Colour Films in Britain

The Eastmancolor Revolution

Sarah Street, Keith M. Johnston, Paul Frith, Carolyn Rickards

• Éditeur: British Film Institute
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781911239598
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Film & Video

The story of Eastmancolor's arrival on the British filmmaking scene is one of intermittent trial and error, intense debate and speculation before gradual acceptance. This book traces the journey of its adoption in British Film and considers its lasting significance as one of the most important technical innovations in film history. Through original archival research and interviews with key figures within the industry, the authors examine the role of Eastmancolor in relation to key areas of British cinema since the 1950s; including its economic and structural histories, different studio and industrial strategies, and the wider aesthetic changes that took place with the mass adoption of colour. Their analysis of British cinema through the lens of colour produces new interpretations of key British film genres including social realism, historical and costume drama, science fiction, horror, crime, documentary and even sex films. They explore how colour communicated meaning in films ranging from the Carry On series to Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to A Passage to India (1984), and from Goldfinger (1964) to 1984 (1984), and in the work of key directors and cinematographers of both popular and art cinema including Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell, Ridley Scott, Peter Greenaway and Chris Menges.

1

Eastmancolor and Branding

Keith M. Johnston

Take a look at the colour credits next time you visit the cinema. Eastmancolor is an indication that Kodak has scored all along the line: Eastmancolor is Eastmancolor negative film printed onto Eastmancolor positive. Technicolor? Technicolor is Kodak film except with Technicolor’s dyes printed on it. If you go into hospital for an X-ray the chances are that the X-ray film is manufactured by Kodak … Film, then, is where Kodak really makes its money.

(ADAMS 1973: 6)

The first British narrative feature film in Eastmancolor was Our Girl Friday (Noel Langley, 1953), released in December 1953, an unlikely standard-bearer for the revolution that was to come. The years before that release had seen a significant increase in American colour films (largely in Technicolor and Eastmancolor) being released to British cinemas: 82 colour films in 1951 (7 British), 132 in 1952 (18 British), rising to 152 in 1953 (18 British) (Anon 1957: 509). Despite that number, the absence of any mention of colour in reviews of this first British Eastmancolor film is still surprising. The film is ‘a humourless comedy’ (Anon 1954a: 11), ‘often turgid and obvious’ (Fitzgerald 1954: 14), although it may ‘create a surprise when it does the rounds’ given ‘it is a big success with popular audiences’ (Billings 1954: 12). The Monthly Film Bulletin and Kinematograph Weekly reviews do list ‘EastmanColor’ as the colour process, while Picturegoer mislabels it as ‘Technicolor’. This was a mistake that contemporary audiences could also have made, given the dominance of Technicolor and because posters for the film simply advertised it as being in ‘colour’ rather than a specific process. It was left to the US trade paper Variety to note ‘the Eastmancolor process gives the backgrounds a handsome and striking appearance’ (Myro 1953: 6). As well as being a factual statement, Variety’s choice to label the film as ‘British-Color’ might also suggest a pre-existing chromatic distinction being made about UK colour film production.

While this may seem an inauspicious start, British audiences had in fact seen a more celebrated debut for British Eastmancolor six months before the release of Our Girl Friday, of which they may also have been unaware. Elizabeth is Queen (Howard Thomas, 1953) was one of three colour Coronation films quickly filmed, edited and released in July 1953, alongside A Queen is Crowned (Castleton Knight, 1953: Technicolor) and Coronation Day (British Movietone, 1953: Gevacolor). Elizabeth is Queen was promoted as WarnerColor, but it was ‘photographed on Eastman colour negative and printed on Eastman colour positive’ (Anon 1953c: 89). While being critical of the ‘over production’ of Elizabeth is Queen and A Queen is Crowned, Monthly Film Bulletin noted:

the colour … has been most effectively caught … The shining white gowns of the Maids of Honour and the simple white gown which the Queen wears … provide a dramatic contrast to the shimmering velvets and glittering cloth of gold.

(Anon 1953a: 112)

While that review offered no specific comment on the different aesthetic qualities of the Technicolor or Eastmancolor processes, Kinematograph Weekly hailed the process used for Elizabeth is Queen: ‘Eastman Color has proved to be the only integral process capable of securing adequate colour at the low light intensity’ inside the Abbey (Anon 1953b: 11).

Figure 1.1 Elizabeth is Queen (Howard Thomas, 1953) title image featuring Warnercolor credit.

These initial 1953 examples offer early evidence of the visibility issues the Eastmancolor Monopack film stock encountered during its introduction to British film production. The exhibition market was well served by a range of colour films, and the introduction of a new colour film stock was not accompanied by a strong brand image, regularly being mistaken for a well-known competitor (Technicolor), rebranded as a different studio process (WarnerColor), or overlooked completely. If brands operate as ‘a trademark or “maker’s mark” that worked to guarantee quality or to give the potentially anonymous mass-produced commodity an identity’ (Arvidson 2005: 244), then early British Eastmancolor struggled to create such an identity. A shifting use of nomenclature did not help: the process was variously listed as Eastmancolor, Eastman Color, Eastman Colour and Eastmancolour across advertising, trade press articles, on film posters and in on-screen titles. While some of this could be linked to an inherent British dislike of the ‘color’ spelling, that clearly did not affect the dominant brand Technicolor.

