British cinematographer and photographer Jack Cardiff and “leading ladies” portraits at Pinewood Studios. (JP/jackcardiff.com)

Today the world of cinema is in a rapid revolution from film to digital processes for shooting, reproducing and screening movies. Can we still say, “I’m watching a film?” or “I saw a good film last weekend”?

Almost certainly you didn’t watch a film, but a digital image — even in the cinemas. The days of film projectors are more or less history now.

The moving image in all its forms is truly the art form of the 20th century. It was first seen by the fascinated French in 1895, when the Lumiere Brothers showed a short moving film which ran for just under a minute.

Its power to change the world has known no boundaries in the 117 years since then.

However, the cinema has gone through several revolutions of technical development, each thought by some people to be the end of the world as they knew it.

There was the introduction of sound in 1927 when Warner Bros released The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson and then nothing was ever the same again — well not until an affectionate remake of a silent film The Artist, won five Oscars including Best Film, in 2012. Its plot deals with the catastrophic affects of the coming of “the talkies” on a famous actor.

The next cinematic revolution was the introduction of color. But movie lovers who now take color movies for granted, might be surprised to know that color took quite a long time to catch on in Hollywood.

We rarely see a black and white film now — except when an auteur filmmaker chooses black and white for its suitability to the subject matter, such as Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon. Or we might catch a late-night film noir movie on TV.

There had been some laborious hand coloring in the early 1900s until the Technicolor company, founded by Herbert Kalmus and Daniel Comstock (graduates of Massachusetts Institute of Technology), first invented a two strip color process in 1928. The studios had adopted the new technology of “the talkies” quite rapidly, in comparison with the resistance that seemed to greet the coming of the color film process.

Two strip Technicolor was superseded by the much improved three strip process which was available from 1934.

In 1935, Rouben Mamoulian directed the first ever full-length feature film shot in three strip Technicolor, a costume epic, Becky Sharp and followed it in 1940 by his second Technicolor film, a drama, Blood and Sand.

Dramas were still mostly shot in black and white with Technicolor mainly used for musicals or Westerns.

Hollywood directors were heard to say surprising things:

“For a good dramatic story I much prefer to work in black and white; you’ll probably say I’m old fashioned, but black and white is real photography,” says John Ford.

“I’ve never seen a good, serious dramatic movie in color, except maybe Gone With the Wind. You can’t get drama and make people real in color,” says Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

Fritz Lang complained that he was unable to make a street look dirty while filming in Technicolor.

It took 10 years to break down the resistance.

 It was the coming of color television that finally tipped the color balance, making it the standard, with both the audiences and the studio moguls. In addition, by this time a color negative process had been developed.

Jack Cardiff (left) and another British cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth with a Technicolor camera. (JP/jackcardiff.com)The studios had another revenue stream option too — the films could be sold on to television (and further in the future, to VHS and DVD.)

This was ironic considering that widescreen was developed and used in Technicolor sword and sandal epics (Ben Hur, The Robe, El Cid) as a way of competing with the advent of television, which had audiences staying home in droves. At last the influence of television was working in their favor.

Notable early films made in Technicolor were The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), Gone With the Wind, (1938), The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Another problem was that the Technicolor camera was a totally new piece of complicated and cumbersome technology. It required a lot of study and practice to learn how to use it. It was more suited to shooting in a soundstage, because of its size and weight. However, in those days, almost all films were shot in a soundstage anyway.

The film stock it used had an extremely slow ASA speed of five, which was not able to capture images in low light situations and so a lot of very bright and heat inducing studio lighting was needed.

Taking this into consideration, we must pay homage to one of the all time masters of three strip Technicolor Cinematography, Jack Cardiff of the UK. He was the first man in his country to learn how to use this monster camera.

He was a painter and understood color well. In 1951, he even took it on location in Africa to shoot John Huston’s The African Queen with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. He had already gained his reputation as a master of Technicolor, using it to shoot The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, Under Capricorn, Pandora and the Flying Dutchman and other classics of cinema history.

In 1954, Joseph Pevney’s Foxfire was the last film made in the US with the three strip method.

When Technicolor was discontinued in the US and the UK, the equipment was sold to Chinese film studios. Its decline was because of financial and practical reasons, not because it had any failings as a color process.

The famous “look” of three strip Technicolor sends aficionados into raptures in their attempts to describe it, as compared to the color negative process we later became familiar with when Eastman-Kodak developed a color process which could be achieved on a single negative. The Technicolor company has kept up with change and still provides color negative film and digital services.

Scott Higgins wrote on the three strip process saying, “Watching a Technicolor film from the classical era is a perceptual luxury. We are impressed with the abundance of color and we sense that it has been carefully organized, shaped into compositions that feel complete, polished, and dramatically nuanced, compared to our contemporary experience of color, which is automatic, and all too often mundane.”

Once the use of “glorious Technicolor” was adopted in Hollywood, it reigned supreme from 1934 to 1954, and a new word entered the lexicon.

For more information watch Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff, directed by Craig McGill.