Chromatic Border Crossings: Technicolor in China

This guest post is written by Kirsty Sinclair Dootson, PhD Candidate Yale University in History of Art, Film and Media Studies. Kirsty visited the George Eastman Museum to conduct research using our collections, shares what she discovered and how it fits in to her broader research.

As an international PhD researcher in the USA, passing through American immigration is always a nerve-wracking experience. Your credentials must be scrutinized, your identity verified, and your travel history disclosed. But no question is as terrifying as the one inevitably posed each time a PhD student crosses the border: “and what is it, precisely, you’re researching?” I try to keep it simple. I say “Technicolor.”

In truth I’m completing a PhD in Art History and Film Studies at Yale examining the mass-production of color, which contends that through color’s industrial manufacture, it became a site for reflecting on the experience of modernity in the twentieth century. But that’s a bit of a mouthful. It’s easier to just say “Technicolor.” And in this regard, I’m lucky. While my colleagues might struggle to explain the intricacies of quattrocento sculptural aesthetics or untangle the ontology of digital cinema for a bewildered government official, for me, a single word is sufficient to evoke my objects of study, even to those with only a passing interest in cinema and its history.

Vivid, spectacular, gaudy and commercial, Technicolor embodies the kind of superficial razzle dazzle synonymous with Hollywood itself. Just one word is enough to conjure a kaleidoscopic palette, made from ruby slippers, emerald cities and yellow brick roads. Like Coca-Cola or Disney, Technicolor is a brand that operates as shorthand for American mass culture, popular taste and consumerism. In other words, it helps you pass through immigration.

Yet, it’s precisely because Technicolor is considered so quintessentially American, that I am fascinated by a particular moment in the company’s history in the 1970s, when it struck a deal with Mao Zedong and the People’s Republic of China. By this time the identity of Technicolor was in flux. The firm had already retired its fleet of three-strip cameras, (the hulking juggernauts required to shoot in Technicolor between 1935 and 1955), yet it continued to use the dye-imbibition (or IB) printing process that helped produce the saturated look so iconic of Technicolor as a brand.

In the early 1970s, IB printing still proved a cheap way to mass-produce release prints, but with ever decreasing cinema attendance and a related dip in print runs, Technicolor began looking for ways to economize. By 1975 the Hollywood laboratory closed its IB unit, and although the British and Italian labs continued to manufacture IB prints, these machines were operating on borrowed time. When a delegation from the Chinese government proposed to purchase the printing equipment from the London Technicolor lab in the early 1970s, it seemed like an ideal opportunity. At precisely the moment Technicolor was interested in shedding a system designed to manufacture large, color print runs, China was looking to buy one.

With the restricted number of films produced in China during the Cultural Revolution (as the industry was entirely limited to propaganda), and the enormous volume of prints required to distribute these propaganda films around the country, Technicolor’s IB process provided an economic solution to these problems. Although, the dye-imbibition unit at the Beijing Film Laboratory was not operational until 1978, that is, two years after the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, this purchase of Technicolor’s IB process by the PRC forces us rethink the equation of vibrant Technicolor aesthetics with American capitalism. We have to imagine how a technology so resolutely identified with American popular culture, could be instrumentalized for socialist propaganda. Moreover, in the 1990s, when the Hollywood branch of Technicolor decided they wanted to buy back the IB equipment to revive the process, what were the political and aesthetic considerations of executing this technological exchange in reverse?

These are some of the key questions for the collaborative project I’m currently working on with Zhaoyu Zhu, a PhD Candidate in Film Studies at King’s College London. While Zhaoyu is undertaking archival work in China, interviewing former laboratory staff and assessing technical documents, I am examining materials in the UK and USA to piece together a robust history of the sale and re-purchase of Technicolor’s IB process. I have previously visited the British Film Institute in London to listen to interviews with the British workers involved in installing the equipment in Beijing. But I was eager to visit the Technicolor archives held at the Eastman Museum to learn more about the American engineers who visited China in the 1990s with the intention of re-acquiring equipment for the Hollywood plant.

Among the more curious objects I encountered was a legal deposition given by Dr. Richard Goldberg (a leading figure for the nineties IB revival). During an investigation for an unrelated lawsuit, Goldberg is quizzed about the laboratory in Beijing and describes his visits there (under oath) in as much detail as possible to satisfy his interrogating officers. In addition to paperwork detailing the tests made by Goldberg’s team in China, the archives also hold three IB prints made at the Beijing laboratory, comprising two Chinese films from 1992: On a Profit of Ten Million (赚他一千万) (pictured above) and The Tragic Tale of Grassland (大漠恩仇) as well as one American picture, King Vidor’s western Duel in the Sun (1946). As is evident from the image above, these Chinese IB prints were just as jewel-like in color as any Minnelli musical or Selznick melodrama, and I’m looking forward to considering the political and ideological implications of this aesthetic further with Zhaoyu when we meet again in the UK this summer. I imagine it is precisely because we are two scholars who are perpetually moving between America, Britain, and China, that we’ve become so invested in how all this border crossing, this global migration of technology, people, and ideas, informed the history of color cinema.