The Demise of Kinemacolor: Technological, Legal, Economic, and Aesthetic Problems in Early Color Cinema History

Abstract

Film historians generally agree that Kinemacolor was a significant development in the early history of color motion pictures, but they disagree about why its success was so short-lived. American and British film historians Terry Ramsaye, Rachael Low, Adrian Cornwell-Clyne, and D. B. Thomas all characterize Kinemacolor as the first successful photographic color motion picture process. But they offer slightly different explanations for the limited duration of its success. Ramsaye's portrayal of Kinemacolor focuses upon Charles Urban, the American impresario who promoted Kinemacolor throughout the world, and he suggests that the source of Urban's difficulties was the Motion Picture Patents Company, whose disinterest in Kinemacolor prevented him from deeply penetrating American markets.1 Low examines Kinemacolor's legal problems in Great Britain and argues that the loss of George Albert Smith's original 1906 patent in 1914 forced Urban to initiate the liquidation of Kinemacolor's assets.2 Cornwell-Clyne concentrates upon the technical deficiencies of early additive color processes, including Kinemacolor, and argues that they were all destined to fail because they were technologically inadequate and perceptually disconcerting.3 To the technological and legal problems that Kinemacolor encountered in the mid 1910s, D. B. Thomas adds economic and aesthetic problems of supply and demand. He points out that over 70 percent of all British Kinemacolor footage available in 1914 was nonfiction, i.e., newsreel and travel films, and therefore deficient in popular dramatic films, and that there were too few Kinemacolor films overall to offer a high quality, varied, twice weekly change of program to film exhibitors.4 The evidence I have gathered from exhibitor trade papers and other sources indicates that each of these explanations is at least partially valid. Kinemacolor's demise can be attributed to several sets of negative factors: technological, legal, economic, and aesthetic. The deaths of the Natural Color Kinematograph Company, Ltd., in Great Britain and Kinemacolor of America (separate but related companies) in 1914 were undoubtedly hastened by the conjunction of technical and economic problems inherent in Kinemacolor production and exhibition, the loss of Smith's British patent, the rising popularity of dra

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