This is a list of early

feature-length A feature film or feature-length film is a narrative film (motion picture or "movie") with a running time long enough to be considered the principal or sole presentation in a commercial entertainment program. The term ''feature film'' originall ...

color films (including primarily black-and-white films that have one or more color sequences) made up to about 1936, when the

Technicolor Technicolor is a series of Color motion picture film, color motion picture processes, the first version dating back to 1916, and followed by improved versions over several decades. Definitive Technicolor movies using three black and white films ...

three-strip process firmly established itself as the major-studio favorite. About a third of the films are thought to be

lost film A lost film is a feature or short film that no longer exists in any studio archive, private collection, public archive or the U.S. Library of Congress. Conditions During most of the 20th century, U.S. copyright law required at least one copy o ...

s, with no

prints In molecular biology, the PRINTS database is a collection of so-called "fingerprints": it provides both a detailed annotation resource for protein families, and a diagnostic tool for newly determined sequences. A fingerprint is a group of conserve ...

surviving. Some have survived incompletely or only in black-and-white copies made for TV broadcast use in the 1950s.

Background

The earliest attempts to produce color films involved either tinting the film broadly with washes or baths of dyes, or pains-takingly hand-painting certain areas of each

frame A frame is often a structural system that supports other components of a physical construction and/or steel frame that limits the construction's extent. Frame and FRAME may also refer to: Physical objects In building construction *Framing (con ...

of the film with transparent dyes.

Stencil Stencilling produces an image or pattern on a surface, by applying pigment to a surface through an intermediate object, with designed holes in the intermediate object, to create a pattern or image on a surface, by allowing the pigment to reach ...

-based techniques such as Pathéchrome were a labor-saving alternative if many copies of a film had to be colored: each dye was rolled over the whole print using an appropriate stencil to restrict the dye to selected areas of each frame. The

Handschiegl color process The Handschiegl color process (, , App: Nov 20, 1916, Iss: May 13, 1919) produced motion picture film prints with color artificially added to selected areas of the image. Aniline dyes were applied to a black-and-white print using gelatin imbibition ...

was a comparable technique. Because transparent dyes did not impact the clarity or detail of the image seen on the screen, the result could look rather naturalistic, but the choice of what colors to use and where was made by a person, so they could be very arbitrary and unlike the actual colors.

Edward Raymond Turner Edward Raymond Turner (1873 – 9 March 1903) was a pioneering British inventor and cinematographer. He produced the earliest known colour motion picture film footage. Biography Turner was born in 1873 in Clevedon, North Somerset, UK. In late ...

's process, tested in 1902, was the first to capture full natural color on motion picture film, but it proved to be mechanically impractical. A simplified two-color version, introduced as

Kinemacolor Kinemacolor was the first successful colour motion picture process, used commercially from 1908 to 1914. It was invented by George Albert Smith in 1906. He was influenced by the work of William Norman Lascelles Davidson and, more directly, E ...

in 1908, was marginally successful for a few years, but the special projector it required and its inherent major technical defects contributed to its demise in 1914.

, originally also a two-color process capable of only a limited range of hues, was commercialized in 1922 and soon became the most widely used of the several two-color processes available in the 1920s. Beginning in 1932, Technicolor introduced a new full-color process, " Process 4", now commonly called "three-strip Technicolor" because the special camera used for

live-action Live action (or live-action) is a form of cinematography or videography that uses photography instead of animation. Some works combine live-action with animation to create a live-action animated film. Live-action is used to define film, video ga ...

filming yielded separate black-and-white negatives for each of the three

primary color A set (mathematics), set of primary colors or primary colours (see American and British English spelling differences#-our, -or, spelling differences) consists of colorants or colored lights that can be mixed in varying amounts to produce a gamu ...

s. The final print, however, was a single full-color strip of film that did not need any special handling. This became the standard process used by the major Hollywood studios until the mid-1950s.

List of films

References

{{Reflist

External links

Timeline of Historical Film Colors

Early color feature films Articles containing video clips it:Procedimenti di cinematografia a colori

Background

List of films

See also

References

External links