The Oxford History of World Cinema (6 page)

used in the camera. Kodak launched their 16 mm. film on the market in 1923, and around

the same time Pathé brought out their 'PathéBaby', using 9.5 mm. non-flammable stock.

For many years 9.5 was a fierce competitor with 16 mm., and it survived for a long time

as a reduced projection gauge both for amateur film-making and for the showing of films

originally made on 35 mm.

Filoteo Alberini, unidentified 70 mm. film ( 1911). Frame enlargement from a negative in the film collection at George Eastman

House, Rochester, NY

There were also more exotic formats, using film divided into parallel rows which could be

exposed in succession. Of these only Edison's Home Kinetoscope, using 22 mm. film

divided into three parallel rows with an image-width of just over 5 mm., each of them

separated by a line of perforations, had any significant commercial application.

COLOUR

As early as 1896, copies of films which had been handcoloured frame by frame with very

delicate brushes were available. The results achieved by this technique were often

spectacular, as in the case of Georges Méliès's Le Royaume des fées ( 1903), whose

images have the glow of medieval miniatures. It was very difficult, however, to ensure

that the colour occupied a precise area of the frame. To achieve this, Pathé in 1906

patented a mechanical method of colouring the base called Pathécolor. This method, also

known as 'au pochoir' in French and stencil in English, allowed for the application of half

a dozen different tonalities.

A far less expensive method was to give the film a uniform colour for each frame or

sequence in order to reinforce the figurative effect or dramatic impact. Basically there

were three ways of doing this. There was
tinting,
which was achieved either by applying a

coloured glaze to the base, or by dipping the film in a solution of coloured dyes, or by

using stock which was already coloured. Then there was
toning,
in which the silver in the

emulsion was replaced with a coloured metallic salt, without affecting the gelatine on the

film. And finally there was
mordanting,
a variety of toning in which the photographic

emulsion was treated with a non-soluble silver salt capable of fixing an organic colouring

agent. Tinting, toning, mordanting, and mechanical colouring could be combined, thus

multiplying the creative possibilities of each technique. A particularly fascinating

variation on tinting technique is provided by the Handschiegl Process (also known as the

Wyckoff-DeMille Process, 1916-31), which was an elaborate system derived from the

techniques of lithography.

The first attempts (by Frederick Marshall Lee and Edward Raymond Turner) to realize

colour films using the superimposition of red, green, and blue images date back to 1899.

But it was only in 1906 that George Albert Smith achieved a commercially viable result

with his Kinemacolor. In front of the camera Smith placed a semi-transparent disc divided

into two sectors: red and blue-green. The film was then projected with the same filters at a

speed of 32 frames per second, and the two primary colours were thus 'merged' in an

image which showed only slight chromatic variations but produced an undeniable overall

effect. Smith's invention was widely imitated and developed into three-colour systems by

Gaumont in 1913 and the German Agfa Company in 1915.

The first actual colour-sensitive emulsion was invented by Eastman Kodak around 1915

and shortly afterwards marketed under the trademark Kodachrome. This was still only a

two-colour system, but it was the first stage in a series of remarkable developments.

Around the same time a company founded by Herbert T. Kalmus, W. Burton Westcott,

and Daniel Frost Comstock -- the Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation -- began

experimenting with a system based on the additive synthesis of two colours; disappointed

by the results thus obtained, the three changed tack in 1919 and began exploring (still

with two colours only) the possibility of using the principle of subtractive synthesis first

elaborated by Duclos du Hauron in 1868. This worked by combining images each of

which had filtered out light of a particular colour. When the images were combined, the

colour balance was restored. Using the subtractive principle the Technicolor team were

ready within three years to present a colour film --
The Toll
of the Sea
( Chester M.

Franklin, Metro Pictures, 1922) -created on two negatives and consisting of two sets of

positive images with separate colours printed back to back.

The late 1910s and early 1920s saw many other inventions in the field of colour, but by

the end of the decade it was clear that Kalmus and his associates were way ahead of the

field, and it was their system that was to prevail for professional film-making throughout

the 1930s and 1940s. Meanwhile the great majority of films during the silent period

continued to be produced using one or other of the methods of colouring the print

described above. Literally black and white films were in the minority, generally those

made by smaller companies or comic shorts.

SOUND

Almost all 'silent' films had some sort of sound accompaniment. Early film shows had

lecturers who gave a commentary on the images going past on the screen, explaining their

content and meaning to the audience. In a number of non-western countries this practice

continued long beyond the early period. In Japan, where silent cinema remained the rule

well into the 1930s, there developed the art of the
benshi,
who provided gestures and an

original text to accompany the image.

Along with speech came music. This was at first improvised on the piano, then adapted

from the current popular repertoire, and then came to be specially commissioned. On big

occasions this music would be performed by orchestras, choirs, and opera singers, while a

small band or just a pianist would play in less luxurious establishlnents. Exhibitors who

could not afford the performance of original music had two choices. The first was to

equip a pianist, organist, or small band with a musical score, generally consisting of

selections of popular tunes and classics in the public domain ('cue sheets'), which

provided themes suitable to accompany different episodes of the film. The second, more

drastic, was to fall back on mechanical instruments, from the humble pianola to huge

fairground organs powered by compressed air into which the 'score' was inserted in the

form of a roll of punched paper.

