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Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s
by Scott Higgins
From where we sit in 2008 it may be tempting to assume that color in cinema is a vanquished territory. With the technology available to us we can modify the color of the light in a given shot with the click of a mouse button. We can alter the hue of an object, a scene, or an entire film. As for the name "Technicolor," it signifies a different Hollywood, a different time and place in moviemaking. It invokes the palettes of that time, shades of the real, the hyperreal, and the little-too-intense-to-be-believed. All too often these shades have faded with time; in some few cases we have reconstructed glories available to us, such as with the restored Vertigo of a few years back.
The fact is, few of us have seen a film in Technicolor. As Scott Higgins explains, original but degraded prints were restored to something different from what they once were, reissued, transferred to video, and restored again. Once we realize this we are only part of the way toward understanding how elusive color continues to be both in cinema and in a wider sense. Higgins's masterful work is, in his own words, an attempt to "answer color's chaUenge" (8). Color is highly subjective, changeable, and, in the context of a medium Uke fdm, vulnerable to a myriad of factors that alter how it is perceived by an individual set of eyes.
In a very real sense, then, Technicolor is lost to us, yet Higgins brings us as close as possible, via an act of intense academic energy combined with perceptual imagination, to seeing some of the old Technicolor classics "as they were." FoUowing an outline of the familiar history of color in cinema-from hand tinting, stenciling, tinting and toning, to some of the more weU known color processes such as Hanschiegel and Padiechrome-Higgins proceeds to examine Technicolor as business venture, as process, and as aesthetic history. He explores in fantastic detaU the history, objectives, and accompUshments of the Technicolor Corporation. Initially a venture to "solve the problem of color in motion pictures" (4), Technicolor became all but synonymous with color cinema, holding a...