This chapter will explore the early and often erratic British adoption of Eastmancolor from 1953 through to the late 1970s. In Britain, as elsewhere, Eastmancolor was hailed as a cheaper solution to colour production, and a way to break Technicolor’s production and laboratory-based monopoly on colour processing. Eastman Kodak developed a range of marketing campaigns across the decades that attempted to create and instil a brand identity around Eastmancolor, to give it a ‘significance … in the minds of consumers’ (Arvidson 2005: 244). Exploring three specific aspects of Eastmancolor in the UK – its relationship to Technicolor, its association with other technical processes, and its industry-focused marketing campaigns – the chapter will demonstrate how its brand identity shifted across the three decades after its initial introduction in Elizabeth is Queen and Our Girl Friday.

Eastmancolor and Technicolor

It is tempting to see the 1950s relationship between Eastmancolor and Technicolor as adversarial, pitting the new Monopack colour film stock against the established three-strip colour market leader. Naturally, the truth is less dramatic. In the US, Eastman Kodak had worked closely with Technicolor through the different stages of Technicolor’s two- and three-strip development, and all Technicolor processing facilities used Eastman Kodak black and white film stock. Technicolor saw Kodak as ‘both a necessary and desirable partner … Technicolor lacked the capacity to manufacture print stock … [and] it could benefit from Kodak’s highly capitalized research and development programme’ (Heckman 2015: 51). In the 1930s and 1940s, as Technicolor developed its colour monopoly in film production and processing, that relationship with Kodak was crucial.

From the early 1940s the multilayer colour film stock Technicolor Monopack was used for films that were shot extensively on location, such as Lassie Come Home (Fred M. Wilcox, 1943) and Scott of the Antarctic (Charles Frend, 1948), where the bulky three-strip Technicolor camera was less practical. From the Monopack’s positive image ‘three separate negatives … can be obtained by printing through blue, red and green filters on to panchromatic duplicating stock. From such separations, matrices are made and final positive prints are produced by dye transfer as before’ (Happe 1959: 6). Although described as Technicolor Monopack, it was an unbranded Eastman Kodak product, a 35mm version of Kodachrome Commercial: a stock Kodak produced, but on which Technicolor owned some of the patents. The 1934 Monopack agreement between the two companies allowed Kodak to produce multilayer 16mm Kodachrome for the amateur market (which it did successfully from 1935), while Technicolor had exclusive use of the 35mm Monopack stock.

Although not a direct development of that Monopack stock, Eastmancolor was crucially related to the companies’ close relationship:

Kodak first envisaged that its new film stock technology might provide professionals with a daily print film for Technicolor … [which] struggled to get rushes to studios … To this end, Kodak assembled the research team that ultimately created Eastman Color. From infancy, then, Eastman Color was designed to fit into Technicolor workflows.

(Heckman 2015: 51)

A 1947 antitrust suit brought by the American Monopolies Commission concerning the 1934 Monopack agreement led Eastman Kodak, and subsequently Technicolor, to sign consent decrees renouncing that agreement (Heckman 2015: 52). It also reshaped Kodak’s Eastmancolor plans from the initial ‘daily print film’ to a colour Monopack camera negative and print film. A financial agreement between the Associated British Picture Corporation and Technicolor in 1948 suggests that Technicolor, likely aware of Kodak’s plans, was eager to produce its own ‘photographic raw stock’ across the lifetime of that agreement, a stock that would be ‘referred to as “Technicolor multilayer negative” and “Technicolor multilayer process”’ (Technicolor Ltd 1947: 1). Without Kodak’s extensive research and development expertise, however, the language of that agreement seems to have been a further protection of the Technicolor brand more than a practical reality.

As Kodak was introducing Eastmancolor, an analysis of Technicolor’s financial status raised two competing problems for Herbert Kalmus’s company. First, cost-conscious Hollywood studios and associated companies were looking to save money on colour film production; second, that Technicolor’s ‘earning power is dependent in a large measure upon its three strip colour process … [the introduction of] a cheaper colour process having similar high quality would be a serious matter to the company and its stockholders’ (quoted in Anon 2000: 386). The successful introduction and expansion of Eastmancolor for film productions between 1950 and 1954 led Technicolor’s response: it closed its production arm by the mid-1950s and pivoted its business model towards imbibition processing and release printing at its US and UK sites. This was not as seismic a shift in Technicolor’s practices as it first appears, given the company’s three-strip colour process had always used Eastman Kodak negative stock and because laboratory processing, imbibition printing and release printing had long been a financial strength of the company. In shutting the production arm, Technicolor was able to repurpose its laboratories to work from the new Eastmancolor negative, rather than the previous three-strip camera or Monopack negative, as explained by Alan Masson who worked for many years at the Kodak Research Laboratories in Harrow:

Eastmancolor Negative … [could provide] a single strip colour negative film, from which the yellow, cyan, and magenta separations could be made for the so-called ‘IB’ imbibition or dye transfer process used by Technicolor. So, they would still be releasing Technicolor prints but they had been originated on Eastmancolor Negative film.

