Chromatic Modernity

Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s

Sarah Street, Joshua Yumibe

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231542289
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

The era of silent film, long seen as black and white, has been revealed in recent scholarship as bursting with color. Yet the 1920s remain thought of as a transitional decade between early cinema and the rise of Technicolor—despite the fact that new color technologies used in film, advertising, fashion, and industry reshaped cinema and consumer culture. In Chromatic Modernity, Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe provide a revelatory history of how the use of color in film during the 1920s led the way in creating a chromatically vibrant culture.

Focusing on the final decade of silent film, Street and Yumibe portray the 1920s as a pivotal and profoundly chromatic period of cosmopolitan exchange, collaboration, and experimentation in and around cinema. Chromatic Modernity explores contemporary debates over color's artistic, scientific, philosophical, and educational significance. It examines a wide range of European and American films, including Opus 1 (1921), L'Inhumaine (1923), Die Nibelungen (1924), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), The Lodger (1927), Napoléon (1927), and Dracula (1932). A comprehensive, comparative study that situates film among developments in art, color science, and industry, Chromatic Modernity reveals the role of color cinema in forging new ways of looking at and experiencing the modern world.

CHAPTER 1

COLOR STANDARDS AND THE INDUSTRIAL FIELD OF FILM

[W]e must thank the chemists for liberating scores of new hues from the gummy darkness of coal tar and other plentiful substances.

—“A New Age of Color,” Saturday Evening Post (1928)

Color today is by and large ready-made, purchased prefabricated, and mixed with the help of matchable color cards, charts, and digital indexes that allow one to choose the ideal hue, saturation, and combinations for the job at hand. This was not always the case, for at one time most pigments were profoundly expensive and required trained specialists to mix and prepare for each application. Our modern sense of color as a standardized commodity available off the shelf dates back to the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1850s and accelerating rapidly after World War I, new forms of color revolutionized the spaces of modernity through an array of industrial innovations, standardizing procedures, and aesthetic experiments, and by the 1920s cinema in all of its various hues was at the vanguard of these transformations. The colorant industry went through fundamental changes during the era, as it shifted from the use of natural dyes to synthetic anilines. Aniline is a chemical compound synthesized from coal tar, a common industrial waste product. The German chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge initially discovered coal tar’s potential for producing dyestuffs in the 1830s, but it was the British chemist William Henry Perkin who was first able to market aniline dyes after he distilled a deep purple compound he named and patented as mauveine in 1856. Mauveine inaugurated a massive expansion of color in the textile and chemical industries, as numerous other synthetic dyes were soon developed across Europe, particularly in Germany. It was not just new colors that emerged from these innovations, but also a whole host of chemical offshoots: pharmaceuticals, film and photographic stocks, fertilizers, and eventually tear, mustard, and chlorine gases, often as by-products from the waste of colorant production.

Synthetic dyes were cheaper and more colorfast than the colorants used previously, for before aniline, dyes were extracted from organic materials that by and large were relatively unstable and imported at great cost through colonial trade. With the tints of aniline flooding the market, new colored goods were transformative, making the world seem like a fantastic dream come to life. Aniline-dyed magic lantern slides and tinted theatrical lighting illuminated the spaces of popular entertainment, and urban sidewalks overflowed with passersby draped in the newly saturated fashions of aniline-colored fabrics, which came to define the fashion look of the New Woman. Print ephemera was also a major site for the expansion of color, as city streets were plastered with chromolithographed advertising posters and subsequently by neon signage. Wallpapers, reproductions of artwork, hand-painted photographs, and stenciled trade postcards colored the walls of domestic spaces. Meanwhile, color printing revolutionized the space of reading, as vibrant illustrations—in women’s journals meant to be clipped out to decorate the home, in children’s books, and on dime-novel covers—grew increasingly popular at the end of the century.¹ It is out of this synthetic prism that cinema emerged in the 1890s, and as the medium crystalized into its classical form of mass entertainment, the moving image became a hallmark of the chromatic modernity of the 1920s, resplendent in the tints, tones, and Technicolor hues that saturated the Jazz Age.

