Les Destructeurs de nos jardins [The Destroyers of Our Gardens]
(Pathé Frères, France 1916, 4 min. 27 sec., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Colorful, educational, and visually playful, Les Destructeurs de nos jardins [The Destroyers of Our Gardens] was first released in France in March 1916, and months later distributed in the United States under the considerably tamer title, The Caterpillar. Emblematic of Pathé Frères’ robust program of documentary shorts, Les Destructeurs uses macro photography to great effect, granting intimate access to the hidden world of caterpillar feeding habits: in up-close, textural detail, several species of the titular insect crawl and cavort atop mountainous leaf ridges and tree-trunk plant stems.
Crucial to the film’s charm is its stencil coloring, which renders the caterpillars and their leafy meals in gentle, painterly pastels. An industrialized improvement on the hand coloring of film, stencil color—branded Pathécolor by Pathé—was a complicated and multi-step process. First, stencils were made for each intended color, with the pertinent areas of every frame removed. This involved the use of a pantograph, which allowed the technician (usually a woman, due to cheaper labor costs) to cut each stencil frame by tracing the desired areas on a magnified image. After stripping the stencil of its emulsion to avoid potential scratching of the black and white print, the two elements were registered together precisely and advanced across a rotating velvet band carrying the acid color dye. After repeating these steps for each color stencil, a final Pathécolor print was produced.
Though laborious and demanding, stencil coloring could produce remarkably consistent results. Unlike hand coloring, which required each print be painted individually, numerous Pathécolor prints could be struck from one set of completed stencils. Additionally, while hand coloring films often led to uneven blobs of color, stencil-colored prints featured precise color alignment and sharp borders. Although Les Destructeurs de nos jardins may not be the most elaborate demonstration of the possibilities of Pathécolor, it shows one of a variety of subjects the stencil color process could bring vibrantly to life.
This original 1916 Pathé Exchange print of The Caterpillar comes from the George Eastman Museum collection. It is missing its opening titles and a small amount of footage at its head. Unsurprisingly for a print of its age, shrinkage is quite high (at 1.35%) and splices are frequent (18).
– Kirk McDowell
Examples of Color Cinematography Produced by the Kodachrome Process
(Jules Brulatour, Loyd A. Jones, US 1925–1926, 9 min. 22 sec., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
At its best, Eastman Kodak’s boutique two-color Kodachrome process was hauntingly beautiful, with delicate colors and near-perfect reproduction of white skin tones. It could have rivaled Technicolor in the 1920s, but Kodachrome was a missed opportunity, never achieving commercial perfection despite fifteen years of development. Mostly confined to the laboratory where engineers could endlessly tweak the printing, very few two-color Kodachrome films reached the public. Only eight shorts and one insert in a feature received notable distribution between 1922 and 1927.
The Eastman Museum has a sizable collection of two-color Kodachrome reels, which were acquired around the time of the museum’s founding over seventy-five years ago. This compilation of prints made in 1925 and 1926 highlights the strengths of the process with scenes of sumptuous clothing and fabrics, life-like shots of fruit, advertising setups, and abstract kaleidoscopic views. Prominently featured are shots of actress/model Hope Hampton, showcasing the latest French fashions from designers including the House of Worth, Lanvin, and Jean Magnin. These scenes were originally featured in the 1926 shorts Parisian Modes in Colour and Colorful Fashions from Paris, both of which were photographed in Kodak’s color film studio at the Eastman School of Dance and distributed across the US by Educational Pictures as part of the McCall’s Color Fashion News series.
Two-color Kodachrome was a subtractive color process, capturing red and green records through two lenses on one strip of black and white film. These records were then printed onto a film with emulsions on both sides. Because only two color records were created, the process could not reproduce the full range of the color spectrum. This reel is notable because it contains footage where the component colors were tweaked or substituted to create custom results or contrasting color effects. For example, the shots of grapefruit use orange and green dyes on the print instead of the customary red and green, while the kaleidoscope images experiment with combinations of purple and green, and purple and blue.
This original print has seldom been screened since the 1920s. However, its 35 splices and high shrinkage (up to 1.3%) required meticulous prep work to make it projectable.
– James Layton
Married in Hollywood
(Marcel Silver, US 1929, 12 min., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
With the advent of sound, Hollywood finally had the ability to produce the one genre silent films could not: musicals. The Fox Film Corporation, with its pioneering Movietone sound-on-film system, began musical production in 1929. Married in Hollywood featured music by popular composer Oscar Straus and starred Broadway headliners J. Harold Murray and Norma Terris, who were signed by Fox after their 1927 stage successes in Rio Rita and Show Boat, respectively. Directed by Marcel Silver, a filmmaker from the French avant-garde brought to America by William Fox, Married in Hollywood is a Ruritanian musical romance about a showgirl and a prince who wind up in the movies. Originally conceived as a $2 roadshow attraction, it was eventually released as a program picture. While it did well in big cities, the film fared poorly in smaller towns where audiences were unfamiliar with the two leads from the New York stage.
