SECTION THREE
9
Michelle Tolini Finamore
One of the early Technicolor films, Stage Struck (Famous Players/Paramount, 1925), opens with a dramatic and vividly colored fashion show sequence in which Gloria Swanson morphs from one fantastic creature into the next. She parades out in costumes that range from an Aubrey Beardsley-inspired Salome to the “Queen of the Revue” to Carmen. After the fashion show she is shown at a lavish banquet in which she is offered a peacock on a silver platter but lets the server know that she prefers simple wheat cakes. The chef brings them out, kisses her hand, and, in the intertitles, toasts the actresses who “command our laughter, our tears, our dreams” (Stage Struck 1925). The sequence is indeed otherworldly and in those early days of cinema, filmmakers often chose to use the more costly color process for these fantastical fashion-related mise-en-scènes, even if the rest of the film was in black and white. Fashion is doubly implicated in this fantasy role-play because dress is a constructed image that is then projected onto a screen, removing it even further from the real world. Perhaps it is that very unreality which made fashion that much more important to colorize, heightening the dream-like atmosphere of the films discussed in this text.
The early twentieth century is often viewed through a black and white filter, but it was an era full of vivid color, particularly in moving images. An astonishing 80–90 percent of films in the early part of the twentieth century were either fully or partially colorized (Koszarski 1990: 127). The mid-1910s in particular, when much of this experimentation with new film processes was taking place, witnessed the Orientalist creations of Paul Poiret, the Fauvist hues of artists such as Henri Matisse, and the richly colored costumes of the Ballets Russes. Color lithography, colored electric lights, magic lantern shows with colored glass slides, and artificially-dyed textiles in bright hues achieved through artificial dyes contributed to a visual culture awash in color.
From the very beginning of the history of projected film, color was an essential part of the cinematic presentation but most color footage has not survived due to the volatile aniline pigments that compromised the highly flammable cellulose nitrate film stock. One of the earliest fashion reels at the British Film Institute—a c.1900 film showing the latest hats from Paris—was colorized. Paris Fashions—Latest Creations in Hats of the House of Francine Arnaud shows a mannequin from the shoulders up rotating on a turntable in just two millinery creations. The frames were hand-colored in shades of pink and, while the colors were not applied in the most sophisticated manner, they did offer a suggestion of how these hats might look in real life (Finamore 2013: 77). The film also points to a trend that remained the norm throughout the 1910s and 1920s—that fashion and fancy dress were deemed worthy of colorizing, even in the earliest days of cinema when the technology was still in its infancy.
In Western culture, color is a gendered construct and color in fashion has often been more closely associated with women: contrast the sobriety of men’s standard uniform black of the nineteenth century with a women’s fashion system driven by seasonal color change. A number of authors have explored the cultural significance of color, both within fashion and in a broader contextual sense, including Harvey (1995), Gage (1993), and Batchelor (2000). And although it is no surprise that fashion films were targeted toward women, importantly, the workers who were hand-coloring these images in the film studios were women as well (Yumibe 2013). It is also important to note that the very processes for colorizing these films were often related to textile production processes, explored in more detail later in this text. Thus the clothing creators, the consumers, the viewers, the colorizers, and the wearers associated with these early color fashion films were primarily women.
Female audiences were of particular interest to filmmakers because high fashion was perceived as a way to broaden audience reach and draw a better class of patron into the movie theater (Finamore 2013: 12). In the early twentieth century the performative aspects of fashion display put fashion reels in a category shared by George Meliès’ fantasy films and Pathé fairy films, travelogues to exotic places, and multi-reel narrative spectacles such as the seminal 1914 Kinemacolor film The World, The Flesh and The Devil many of which were colorized (Kinemacolor is discussed in more detail later). Fashion shows on film were an offshoot of popular burlesque or Vaudeville entertainment featuring the female body in motion, and did retain this connection to spectacle through what is called in film history parlance the “cinema of attractions” (Finamore 2013: 31). A phrase coined by Tom Gunning, the “cinema of attractions” refers to the continuation of Vaudeville and burlesque-inspired performance styles and stage presentation in early cinema (Gunning 2000: 162).
Annabelle and Her Serpentine Dance is an example of the type of film that one would view at the “cinema of attractions” and, importantly, it was shown at the very first presentation of projected film in 1896 when Thomas Alva Edison premiered his Vitascope in New York City. The film was one of two that were shown in color. Annabelle was a dancer who used new light technology in her stage performances to illuminate her voluminous, swirling ensembles in varied shades. To replicate her stage acts, the film strip for Annabelle and Her Serpentine Dance was colored by hand, frame by frame (Plate 9.1). It is believed that the wife of Edmund Kuhn, an Edison employee in Orange, New Jersey, colored the film (Yumibe 2013).
The great variety of techniques for colorizing film in the early part of the century attests to its prevalence as well as the desire on the part of filmmakers to accurately capture real life. There was much experimentation with tinting film, but four basic methods, some more successful than others, were commonly used. The methods included hand-coloring, stenciling, tinting, and toning. There was a very fluid relationship between photography and film in the early days of cinema and the most straightforward form of colorizing had its roots in the hand-coloring of glass slides, which were still part of the cinematic experience and shown alongside films well into the late 1910s. In hand-coloring, the film strips were lit from below on machines that would advance the film frame by frame. One color of an aniline dye would be spread over the frame with a tiny brush, the film would be rewound, and then another color applied. The process yielded quite beautiful results but was very labor-intensive and never fully organized on an industrial scale (Yumibe 2013). Innovative film pioneer George Meliès was a master at this method, and his Le Papillon Fantastique of 1909 shows the high quality range of color that could be achieved. As feature films became increasingly popular in the mid-1910s, hand-coloring became less feasible because it was too costly and slow.
Hand-coloring was gradually replaced with a more mechanical system in the form of stenciling, which was similar to the way wallpaper, pochoir fashion plates, and postcards were printed. Pochoir was a stenciling technique popular in France from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s that produced fine quality prints in limited editions (Plate 9.2). A series of hand-cut stencils were used to apply multiple colors and additional colors were often applied by hand. In film, there was a different stencil for each color, applied using a semi-automatic device similar to a sewing machine that would cut the stencils. The needle on this machine followed a stylus that traced the image on the film stock to create the stencil. The stencil would then be placed on top of the film strip and aniline dyes would be spread on the film. Three stencils for each frame could mix primary colors that could achieve an impressive range of twenty colors on one frame.
The similarities between film and textile technology are worth noting; not only did the stenciling process have a connection to the sewing machine, but the cellulose nitrate used in film stock has a base of cotton and, like textiles, was dyed with aniline dyes (Hanssen 2009: 108). As these processes, and materials, were so closely tied to the textile industry, women’s “sensitive and nimble fingers” were considered more attuned to the work, and colorizing was some of the earliest film production work available to women. In 1913 the French film company Pathé Frères made color a prominent feature of its business, employing between two and three hundred colorists at their Vincennes factory, many of whom were women who were referred to as the poules de chez Pathe (the hens of Pathé) (Yumibe 2013). Because this color process was more time-consuming, it was usually reserved for films for which over two hundred copies would be sold.
Tinting was the third technique for coloring film, a method by which color would be applied to the surface of the film without altering the physical structure of the emulsion. The entire picture would be uniformly washed with color, a strategy that was most useful for night or daytime scenes (e.g., blue for night, yellow for day) but did not allow for any defined detail. It was so popular that by 1926 Pathé was offering a choice of nine different raw film stocks suitable for tinting. A 1912 fashion reel in the Swedish Film Institute archives showing shoes from Paris’s Galeries Lafayette is a wonderful example of how the technique can be applied to good effect. The fifty-two-second film uses a different tint for each shoe, ranging from sepia tones to pale pink to shades of blue. While the colors probably did not correspond to the real colors of the shoes, the varied tints served to accentuate the differences between the styles, and played a very important role in communicating the fashion information.
An even more sophisticated range of color variation could be achieved with the fourth technique—toning. Toning was in extensive use by the 1910s, especially in connection with “artistic” films. In toning, a chemical color (e.g., iron or copper) replaced the silver in the film emulsion and dyed only the darker areas of the image, leaving the transparent parts white. The effect was that of an overall color wash, much like tinting, but a wider range of colors could be achieved. Tinted color stock could also be combined with toning for even more dramatic color effects.
Contemporaneously, there was technological experimentation that moved beyond simply coloring the actual film stock. A British scientist named Albert Smith invented the first camera that actually shot film in color using an innovative, and technically successful, technique called Kinemacolor. The film was shot through two colored filters at thirty-two frames per second—twice the normal speed for film in the silent era—and then projected through colored filters in the movie theater. Kinemacolor premiered in London in 1908 and by 1911 an improved product “created a sensation” and was described as the “motographic eighth wonder of the world … [bringing a] scene before millions with a wonderful realism and gorgeous blaze of color such as never before in the history of moving pictures had been witnessed upon the screen” (Talbot 1912: 296). Such hyperbolic language was typical in the early days of cinema because the technology and the magic of bringing still pictures to life still inspired awe, even sixteen years after its invention. No doubt, the color achieved was another reason for such flowery language. Looking at extant examples such as the fifteen-second 1913 clip of the famous American actress Lillian Russell singing demonstrates that the quality of the color, the realistic flesh tones, and the clarity of the film must have contributed to this remarkable sense of wonder.
Much like the Pathé color films that were reserved for special subjects and high distribution films, the Kinemacolor process was quite costly and the elevated price of the films resulted in its categorization as a high-class product. Such a classification excluded Kinemacolor from the lower-priced nickelodeons and the films were shown primarily in theaters, opera houses, and auditoriums. In keeping with its loftier ambitions, Kinemacolor produced films on topical subjects such as travel, as well as educational films that centered on subjects such as history and natural history. In 1913, the company also decided to add a “Fashion Gazette,” showcasing the latest in haute couture, to its usual lineup of short films. As it was an experimental and cutting-edge technology, it is not surprising that avant-garde fashion designer Paul Poiret chose Kinemacolor to document his current line (Figure 9.1). That Kinemacolor could capture the “savage” hues so important to Poiret’s Orientalist creations no doubt also played an important role in the designer’s interest in the technology. Indeed, another early colorized film in the British Film Institute collection, Costume Through the Ages, Remade by Couturier Pascault (Pathé Frères 1911), incorporated hand-coloring to make a point about the newly popular Fauvist colors that were sweeping the fashion world. The reel used a turntable display to show three-dimensional views of clothing from the past. The modern fashions, however, were shown on mannequins that walked in and out of the set. One of these garments, a Directoire style dress topped with a bird-of-paradise feather hat, was tinted in bright pink hues that were popularized by Poiret and other fashion designers (Finamore 2013: 78).
Figure 9.1 Advertisement for Paul Poiret’s Kinemacolor fashion films from “Poiret Fashions in Kinemacolor,” Moving Picture World, October 25, 1913, 309.
Poiret’s own Kinemacolor film premiered in 1913, and such was the marvel of its presentation that a New York Times journalist described the models drifting across the screen as “goddesses from the machine” (Finamore 2013: 74). The film magically brought the viewer into the garden of Poiret’s Paris couture house, where his models moved about in a dreamlike way, showing off gorgeous, beautifully crafted garments. Poiret’s goddesses appeared to be emerging from a netherworld, in colorful and exotic creations such as his jupe-culottes and “lampshade” tunics in “violent” Fauve colors. Given that Poiret took great pride in banishing what he called the “morbid mauves” of the fin-de-siècle from his color palette, color was of utmost importance in communicating his design sensibility. Although the film has not surfaced in archives, one detailed description in the newspaper offers information, with numerous reporters noting that Poiret himself stated that “no light or pastel tones will be admitted” (The New York Times 1913).
