdam (color plate 3.8), and through the increasing restoration and exhibition of colored films of the era.
Cinema was part of an experience of color during the decade that shaped various media and cultural fields that connect color to a broad, transnational sweep of economic, social, and artistic developments. The interwar era crystalized what Miriam Hansen has described as “the modernity of mass production, mass consumption, and mass annihilation, of rationalization, standardization, and media publics.”5 From mustard gas to radiant light cathedrals and cinemas, color was foundational to these facets of 1920s modernity, and this is why the chromatic aura of the era continues to glimmer in our own, through veils of nostalgia, inspiration, and anxiety. To unpack these ambivalent layers, it has been productive to historicize industrial developments in colorimetry and knowledge exchange as indicators of how commercial imperatives circulated and affected cultural production and taste cultures at various levels. While industrial interests promoted the quest for greater standardization of color across media and commodity production, this was a more complex process than simply imposing a top-down mechanism to guide consumers into making predictable chromatic choices that could be exploited year after year. The drive toward harnessing color choices through the codification of ready-made dyes, paints, and fashions paradoxically liberated it in art and fashion, making color more accessible and variable and enabling one to be more color conscious in personal choices, from clothing and décor to what one read and watched at movie theaters. The regulatory tinge to the logic of codification was motivated toward moderating rather than controlling the highly subjective and ever-expanding realm of color. At the same time, the intermedial energies unleashed by the color revolution led to scientific and artistic innovation, new alliances, and international collaboration. In this sense, the decade was one in which modernity was fundamentally negotiated through a chromatic lens that dynamized the field of cultural production and consumption.
Such dynamization is evident through the many individuals, organizations, artworks, and films we have examined. By emphasizing cinema’s extensive connections with, among other things, industry, fashion, music, and artistic culture, we have delineated how the period constituted a rich, cosmopolitan network of intermedial and cross-field relations. While this empowered competitive forces within the culture industry, there were also subtle gradations and back-and-forth collaborations between the forces of commerce and artistic practice—across both large-scale and restricted forms of production, in Pierre Bourdieu’s formulation. We have traced both the radical engagement by the avant-garde with prismatic forms of mass culture and the ways in which vernacular forms of the moving image critically responded to and helped shape the chromatic modernity of the decade and beyond. Through color, the sponsored films of Walter Ruttmann and the vernacular abstractions of Ballet mécanique in the 1920s are of a piece with Len Lye’s advertising work for the British GPO in the 1930s; with the educational animation work of Norman McLaren for the National Film Board of Canada and UNESCO at midcentury; with the pop-art sensibilities of Andy Warhol’s iconic color work in paintings, screen prints, and also films; and with the contemporary collage work of experimental animators such as Larry Jordan, Lewis Klahr, and Jodie Mack. Similar parallels can be drawn between the narrative experiments with intermedial color in films such as Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), L’inhumaine (Marcel L’Herbier, 1924), and Lonesome (Paul Fejos, 1928); Alfred Hitchcock’s collaborations with designers, animators, and painters such as Saul Bass, John Whitney Sr., and John Ferren in Vertigo (1958); and Paul Thomas Anderson’s work in Punch-Drunk Love (2002) with painter and digital animator Jeremy Blake, as well as his homage to Andreas Gursky’s photograph 99 Cent (1999). These moments of intermedial collaboration and allusion stand out in the films, crystallizing their references through chromatic tableaux in ways excessive to narration. Anderson’s Gursky allusion, for instance, captures the phantasmagoria of a modern grocery store, bedecked in bright commodity packaging. In a single tracking shot, the camera begins slowly, not quite in tableau, tracking right, allowing one to appreciate the allusion to Gursky before—in a feat of cinematic bravura—speeding up in a blur of bright colors.
The decade’s immediate chromatic legacy, both in the 1930s and beyond, is complex to unravel. Rooted in Depression-era pictorial conventions, this is the beginning of the worldwide association of black and white with aesthetic realism, which came to dominate the classical sound era, while color became increasingly relegated to the generic conventions of the musical, fantasy, melodrama, and historical fiction. With the attenuation of tinting and toning at the end of the 1920s, color was present but no longer a normative practice in feature films. The adoption of processes such as two-color and three-strip Technicolor, Dufaycolor, Gasparcolor, and Agfacolor occurred mainly in the United States, the UK, and Germany. With the linguistic disruptions that sound brought, the cosmopolitan networks of exchange—which had proliferated in the 1920s to the benefit of modernist experimentation with color—to an extent atrophied. The physical movement of émigré professionals who fled from Germany to Britain, France, and the United States during the 1930s, however, meant that artistic collaboration entered a new phase, but one that concentrated particularly on exchanges of knowledge and skills in black-and-white cinematography and set design, as in the work of the many German exiles who worked in British cinema.6 The color exchanges that did occur—for instance, Oskar Fischinger’s failed collaboration with Disney yet important influence on U.S. experimental work at midcentury—tended to be more insular, nationally bound, and relatively less traveled, at least initially, than the 1920s avant-garde.7
Chromatic experimentation did continue in other cultural fields such as advertising and fashion, both of which remained important to emerging photographic color styles for motion pictures. In this respect, many of the intermedial relationships surrounding cinema that had become firmly established in the 1920s persisted. Fox Movietone, for example, produced Vyvyan Donner’s Fashion Forecast series of eight films in Technicolor in the late 1930s.8 Technicolor also developed a range of industrial films that were part of the color revolution of the day, particularly its advertisement films for the American rayon industry at the 1939–1940 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York.9 From 1932 to 1952, Technicolor released more than a thousand shorts and advertising films across the United States, capitalizing on color’s visceral power to enhance a range of products from toothpaste to textiles.10 Disney’s early use of three-strip Technicolor for animated cartoons and Gasparcolor’s application in short advertising films were part of a continuum in terms of showcasing new color processes in the short-film market.