Like many musicals from 1929 and 1930, Married in Hollywood added box-office value with a color sequence. The finale was photographed in Multicolor, a subtractive two-color process that ran two black-and-white negatives through the camera with their emulsions pressed together. Dyed an orange-red, an orthochromatic negative would capture blue values while allowing reds to pass onto the more sensitive panchromatic camera film. The negatives were then printed onto a double-sided stock and each toned either red or blue. The lack of the full spectrum is readily apparent. Flesh tones reproduced somewhat accurately, but overall, colors tended to pastel shades, and the lack of a green record caused foliage to appear a murky gray.
It is highly unusual for only the color portion of an early musical to survive, but this is exactly the case here. The original negative and prints were lost in the disastrous 1937 Fox Film vault fire in Little Ferry, NJ, along with over 40,000 reels of other prints and negatives—nearly all then extant films Fox made prior to 1932. Miraculously, the Multicolor reel is still with us.
This original 1929 print on double emulsion Kodak stock has 11 splices and a steady shrinkage range of 1.0%–1.15%. It runs smoothly, however severe buckling makes it extremely difficult to maintain focus. One can still appreciate the Multicolor palette, and we are lucky that a sample of this short-lived process is projectable.
– Anthony L’Abbate
Unusual Occupations
(Jerry Fairbanks, US 1944–1946, 11 min., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Jerry Fairbanks was a Hollywood Renaissance man. Among the myriad roles he laid claim to over his decades-long career were: aerial cinematographer, innovator of the multi-camera setup for television, industrial film producer for the likes of Standard Oil and Heinz ketchup, and the first filmmaker to direct James Dean (in his famous Pepsi-Cola ad). Given this remarkable range in Fairbanks’ professional life, it is perhaps no surprise that he also produced a series titled Unusual Occupations.
Following previous cinematic oddity explorations like Warner Bros.’ Believe It or Not (1930–1932), Universal’s Strange as It Seems (1930–1934), and certain installments of E. M. Newman’s travelogues (1931–1938), Unusual Occupations exploited a booming contemporary interest in the offbeat and eccentric. Turning its eye specifically toward the surprising professions and hobbies of otherwise ordinary people, the series—produced by Fairbanks’ Scientific Films Inc., and with able narration by sportscaster Ken Carpenter—featured everything from artillery testers to underwear collectors. While the series’ two 1936 pilots were shot in Cinecolor, the production soon switched to Magnacolor, a similar two-color subtractive system that had likewise found a place in the film production market as a cheaper alternative to Technicolor. Using bipack camera film to obtain two color records, prints were struck on double emulsion-coated (“duplitized”) film with one side toned blue and the other red-orange. The resulting color image is pleasing, if not entirely natural.
Unusual Occupations endured for more than ten years, profiling nearly 500 individuals from the US and abroad, and it served as a fascinating window into the professional and leisure lives of average folks. While Fairbanks moved on to initiate successful endeavors in the world of industrial filmmaking and the burgeoning television industry, his work on Unusual Occupations stands on its own as a lighthearted tribute to all of our individual, idiosyncratic interests.
This print was donated to the George Eastman Museum in 2024 by the Mahoning Drive-In Theater and combines segments from multiple episodes of the series from 1944–1946. Although the change in stocks between each segment has made maintaining focus difficult, the element is in otherwise fine projectable condition, with 21 splices and a shrinkage range of 0.5%–1.05%.
– Kirk McDowell
Colour Flight
(Len Lye, UK 1938, 4 min. 43 sec., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Born in New Zealand, Len Lye spent his formative years in the South Seas, captivated by the art of Māori, Samoan, and Aboriginal cultures. Throughout his artistic career, Lye would incorporate these influences in his drawing, painting, sculpture, writing, and filmmaking.
In 1926, Lye immigrated to England, where, as a member of the Film Society of London, he saw important modernist films. With Film Society funding, he spent two years making his first cel animation film, Tusalava (1929). Encouraged by the experience, Lye pursued filmmaking as an artform, which he hoped would reach a broad audience while providing a regular income.
In 1935 Lye began experimenting with the cameraless technique, later known as “direct animation,” in which ink and paint are applied directly onto film. The process showcased his exceptional skill at implementing designs on tiny 35mm surfaces which, when projected, resulted in eye-popping explosions of colors and patterns. Lye was hired by the UK General Post Office to make Colour Box (1935), his first commission in the direct animation style. While not all British moviegoers appreciated the abundance of flashing colors, the film established Lye’s name as an animator, and further commercial opportunities followed.
