COLOUR IN THE CINEMA

Evening Star, Issue 20256, 17 August 1929, Page 21

COLOUR IN THE CINEMA

THE NEXT DEVELOPMENT The arrival in the London cinemas this week of two full-length colour films, the presence of colour scenes in at least three of the recent talkies, the news that Florenz Ziegfcld is to make musical comedies in • colour for the talking picture producers, illustrates a common phenomenon of industry—that curious loosening of tradition, that sudden epidemic of discovery that follows the practical application of any new idea (says a writer m the ‘Observer’). For the last five years the film industry in every country, with tho exception of Russia, has been at a standstill. Films have been made—films have been, successful —but there has been no real impetus behind the work, none of the vitality of invention that brought Griffith and Ince to prominence, that carried the fame of the post-war German studios many thousands of miles from Munich and Berlin. The social enthusiasm of the Russian directors made for great work, hut the political emphasis of that enthusiasm limited the scope of its influence, and the cinema in general was suffering from a terrible period of inaction and sterility. 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. Tho film with a voice made more possible and more desirable tho 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 tho next week’s development is going to be. There is nothing unprecedented, of course, in the production of full-length colour films, nor anything extraordinary in the introduction of an odd patch of colour in an otherwise black-and-white screen. As far back as 1922

Stuart Blacktou was considered by many critics to have solved the colour problem with ‘The Glorious Adventure.’ But it is only recently that colour has ceased to he a novelty, and has begun to bo regarded by producers as a necessity. It is only the advent of the talking film that has made tho advent of the colour film inevitable. America is seriously concerned, for the first time, with , the production of something better in colour than cheap picture post card painting, and the elimination of black-and-white photography, like the elimination of silent photography, is now little more than a matter of time. I have no doubt that the colour film, like the talking film, will be bitterly opposed. I do not myself enjoy it. That is to say, 1 have never seen a colour film yet that gave me any real sense of colour; that presented or implied the tone values of a black-and-white film like—to take three very different examples—‘The Divine Lady,’ ' The Wonderful Lie,’ and ‘ The Aidershot Tattoo.’ I have never seen a colour film that had warmth, or life, or key. The best of them— ‘ The Toll of the Sea ’ and the short, doll scene from ‘ Broadway Melody ’ —have been limited in range and uneven in tone. All existent colour-photography flushes and pales intermittently; we have the colour one minute and lose it the next; flesh tints, are unhealthy, yellows muddy, skies like pale metal, reds riotous, and if the old trouble of fringing has been satisfactorily elimi- ' nated, the old problem of a full palette has never j-et been solved.

But that does not say that it never will be solved. Indeed, it must be. The pitch of perfection to which black-and-white photography has been brought demands an equal perfection in the colour-photography that will take its place in commerce. I do not like the colour film of to-day, but it has enough fleeting beauty in it —a movement of scarlet tunics, a flash of black velvet and white feathers, a ripple of a brown sail in the wind—to make me hopeful of the colour film of to-morrow. T believe America will produce a good colour cinema, because a good colour cinema has become a commercial necessity. Odd black-and-white films there may be, just as there may bo odd silent films, but colour and sound together, and with them stereoscopy—all the attributes that make up the splendid machine of the cinema and definitely negative its claim to be an art—all the mechanical gadgets that have come so rapidly out of this period of invention and many others still uufamiliar-'-are going to constitute, I am sure, the normal film entertainment of the next generation—if not of pur own,