Color and cinema have entwined histories. Each expanded industrially as well as artistically in a global context after the First World War, and this growth necessitated new standards for color production. Within the industrial field, the codification of colorimetric values and meanings became essential for taming color’s polyvalence and industrial unruliness. Color has always been uncontainable—it spills over borders and makes sparkling messes, and as such it is a constant variable in the industrial arts. Tints shift both chemically and in reproduction, depending on lighting conditions, ingredients, color juxtapositions, the physiology of the eye, and time, as dyes fade and decompose. But color is simultaneously a vital aspect of our lived environment and a hallmark of 1920s consumer culture as illuminated through the cinematic field. In particular, the hues of the screen illuminated new modes of female fashion as well as a host of Orientalist and Primitivist fantasies through various Art Nouveau and Art Deco flourishes, which Lucy Fischer has shown, as we take up in more detail in chapter 2.² In order to better commodify and control such gendered and racialized excesses for the new mass markets, colorant firms began to distribute color card indexes increasingly in the latter half of the nineteenth century. At the same time, various aesthetic and industrial theories emerged for codifying color harmony in tandem with the development of aniline colorants. It is this process of colorimetric standardization within the industrial sector that we examine in this chapter. Not only restrictive in effect, these processes enabled forms of technical and aesthetic innovation in 1920s cinema and were generative for the new modes of production and reception that defined the modernity of the decade.

Our focus in this chapter is primarily on industrial history as opposed to film analysis, which we take up in detail in ensuing chapters. Specifically, our interest is in how new forms of chromatic standardization across the cinematic and industrial fields of production necessitated new, international modes of technical research. To these ends, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production is particularly useful, not only as a model for mapping color’s complex interactions across media and cultural fields of the 1920s, but also for how it emphasizes the dynamic nature of fields, which are open to constant transformation.³ When emergent forces—such as new corporations, trade alliances, technologies, and ideas—enter a given field, its internal structure shifts to accommodate the novelty. Taking synthetic color’s introduction into the fields of production as a starting point, we delineate how color in the 1920s transformed, and was transformed by, the various intermedial, industrial, and cultural spheres that it interacted with—in, around, and through the cinema.

German corporations dominated the conglomerated chemical and colorant industry at the turn of the last century, but with the conclusion of the First World War and the ensuing reparations, the German industrial sector was forced to divest a portion of its international factories and chemical patents. Global colorant production diversified and surged in the ensuing postwar consumer markets, which necessitated new, transferable principles of research and design. The international history of color intersects with what Olivier Zunz has examined regarding the rise of U.S. power in the “American twentieth century.” As he explains, one of the overarching drives of the United States at the turn of the century was “the creation of an industrial economy on a continental scale,” which in turn would grow to dominate global trade, eventually overtaking the German industrial complex during the interwar period.⁴ As the second half of this chapter details through comparative studies of Eastman Kodak, Pathé Frères, and Technicolor, part of this rise to global power relates to intersecting developments in the U.S. colorant and film industries during the 1920s. Tracking the industrialization of color and cinema in a global context illuminates a structural transformation in knowledge production during the era. Laboratory research, particularly in Germany and the United States, was being professionalized through increasing partnerships between industry and technical universities that accelerated the rate of knowledge transfer. This change in the structure of industrial knowledge was one of the factors—alongside other professionalizing shifts, such as the rise of the studio system and the development of the trade press and organizations such as the Society of Motion Picture Engineers—that enabled cinema to crystalize as an autonomous mass medium.⁵

Industrialized and standardized, color became a hallmark of modernity and modernism, consumer culture, and film and mass media. To make sense of these overlapping concerns, we examine how the standardization of color drove its expansion across fields and media during the 1920s. The industrial networks running through and around cinema experienced new challenges, which developed and sustained symbiotic relationships across media. With the diversification and expansion of aniline production and distribution following the war, the standardization of color values through colorimetry became of increasing importance for the emerging cultures of mass production and consumption, and the professionalization and interconnection of research laboratories played a critical role in this industrial process. It is the development of industrial standards for color research to which we now turn to trace in brief its history before and after the war in order to assess its influence on film research laboratories of the 1920s.