Imperial Airways, a forerunner of British Airways, approached Lye to promote the airline using his direct animation style. In Colour Flight, stenciled images of the airline’s Speedbird logo acrobatically careen around dense patterns of hand-applied lines, colors, and shapes which evoke the sky, while text informs viewers that Imperial Airways connects the far-reaching British Empire through its mail service. The rich color saturation is the result of printing on Gasparcolor 35mm film stock, with which Lye achieved excellent results in the GPO-sponsored Rainbow Dance (1936, shown at the 2022 NPS). Introduced in Germany in 1933, Gasparcolor was developed by Béla Gaspar with the assistance of Oskar Fischinger, the innovative artist and animator who helped ensure that the three-color dye system would be well-suited for animation.
This 35mm Gasparcolor print on 1939 Eastman Kodak stock comes from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. It has a shrinkage factor ranging from 0.95% to 1.05% and some fair to moderate curl. Minor repairs and reinforcements were needed in the perforation areas.
– Gordon Nelson
Animation in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s
Prints source: Národní filmový archiv, Prague
Veselý koncert [A Cheerful Concert] (35mm Nitrate)
(Irena Dodalová, Karel Dodal, Czechoslovakia 1935, 4 min., 35mm nitrate
Všechno pro trhanec [Alles um einen Schmarren, Everything for a Scrambled Pancake!] (35mm Nitrate)
(Irena Dodalová, Karel Dodal, Czechoslovakia 1937, 5 min., 35mm nitrate)
Důležité 2 minuty [2 Minuten von Bedeutung, The Crucial Two Minutes] (35mm Nitrate)
(Hans Fischerkoesen, Czechoslovakia/Germany 1938, 4 min., 35mm nitrate)
Much of Czech animation’s due acclaim has centered on mid- to late-twentieth century filmmakers. Earlier, however, there were the Dodals, an innovative animation team which produced commercial and experimental cartoons during Czechoslovakia’s pre-war years.
In 1932, Karel Dodal and Irena Leschernová met and became a couple—romantically and professionally. Between Karel’s filmmaking experience as an art director and animator and Irena’s business knowledge, they had the essential skills of an animation studio, and in 1933 they launched IRE-Film. With Karel’s ex-wife Hermína Týrlová animating, IRE-Film began producing ads for Czech businesses, each inflected with their own developing style. As Prague’s sole animation studio, IRE-Film depended on international models for inspiration; the influences of Disney and the Fleischers are plainly seen in Veselý koncert (A Cheerful Concert), which promotes Telefunken radios while a loose-limbed cartoon orchestra struggles to play amid the wildlife of the summer outdoors.
Všechno pro trhanec (Alles um einen Schmarren, Everything for a Scrambled Pancake!), an ad for Vitello margarine, animates a recipe with anthropomorphic ingredients. Gasparcolor, introduced to the Dodals by experimental animator Oskar Fischinger, is briefly on display. Though Gasparcolor added a new dimension to IRE-Film’s already vibrant animation, the complicated—and expensive—color process brought with it a host of challenges. Because the process required repeated exposures, the workflow had to be altered to allow three color records to be made for each frame. It is easy to see why color was often reserved for a film’s final shot.
The Dodals continued to improve the quality of their ads, but international competition occasionally disrupted potential commissions. After learning of the intended production and importation of a German-produced ad for Kalodont toothpaste, IRE-Film unsuccessfully petitioned the Film Advisory Board to let them produce the film domestically. The film—Důležité 2 minuty (2 Minuten von Bedeutung, The Crucial Two Minutes)—was ultimately made by the German animator Hans Fischerkoesen.
All three prints had perforation damage and significant curl, but relatively few splices and low shrinkage (0.85%, 1%, and 0.65%, respectively). Everything for a Scrambled Pancake! is on the uncommon Selo stock, which was often used in Gasparcolor.
– Kirk McDowell
Spook Sport
(Mary Ellen Bute, US 1939, 8 min. 38 sec., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: Library of Congress, Culpeper, VA
Spook Sport, Mary Ellen Bute’s seventh film, and her second using the two-color Cinecolor process, demonstrates another leap forward for this trailblazing experimental animator. Following the encouraging reception of her previous color film, Synchromy No. 4: Escape (US 1937–1938, shown at the 2023 NPS), Bute’s work on Spook Sport began in New York City in 1939 as a series of supernatural character designs that included bats and spirits floating against a night sky.