(Masson 2017)

This model, which shares some similarities with the Monopack/Kodachrome 35mm processing developed in the 1940s, became the heart of Technicolor’s revised business model. The company also offered standard (non-imbibition) film processing onto Eastmancolor print stock, but since that service was also on offer at Denham (Rank), Humphries and other British and US laboratories, it was not a unique selling point for Technicolor, and rarely highlighted in the company’s publicity.

This early-to-mid 1950s period offers the first phase of the Eastmancolor Revolution, although as noted in the Introduction, this was relatively slow-paced. With Technicolor successfully repositioning itself as a provider of high-quality film processing and laboratory work, Eastmancolor became primarily associated with film production rather than full production processing. This was aggravated by Kodak’s decision to let individual film studios rebrand Eastmancolor as a studio process such as ‘Warnercolor … Metrocolor … Deluxe … nothing more than a kind of branding exercise really … essentially, it … [was] Eastmancolor’ (Collard 2017). There is also a compelling counterclaim that part of Kodak’s decision not to brand films as Eastmancolor was based on the processing practices of some US laboratories:

When Kodak offered their negative/positive process to the studio owned labs, they gave specific instructions on how to develop, fix and wash the film. If these specifications were not followed, quality control and image stability would suffer. The labs quickly discovered that an acceptable image could be generated while cutting corners in certain areas, like washing the film after fixing. Improper washing resulted in image deterioration, since residue hypo and other chemicals left on the emulsion of both prints and negatives acted as a corrosive and made the dye couplers fade.

(Haines 1993: 54–55)

This claim is directly aimed at US laboratories such as Pathé Color and DeLuxe, with no evidence of similar practices happening at British laboratories such as Denham, Humphries or Kay. While Kodak benefited financially from either approach – Technicolor processing Eastmancolor negatives through the IB process, or other laboratories processing onto Eastmancolor positive and release stock – claims of inconsistent colour reproduction compared to Technicolor could explain the lack of a stronger Eastmancolor brand in this decade. It was also a topic reamplified in film preservation debates of the 1970s, as discussed in more detail in Chapter 14.

The example of Our Girl Friday, when Picturegoer misattributed Technicolor as the colour process, may have been a simple mistake, but it served as an augur of things to come in terms of the different promotional approaches taken by the companies. Technicolor had always attempted to exert its control over colour film production, and the switch to processing saw the company protect and promote its trademark through legal agreements that continued to stress ‘Colour by Technicolor’ despite the move away from three-strip camera production. While there appears to have been no official pushback from Eastman Kodak on this move, likely due to their strong history and ongoing commercial work with Technicolor, the distinction did not go unnoticed by directly competing laboratories.

In November 1954 Technicolor took out full-page advertisements in the British trade press. Thanking the industry for its ‘co-operation in helping us to protect the Trade-Mark TECHNICOLOR’, the advertisement goes on to explain ‘the proper uses of Technicolor credits’:

The credit phrase ‘Colour by TECHNICOLOR’ is used for motion pictures which have been controlled from the developing of the original negative or “taking” film to the manufacture of the positive release prints by a Technicolor company.

In brief, the credit is ‘Colour by TECHNICOLOR’ if the original negative is developed, and the release prints made, by Technicolor, regardless of the type of original negative used or the method of making the release prints.

The credit phrase ‘Prints by TECHNICOLOR’ is used for motion pictures in colour which are photographed on negative or “taking” film other than that developed by Technicolor but which are, however, controlled by Technicolor through some of the stages subsequent to photography, always including manufacture of the positive release prints.

The credit is ‘Prints by TECHNICOLOR’ if the original is not developed by Technicolor, but the release prints are made by Technicolor.

(Technicolor Ltd 1954: 14)

The timing of this advertisement in British journals...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Eastmancolor and Branding
• 2 Institutions and Eastmancolor
• 3 Comedy and Satire
• 4 Social Realism and Contemporary Drama
• 5 The Colour of Crime
• 6 The Colour Fantastic: Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction
• 7 Historical and Costume Films
• 8 Musicals, Pop Music and the Concert Film
• 9 Colour and Collaboration
• 10 Art, Experimental/Avant-Garde Practices
• 11 Amateur Colour Filmmaking
• 12 Short, Documentary and Advertising Films
• 13 Sex and Eastmancolor
• 14 Cultures and Practices of Preservation and Restoration
• Conclusion
• Technical Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint