Moving Picture World (July-Dec 1909)

THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD KINEMACOLOR First American Exhibition of Moving Pictures in Natural Colors. Madison Square Garden Concert Hall, New York, December 11, 1909. SPECIAL CRITICISM OF THE PROCESS. 873 When an ordinary non-scientific person views a photograph in natural colors for the first time, his admiration for the production is none the less keen and great because he is ignorant of the means by which the picture has been made. This applies to most things in this world. The majority of us are quite content to enjoy the good things around us, whether they be clothing, jewelry, furniture, decorations or the other things that minister to our enjoyment and comfort without inquiring too closely how and by what means the things were produced. It is the same with the ordinary photograph on paper. It is the same with the ordinary monchromatic picture in a moving picture house. Probably only two per cent, of the people who look upon these things know exactly how they are made ; not two per cent. care. The remaining 98 per cent, is content to accept the accomplished fact, with, of course, the qualifications that vary with the individual. This probably indicates the attitude of the general public towards this week's remarkable demonstration of moving pictures in natural colors, which Mr. Charles Urban and Mr. G. Albert Smith have presented to the American, or rather to the New York public for the first time, at Madison Square Garden. The great public have for years and years been asking for ordinary photographs in natural colors. They have had them ; they have got them — of a kind. So too, for the last ten or twelve years the great public has been saying to itself all over the world and often in our hearing, in great cities, "Oh! If we could only see these moving pictures in natural colors." Well, here they are in New York City this moment. Careful readers of The Moving Picture World, and by "careful readers" we mean the comparatively few who are interested in the underlying principles and the abstruse aspects of things, — those readers are sufficiently well aware that since January of this year we have subjected the Urban-Smith process, the Friese Greene process, and other processes for making good moving pictures in natural colors, to a searching analysis from scientific and practical points of view. The remarks we have felt it our duty to make are based upon a long study of the subject in most of its aspects, a great deal of observation— for we have been studying natural color photography for a good many years now — and, above all things, from a knowledge of the actual every-day requirements of the manufacturer, whose business in life it is to minister to the great public, about whom we started to write in the first paragraph of this article. So far, indeed, we have dealt very largely with matters of theory, always keeping in view the practical outcome. But now, after some years of waiting, the Urban-Smith results are before us. And they are to be judged by the ordinary test of those who, like ourselves, have made color the subject of much theoretical and practical study and, who, let it be said, know something about the actual producing end of matters. In other words, what it actually means to make a picture in natural colors. It was solely from this standpoint that we turned this week an absolutely open and unprejudiced mind and a tolerably well corrected eye upon the pictures shown at the two or three private demonstrations that Mr. Urban was kind enough to permit us to see. To begin with, let us say right out that — judging by the practical results we saw, and setting aside all questions of theory, the difficulty of production and other technical points with which we have no concern on the present occasion — the color records, for such they may be scientifically regarded, that we saw at these demonstrations are unquestionably the finest bits of color work that we have ever seen on the screen in stationary or moving picture work. And here let it be said, that we have in mind the Lumiere Autochrome, F. E. Ives, Lippman, Sanger Sheppard, Professor R. W. Wood, Bennetto, Gustave Selle, Friese Greene and others, all of world-wide reputation in the work of making photographs in natural colors. In critical estimates of this sort, of course the personal equation must necessarily weigh with the reader, and in the foregoing paragraph we have endeavored without, we hope, due egotism to assure the reader that the opinion we are passing on these pictures is based upon as diverse a knowledge of the subject as there is probably to be found in the world to-day. In other words, we have made the subject something of a specialty. In submitting this opinion upon what is bound to be a notable presentation in the history of the moving picture in the United States, we are conscious that we are taking a very serious responsibility both to ourselves and the readers of this paper and to the public at large. Nevertheless, fully conscious as we are of this responsibility, we have no hesitation in according these results our very heartiest commendation for their beauty, richness and fidelity of color — the fidelity being of course fairly assumed when a group . of individuals spontaneously admit the truth of a color rendering to the original. Above all, there is the splendid, the magnificent, the unexpectedly wide range of scale, which this process possesses in rendering not merely the dominant colors in all their richness and depth of beauty, but in the more delicate shades, nuances and gradations of color effect produced by the almost endless combination which the spectrum band is capable of. So what we desire to emphasize in this article is the fact that the Urban-Smith process is capable of actually recording the color tones, or to put it more shortly, the colors, of any ordinary original subject. To begin with we saw. more than once, groups of many-colored flowers such as the pansy, the rose, the fuchsia, the mimosa, the aster, etc., evidently chosen in order to bring out the elasticity of this method of recording color. Then, in the subject illustrating the Zoological Gardens in London — (the London equivalent of the New York Bronx Park) — the photographer who made the pictures seems to have chosen every possible opportunity for putting the process to the practical test of variety. For example, you had the particular liquid and can dc nil color of fresh water, such as you may see in a clear lake, satisfactorily shown to the eye. And then a few seconds later you came to the amazing blue and scarlet of the most gorgeous parrot (colorifically gorgeous, we mean) you could possibly imagine. Here you have contrast enough in all conscience. The delicate can dc nil of the water, the indescribably vivid coloring of the parrot, all done, as it were, by the same machine, on the same films and shown by the same revolving color filter through which the picture is projected. Then you bave neutral subjects, such as the earthy tint of the gentle elephant. Along comes a lady with