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The Three-Strip Technicolor Project

Analyzing the use of color in every feature film made using Three-Strip Technicolor, in order of release.

000: An Introduction

Updated: Mar 15, 2023

The Three-Strip Technicolor Project is my attempt to slowly develop my point of view on the ways in which filmmakers and studios of the classic era used color in the design and story of their films. I'm going to watch every feature film shot on full color Three-Strip Technicolor (also known as Technicolor Process IV), and I will be watching and then writing about them release order, beginning 1935 with Becky Sharp and (hopefully) ending in 1955 or 1956 with The Feminine Touch or Invitation to the Dance.


I like old movies and would consider myself a fairly well-informed and seasoned watcher of classic era films, but I am not an expert. This project is not really intended to engage in a scholarly dialogue with books like Scott Higgins's Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s, or with other online projects like Barbara Flueckinger's excellent Timeline of Historical Film Colors, though where I have come across relevant research, or when I decide to look for more secondary sources, I will quote from these and other works. While I'm not a film academic, I have taught classes on color, and I feel confident in my abilities to interpret and write about the use of color in these movies.


This also a work in and of process. I will try not to draw too many future conclusions about films I have or have not seen yet. As an experienced author on art history and design topics, my natural inclination is to try to find a comprehensive, well-reasoned framework which collides disparate works across time to speak to whatever themes I'm writing about at a given time. For this project however, I will be trying my best not to do this. Instead, I will try to treat each film only in the context of its contemporary reception and of those films which preceded it. Undoubtedly, I'll mistakes and find myself veering away from this goal, and in this sense I think this project is also a bit about humility, about trying to write a history and interpretation without trying to explain it all at once. Following Manny Farber, I will not be trying to write "an expensive hunk of well-regulated area," but instead embracing termite critique and feeling my way through this subject, one discrete chunk at a time. [1]



The Technicolor Process IV Camera (source: Technicolor, The Three Color Process, pamphlet, May 31, 1935)

Technical notes on Technicolor Process IV

Since this project focuses on the Three-Strip Technicolor process (also called Technicolor Process IV), it is worth explaining very briefly what it was and what distinguished it from preceding Technicolor processes. Put briefly, Process IV was the first widely-successful full color motion picture process. Photography was done using three separate strips of black and white film, run through a camera simultaneously and filtered or sensitized to different parts of the color spectrum. This created a separate negative for each of the tristimulus light primaries, red green, and blue. These negatives were then used, once the film was edited and ready to be printed, to create a set high-relief gelatin matrix films, which were used to physically stamp or transfer dye onto the final projection positive successively in yellow, magenta, and cyan, respectively. Speaking as someone who is deeply interested in color, this double process making use of both additive and subtractive primaries is at once brilliant and deeply fascinating.


Like Kodachrome (a near-contemporary process which also used dyes to create a transparent film positive), Technicolor Process IV has a distinctive look. Both processes feature richly saturated colors, which trigger a certain nostalgia for some of us, projecting a kind of vividness which does not fade, and which makes the past feel very much alive and present even as it inches ever further away from us. Kodachrome endures in part because of its dye process, which makes it much less prone to aging or chemical fading than other (subtractive) film processes like E-6. Technicolor prints are more prone to degradation, both because as motion picture film they received much more physical abuse in the process of projection, and because many were printed on nitrate film stock, which irreversibly decomposes with time. However, the three-color process is uniquely suited to preservation in the 21st century, since the original (black and white) camera negatives, if they still exist, can be digitally scanned, receive (digital-only) image clean-up and restoration, and then be colored, aligned, and mixed together to create a digital master more technically perfect than any original Technicolor print would have been. Unlike other digitized cultural artifacts, since Technicolor film and our computers share the same general RGB (Red, Green, and Blue) primary colors, there is little chance of losing color quality by attempting to reproduce colors which are not within the RGB gamut.


For more on both Three-Strip Technicolor and earlier two-strip processes (as well as a whole host of other fascinating color film processes) I suggest visiting Timeline of Historical Film Colors, or looking at these Technicolor-specific pages from the timeline:



[1] Manny Farber, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," Film Culture, no. 27, (Winter 1962-63), published in Helen Molesworth, ed., One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art / New York: Prestel, 2018), 242.

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Text © 2023 Michael Beggs

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