The Color Chart

The synthesis of aniline colorants from coal tar in the middle of the nineteenth century defined an initial phase of chromatic innovation in the modern era. Though Great Britain and France had well-established colorant industries, it was Germany that came to dominate the trade as its empire coalesced, controlling upwards of 90 percent of the global market by 1900, a position it maintained until World War I. Lacking an expansive colonial network to supply raw resources for manufacturing in the middle of the century, Germany relied instead upon domestic innovation to compete internationally.⁶ Beginning in the 1860s, emerging companies such as Badische Anilin- und Sodafabrik (BASF), Friedr. Bayer et comp, and Höchst AG far outperformed French and British colorant firms. These companies came to hold most of the modern dye patents and factories in the world, while also cultivating close ties to research centers at technical universities that trained a highly skilled workforce of chemists. Such a confluence of technical capability and trained ingenuity led to the continued innovation of aniline production as well as a growing variety of chemical by-products.⁷

Such changes in the industrial field of color enabled the chromatic expansion that occurred in the field of cultural production from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s. However, as aniline colorants flooded the market in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reactions ranged dramatically in the cultural field as the world took on a synthetic face. For some, colored goods—from clothing to chromolithographs to home appliances—were thought beneficial for cultural taste. U.S. chromolithographer and educator Louis Prang, for example, in 1868 suggested that color printing increased access to art, allowing it to be “republicanized and naturalized in America,” thus improving popular taste through increased color consciousness.⁸ Relatedly, at the turn of the century, after devoting “decades of his career and large portions of his business to shaping the way that American children perceived color,” Milton Bradley “played a crucial role in making bright hues an unquestioned fixture in the life of the child,” according to Nicholas Gaskill. As Gaskill argues, “the ways of seeing fostered in the Bradley system prepared students to enter the emerging world of consumerism both as efficient producers and ready consumers.” Intricately connected to this endeavor was the standardization of color materials that Bradley produced through his company.⁹ New color standards corresponded across production, education, and consumption in his system. These imbricated approaches can be read as being relatively self-serving and utilitarian, as both Prang’s and Bradley’s business was to mass-produce and sell color goods. Yet, they also aspired beyond corporate interests to shape the color sense and consciousness of students for their betterment, in concert with broader pedagogical currents that were reshaping childhood education as well as art instruction, from Montessori to Waldorf and the Bauhaus (see chapter 4).

In the art world, the embrace of new color paints was extraordinary, encompassing the chromatic experiments in the Impressionism of Monet and the Neo-Impressionism of Seurat, the Fauvism of van Gogh, Picasso’s Cubism, and the abstraction of Kandinsky. Moving away from the dull palettes of Analytic Cubism, Picasso enthusiastically embraced the vivid enamels of Ripolin house paint in works such as Violin, Glass, Pipe and Anchor, Souvenir of Le Havre (1912).¹⁰ Few writers celebrated the utopian potentials of modern color more than the German journalist and science fiction writer Paul Scheerbart, who famously published in 1914 his utopian tract The Glass Architecture, comprised of 111 aphorisms about the uses and possibilities of glass and color in design. In this novelistic fantasy, he foresaw that modern color, as fused with transparent, colored-glass bricks, “will inevitably transform our whole lives and the environment in which we live…. So we must hope that glass architectur...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Color Standards and the Industrial Field of Film
• 2. Advertising, Fashion, and Color
• 3. Synthetic Dreams: Expanded Spaces of Cinema
• 4. Color in the Art and Avant-Garde of the 1920s
• 5. Chromatic Hybridity
• 6. Color and the Coming of Sound
• 7. Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Series List
• Color Illustrations