Music was sometimes accompanied by noise effects. These were usually obtained by

performers equipped with a wide array of objects reproducing natural and artificial

sounds. But the same effects could be produced by machines, of which a particularly

famous and elaborate example was the one in use at the Gaumont Hippodrome cinema in

Paris.

From the beginning, however, the pioneers of the moving image had more grandiose

ambitions. As early as April 1895, Edison put forward a system for synchronizing his twin

inventions of phonograph and Kinetoscope. Pathé also seems to have attempted the

synchronization of films and discs around 1896. All such systems, however, were

hampered by the lack of amplification to project the sound in large auditoriums.

The alternative to synchronizing films and discs was to print the sound directly on the

film. The first experiments in this direction took place at the beginning of the century, and

in 1906 Eugéne-Auguste Lauste patented a machine capable of recording images and

sound on the same base.

An early example of split-screen technique in an unidentified documentary on Venice. Title on print Santa Lucia, c. 1912

It was only after the First World War that the decisive steps were taken towards the

achievement of synchronized sound film. The German team of Vogt, Engel, and Massolle

established a method of recording sound photographically by converting the sounds into

light patterns on a separate film strip and their TriErgon system was premièred in Berlin

in 1922. Kovalendov in the Soviet Union and Lee De Forest in the United States were

also working in the same direction. De Forest's Phonofilm ( 1923) involved the use of a

photoelectric cell to read a sound-track printed on the same strip of film as the image.

Meanwhile the introduction of electric recording and the thermionic valve as an offshoot

of radio technology solved the problem of amplifying the sound to make it audible in

theatres.

In 1926 the Hollywood studio Warner Bros. presented
Don Juan,
with John Barrymore,

using the Vitaphone system of sound synchronization. This was a sound-ondisc system,

linking the projector to large discs, 16 in. in diameter, which ran at a speed of 33¼ r.p.m.,

with the needle starting at the centre and going outwards. The Vitaphone system was used

again the following year for the first 'talking' picture, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, and

continued in being for a few more years. Meanwhile a rival studio, Fox, had bought up

the rights on the TriErgon and Photophone patents, using them to add sound to films that

had already been shot. Fox's Movietone soundon-film system proved far more practical

than Vitaphone, and became the basis for the generalized introduction of synchronized

sound in the early 1930s.

ASPECT RATIO

The size and shape of the 35 mm. film frame remained virtually unchanged throughout

the silent period, at about 23 mm. Oust under 1 in.) wide and 18 mm. (0.75 in.) high. The

spacing of the frames meant each foot of film contained 16 frames. This too has remained

unaltered, and continues to be the standard today. When projected, the ratio between

width and height worked out at between 1.31 and 1.38 to 1. With the coming of sound the

frame size was altered slightly to accommodate the sound-track, but the projection ratio

remained roughly the same -- at approximately 4:3 -- until the arrival of widescreen

processes in the 1950s. In the silent and early sound periods there were a few attempts to

change the size and shape of the projected picture. The sides of the frame were

occasionally masked out, to produce a square picture, as in the case of Murnau's Tabu

( 1931). In 1927 the Frenchman Henri Chrétien presented the first anamorphic system,

known as Hypergonar, in which the image was 'squeezed' by the camera lens to

accommodate a wider picture on the frame, and then 'unsqueezed' in the projector for

presentation on a wide screen. This was an early forerunner of CinemaScope and the

other anamorphic systems which came into commercial use in the 1950s. Other

experiments included Magnascope ( 1926), which used a wide-angle projector lens to fill

a large screen, and devices for linking multiple projectors together. As early as 1900

Raoul Grimoin-Sanson attempted to hitch up ten 70 mm. projectors to produce a 360-

degree 'panorama' completely surrounding the spectator. More famous (though equally

ephemeral) was the Polyvision system used in the celebrated 'triptych' sequence in Abel

Gance's Napoléon ( 1927), where three strips of film are simultaneously projected

alongside each other to produce a single image.

PROJECTION

The normal method of projection from the earliest times involved placing the projector at

the back of the hall and projecting the image on to the screen in a cone of light over the

heads of the audience. Occasional attempts were made to devise alternative spatial

arrangements. In 1909, for example, the German Messter Company experimented with

showing its 'Alabastra' colour films through a complex system of mirrors on to a thin

veiled screen from a projection booth placed under the theatre floor. It was also possible

to project on to the screen from behind, but this process (known as back-projection) took

up a lot of space and has rarely been used for public presentation. It came into use in the

sound period as a form of special effect during film-making allowing actors to perform in

front of a previously photographed landscape background.

Throughout the silent years projectors, whether handcranked or electrically powered, all

ran at variable speeds, enabling the operator to adjust the speed of the projector to that of