1922 Kodachrome Motion Picture test video

Marco B

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Hi all,

Since there haven't been that many views, I wanted to point out to you all, that I have added a nice small video posted by Kodak on its KodaTube YouTube video channel to the APUG Video Section, showing the "birth" of motion (and in a sense still) color film: A 1922 film test with Kodachrome using silent movie actresses.

With the well chosen music Kodak added to this snippet of history, I find it a quite enthralling video to watch... just imagine, all of these women are likely way dead by now, yet their moving faces and changing expressions captured for us to enjoy after almost a century...

Here it is:

(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

By the way, how on earth did I become top-contributor in the Video Section of APUG :confused: I seem to remember multiple people asking for this functionality (I wasn't one of them), but now it is there since quite some time, only a few people like myself have added more than one video...

Aren't there more of you who know or find good YouTube videos to add??? Do add them! It is very easy using the "Load Information" button . Just copy the URL into the line, hit the button, and you're done.

Marco
 
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ndrs

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Is it the music or my current mood, but these people seemed like from a different world. And in a sense, they are. Thanks for sharing!
 

mike c

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Totally different from the black and white movies.Is that Mary Pickford? Thanks for the eye opener Marco
 

loman

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That was an amazing four minutes and thirty-three seconds . Thank you so much for sharing!
Kind Regards
Mads
 

Chazzy

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This is truly wonderful. It looks better than two-strip Technicolor. I wonder what the speed of this material was and why it wasn't used in the movies?
 

railwayman3

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Fascinating, thanks for posting.

What process would this be...bearing in mind that it was the mid-1930's before anything like the Kodachrome which we know was marketed to the public?

(Wasn't there an early amateur "Kodacolor" home movie system which used basically a B&W film, with rotating colored filters over the camera and projector lenses?)
 
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Marco B

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It says quite clearly "Kodachrome" and the video is an official Kodak production, so I think it is a fair assumption that this is true Kodachrome process film. However, development may simply have taken far longer for a viable commercial product.

I wouldn't be surprised PE has something to say about it, although I figure this is even before his time ... so the details may be a bit sketchy.
 
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Marco B

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Anyone know the music by the way? Love it!
 

bblhed

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Thanks for posting that was really cool, I was surprised that they didn't have a scene of her in the famous Kodak Blue and White striped dress.
 

jpberger

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From the page at
Dead Link Removed

"In these newly preserved tests, made in 1922 at the Paragon Studios in Fort Lee, New Jersey, actress Mae Murray appears almost translucent, her flesh a pale white that is reminiscent of perfectly sculpted marble, enhanced with touches of color to her lips, eyes, and hair. She is joined by actress Hope Hampton modeling costumes from The Light in the Dark (1922), which contained the first commercial use of Two-Color Kodachrome in a feature film. Ziegfeld Follies actress Mary Eaton and an unidentified woman and child also appear.

George Eastman House is the repository for many of the early tests made by the Eastman Kodak Company of their various motion picture film stocks and color processes. The Two-Color Kodachrome Process was an attempt to bring natural lifelike colors to the screen through the photochemical method in a subtractive color system. First tests on the Two-Color Kodachrome Process were begun in late 1914. Shot with a dual-lens camera, the process recorded filtered images on black/white negative stock, then made black/white separation positives. The final prints were actually produced by bleaching and tanning a double-coated duplicate negative (made from the positive separations), then dyeing the emulsion green/blue on one side and red on the other. Combined they created a rather ethereal palette of hues."
 

Nicholas Lindan

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Early Technicolor was also a 2-color process http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technicolor. The obsolete Polachrome color slide film was (TTBOMK, been a while since I played with the stuff) a recent red/green process.

What was called 'Kodachrome' when this film was made has nothing to do with the Kodachrome color process we know (knew) today.

Modern two-color processes occur when you run out of yellow ink in the printer.
 
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Marco B

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Nicholas Lindan said:
What was called 'Kodachrome' when this film was made has nothing to do with the Kodachrome color process we know (knew) today.
Click to expand...

This remark is slightly disputable. OK, we don't use a "two-color" film design for any of the modern color slide films, nor was the now defunct Kodachrome two-color.

But as I always understood it, the defining difference between Kodachrome and other slide films was not so much the design of the film in terms of layers, but the specific development process adding the dyes at development stage, rather than activating or converting already existing precursors of dyes (dye couplers) in the film layers as in a modern E-6 slide film.

Reading the comments that jpberger linked to in his post, does suggest, that this "Kodachrome" film test used a film based on this type of processing, hence the term "Kodachrome" is probably not unsuitable, and may already have been used at the time.

Marco
 

AgX

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Marco,

You are not right in both points...

-) Yes, the commonly known Kodachrome (the chromogenic one) used a special technique (adding coupling agents during processing), but it was not the only one that did so, there were several other films by several manufacturers that followed that principle.

-) the Kodachrome film stock that was tested in that film was a 2-colour separation. Out of memory I would say it used two differently sensitized films exposed simutaneously as a bi-pack. (It was not chromogenic at all.)
 
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Trask

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Oh, I loved that video. These women and the child, forgotten by nearly everyone, live again in color -- and what beautiful color, too. Really, a very charming film, and I too would like to know what music that was. Very evocative, reminding me somehow of the transitory nature of life.
 
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Marco B

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AgX, with my remarks, I wasn't suggesting at all that this film isn't vastly different from the now defunct Kodachrome, nor that there haven't been other products ever using a similar process, just that there may have been similarities in the processing that put it closer to a "Kodachrome", than E-6 type positive film.

And thus suggesting, that Kodak may have well called it "Kodachrome" at the time... The fact that the film is labelled "Kodachrome" by Kodak itself in the trailer to the film, does suggest that the archived film was labelled and stored as such.

So why not call it "Kodachrome" than? In this early stage of color photography, the names for not yet released color products, were probably completely fluid anyway.
 

AgX

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Marco, it is Kodachrome.

But it shares only the name with the chromogenic one, not at all its principle.
Kodak just re-used that name later. As they did with Kodacolor, which was a lenticular, additive colour film at first...
 

Nicholas Lindan

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AgX said:
It had a 3-colour regular screen employing the additive principle.
Click to expand...

You are right. My mind has an image of 2-color, but it was RGB - after being so used to CMY the absence of Y (and Polachrome's very muted color palate) made me remember it as an RB system.
 

perkeleellinen

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Marco B

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Thanks, seems you are right. This link may be more useful:

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It indeed appears a collection of "track" type music fragments, that can be used to play with video or on a website or something.

Well, seems to be confirmed here:

Dead Link Removed

Killer Tracks seems a production house for this kind of music.

Marco
 
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