Conversations about color remained pressing in filmic discourse, largely focusing on classical issues of realism and the extent to which color might distract audiences’ attention from plot-driven drama. Colin Bennett, a British color technician and reporter, argued that color must remain “only an adjunct,” because there was always a danger that it might be “jarring” or “over-done” and thus distract from narration.11 Yet as color became associated with the aforementioned genres of the musical, fantasy, melodrama, and historical fiction, stylistic practice increasingly diverged from such classical prescriptions through their intermedial references, the very point of which was to crystalize exterior allusions.
As international competition between film industries accelerated after the 1920s, debates about color also became more invested with nationalist overtones that further ruptured the cosmopolitan channels of exchange that had previously flourished. As in Bernard Brunius’s diatribe against color in the 1920s in France through his proposed Ligue du noir et blanc, Technicolor increasingly came to embody such problematics. In the 1930s, the company began to move into a position of global ascendency in the color field. Its struggles and success were based in no small way on carefully navigating the legacy of the 1920s in the midst of the Depression. Natalie Kalmus’s brilliant mobilization of the notion of color consciousness in her seminal essay from 1935 attests to this: taking a concept used extensively in the United States to promote color’s cultural value during the 1920s and adapting it to Technicolor’s standardization of color design in the mid-1930s.12 However, as Regina Blaszczyk and Uwe Spiekermann have noted, the international success of the American industry and consumer culture “triggered ideas of national supremacy in the United States and led to ethnocentric discussions about ‘primitive man.’ Cultures that preferred a bright palette to the subtle hues in vogue in advanced industrial societies were compared to young children with their penchant for primary colors.”13 While we have noted similar assumptions about color in the 1920s, these became accentuated as color, and particularly Technicolor in a global context, became increasingly politicized and aligned with American cultural hegemony in subsequent decades. Producing color cinema outside of the United States—whether Jacques Tati’s failed attempts with Thomsoncolor in France for Jour de fête (1948) or Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s crafting of a decidedly non-American, British style of Technicolor in masterpieces such as Black Narcissus (1947)—meant veering away from the rich, candied saturations of American color style.14
These national approaches to color in the 1930s and 1940s call into relief the multivalent and expanding cosmopolitan nature of the chromatic culture of the 1920s. In the face of subsequent reactions against the era, these qualities are also essential for understanding the decade’s palimpsestic longevity now in our cultural imagination, not only in film, but also in art, architecture, advertising, and literature.15 Given the critical emphasis on global interconnectedness in our new millennium—enabled by the profound transformations that digital media have wrought across the spaces of late capitalism’s (neo)liberal world order—it makes sense that the 1920s have returned in film and media. Beyond material archaeologies, the fascination with looking back to the era as a colorful time before economic crisis is a thriving trend in postmillennial screen production—for example, in Rob Marshall’s Chicago (U.S., 2002), Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (U.S., 2004), Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (U.S., 2011), and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (U.S., 2013), and in TV dramas such as Boardwalk Empire (HBO, U.S., 2010–2014), Downton Abbey (ITV, UK, 2010–2015), Mildred Pierce (HBO, U.S., 2011), Peaky Blinders (BBC, UK, 2013–), and Babylon Berlin (Sky 1, Germany, 2017–). These works are also often laden with crystalized allusions to films of the era, as in Babylon Berlin’s references to Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, and Josef von Sternberg, among many others—variations on Walter Ruttmann’s Opus films even play over its closing credits. Similar to other quality recreations of historical periods, these works’ retrospective emphases on costuming, design, and texture bring into contemporary focus an imagined period when cosmopolitan style and visual display were foregrounded in chromatically rich mise-en-scènes. Compared with the somber, muted tones often evoked to represent the ensuing Depression era, the 1920s is associated with a vibrant visual culture in which new color technologies were rapidly expanding the global range of chromatic media. Given the recent influx of new digital coloring processes, it should be no surprise that the roaring chromatic culture of the 1920s serves as a commonly remediated point of reference. Yet, as with Babylon Berlin, which chillingly tracks the end of Weimar liberalism and the rise of fascism, such looks back raise pressing political questions about what may follow as fracture lines increasingly threaten our once taken-for-granted cosmopolitan networks.
This circularity of chromatic inspiration and cultural engagement mean that the developments we have traced in this book are far from buried in the past. Returning to a decade when so many ideas about color, cinema, and its intermedial contexts were formed offers a telescopic view on aesthetic impulses that resonate today. Although many of the films—and their colors—produced in the era no longer survive, the vitality of the 1920s within the history of film cannot be overstated. Restoration and preservation projects by major archives—such as the EYE Filmmuseum, the British Film Institute, the Cineteca di Bologna, and the George Eastman Museum—attest to our continued fascination with recovering how these works pushed the boundaries of color expression in ways that remain both aesthetically alluring and culturally charged. Thanks to this vital work, as the centenary of the 1920s approaches, the moving hues of the decade’s chromatic modernity can once again be experienced in vivid intermedial splendor. The digital cultures of our new millennium echo and transform the colors of the last century, inspiring new creative formations across media, cultural fields, and collaborative networks. Aesthetically as well as politically, such palimpsestic movements of history necessitate critical engagement and action, now and for our chromatic future.