Kinemacolor was never turned into the commercially viable venture its originators hoped it would, partially because of the high cost of showing the movies, and it went out of business by 1915. Other experimental color processes developed included Prizmacolor, Chronochrome, the Handscheigel process, and Kelly Color. All of these processes eventually coalesced in Technicolor, which was in use as early as 1917, and importantly, for the theme of this volume, was used in a great number of longer narrative films with fashion show sequences. These include films such as Fig Leaves (1926), Irene (1926), The American Venus (1926), Stage Struck (1925) starring Gloria Swanson, Pretty Ladies (1925) with fashion shows/parades, The Fire Brigade (1926), Lady of the Night (1923), His Supreme Moment (1925), The Merry Widow (1925), and Beverly of Graustark (1926), among numerous others. Of the three hundred and eighty-five Technicolor films catalogued by the George Eastman House between 1917 and 1937 (Layton et al. 2015: 300–319), the costly Technicolor process was commonly used for fashion shows, spectacular costume scene inserts within the film, or for period costume dramas.
Among the seemingly innumerable fashion reels the author viewed at the British Film Institute and elsewhere, the visual effect of color in Lillian Russell’s above mentioned short was astonishing, set amid the period sets, costumes, and film techniques distinctive of such early film. A similar sense of surprise was evoked by the 1925 film Stage Struck starring Gloria Swanson at the George Eastman House archive in Rochester, New York. In contrast to the multitude of surviving black and white reels, this one opened with a startlingly bold Technicolor fashion show. While several copies of this film exist, only two complete examples with the Technicolor inserts are known to survive (Layton et al. 2015: 309). Such colorized fashion shows were almost always highlighted as a selling point in the promotion of the film and Stage Struck boasted “… the greatest display of gowns ever shown” in its advertising (Lewiston Evening Journal 1925: 9).
Stage Struck tells the story of a young waitress named Jennie Hagen who dreams of becoming a movie star, and the Rene Hubert-designed ensembles are strikingly theatrical, with the intertitle reading “Each new whim of attire [is] accepted by the world of elegance as fashion’s decree.” Her status as a fashion icon and toast-of-the-town is cemented when the movie cuts to a scene where zealous fans are tearing at her clothes. We learn that this is only a dream, and Jennie’s real life—in which she is a waitress working long hours for poor pay in a cheap restaurant—is in the more mundane black and white, which literally pales in comparison to her dramatic, colored dream sequence.
In her black and white world, when she tries to be fashionable, she simply cannot achieve the same heights of elegance, including scenes when Jennie tries to cut her boots into the more fashionable style, imitating a famous actress who has come to town. She also attempts to cut her straw hat into a cloche and starts plucking her eyebrows. When she goes to the town picnic with her new look completed with bobbed hair and makeup, her boyfriend Orme tells her, via the intertitles, she “looks like an accident waiting to happen,” shattering her dreams of being as alluring as the fashionable images she sees on the screen. In the end, Jennie returns to her less exciting, humble, yet ennobling (it is implied) existence. Now the owner of her own modest diner, she is shown flipping flapjacks in the final scenes. And yet, because the last scene is also shown in Technicolor, the viewer is left with beautiful images of Jennie’s life. This short, but effective, scene is quite striking, full of lovely colorful flowers and imbued with happiness. The color itself is used to make the final point—to confirm the practicality and reality of her choice—that beauty and color could also be found in a simple life, one with which the majority of film audiences could no doubt relate, or at least know they must settle for.
Technicolor was not universally employed in film until around 1949 with the development of a special negative stock that made it less costly to produce. Yet, even in the early days of cinema, the experimental color technologies such as Kinemacolor produced remarkably lifelike moving images and the color quality in Stage Struck stands out as exceptionally successful. Many other films no longer exist and the recovery of the original color of those which have survived is extremely difficult and costly, although a few film archives, including Cineteca Comunale di Bologna and the George Eastman House have been successful in restoring many of them to near their former glory.
The early color fashion films bear witness to a number of phenomena: the importance of using fashion to draw women viewers into the cinema, the continued blurring of the line between high class and lower class forms of entertainment, and the eventual erosion of the boundary between the fashion show and narrative film. All of these developments continued apace with the explosion of popular culture media as the twentieth century progressed. In the very early days of cinema, using color to emphasize fashion marked the dress itself as a protagonist in the story; it too had to perform the idea of color—indeed the actual color on the film was itself a construct. This fabricated reality shares a similar impulse to that of fashion, which helps wearers participate in fantasy. As fashion and costume scholar, the late Anne Hollander, wrote so succinctly: “Dressing is always picture making” (Hollander 1978: 311).
References
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