With her otherworldly concept still forming, Bute met 25-year-old emerging Scottish filmmaker Norman McLaren, who had recently moved to New York after being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship grant. McLaren had distinguished himself with his work for the UK General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, where he directed two shorts and assisted on several other productions made between 1936 and 1939. Bute recognized McLaren’s talent and hired him to help bring her Spook Sport characters to life. McLaren suggested that he render Bute’s designs using direct animation, a cameraless technique where inks and paints are applied directly to the surface of the film stock. McLaren had used the technique in his student days and had admired recent films made by his GPO colleague Len Lye, a master of the direct animation style.
McLaren delivered a virtuoso direct animation ballet featuring Bute’s cast of ghostly shapes as they gambol in sync to the famous symphonic work Danse macabre by Camille Saint-Saëns. Bute, with the assistance of Ted Nemeth, her producer and soon-to-be husband, merged McLaren’s hand-painted elements with graveyard and cloud image layers to create an impressive hybrid of direct and cel animation styles.
For both Bute and McLaren, Spook Sport stands out as a significant work in their filmographies, and they would remain lifelong friends. Bute would go on to produce eight more abstract animated short films over the next twenty years before switching to narrative filmmaking. McLaren left New York in 1941 to establish and lead the animation unit of the National Film Board of Canada, where he would have one of the most innovative and influential careers in the history of film animation.
This original release 35mm Cinecolor print comes from the Library of Congress’s AFI/Guggenheim Museum Collection. It has only four splices and a stable shrinkage range of 0.4%–0.45%, the lowest we ever encountered at the NPS.
– Gordon Nelson
Florida, Land of Flowers
(US 1940, 9 min., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
From the 1920s through the 1960s, going to the movies meant seeing more than just a feature film. Newsreels, cartoons, comedies, and travelogues were all part of the regular moviegoing experience. Of all these short-subject genres, none benefited more from natural-color cinematography than the travelogue. By the mid-1930s, MGM’s James A. Fitzpatrick’s Traveltalks (1931–1954) had become the most popular series, due in large part to its early adoption of three-color Technicolor in 1934. Traveltalks’ closest rival was Magic Carpet of Movietone, which the Fox Film Corporation had begun producing in 1931. Originally a weekly release, by 1934 the series was reduced to one a month.
In 1938, Fox, which had by then merged with Twentieth Century Pictures to become 20th Century Fox, contracted popular radio commentator Lowell Thomas to narrate Magic Carpet of Movietone as well as Movietone News, which he had been doing since 1932. Thomas had gained international fame after WWI through a series of lecture-film shows about T. E. Lawrence. During the 1920s he worked as a magazine editor and by the end of the decade he was heard regularly over the radio. Thomas’s commanding voice was well known to the American public, and his narration of the Magic Carpet of Movietone films lent the series added prestige. While some of these shorts featured tinting and toning, most were released in black and white. Beginning in 1940, however, four of each season’s six releases would be photographed in Technicolor. 20th Century Fox could now seriously rival Fitzpatrick’s Traveltalks in terms of audience appeal.
Released in mid-September 1940, Florida, Land of Flowers would be the first Technicolor Magic Carpet of Movietone to hit the screen. The location was a natural for the color camera, and the film showcases Miami Beach, St. Augustine, the Bok Garden Singing Tower, and Marineland. The famous flowers of the title make their appearance in the last couple of minutes of the film. While very pretty to look at, the film does feature the genre’s typical white male point-of-view narration that can strike modern audiences as naïve, pretentious, and condescending.
This original print with gorgeous colors has a fairly low shrinkage of 0.65%–0.75%. Its main challenge is small cracks in nearly all inboard perforations.
– Anthony L’Abbate
Er was eens - een moderne sprokje
(Netherlands 1949, 3 min. 43 sec., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
In the late 1940s, while Europe was still recovering from World War II and almost no film industry existed in the Netherlands, Dutch producer Joop Geesink was successfully building an international client base for his stop-motion “puppet films.” A few years earlier, in 1943, when Geesink worked in hand-drawn animation, he had met Sies Numann, publicity director for the Philips corporation. Numann suggested using puppets, and Geesink took this advice to heart; he even changed the name of his animation studio to “Dollywood.” Over the next two decades, the studio rapidly grew. Dollywood specialized in commercials intended for cinemas and television, with nearly seventy percent of the studio’s productions made for foreign markets, of which the UK, Germany, Italy, and the US were the biggest. Philips remained Geesink’s most important client, but he also produced commercials for Campari, Coca-Cola, Maggi, Players, Otto Versand, and Mackeson beer, among many others. The rise of television, especially in the US, was crucial for Geesink’s success. Many Dollywood ads for brands such as Alka-Seltzer, Ballantine beer, Beech-Nut chewing gum, and Heinz were broadcast on American television.
Once Upon a Time – A Modern Fairy Tale, an advertisement produced in 1949, represents Dollywood’s early period, and the creation of Dutch, English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese versions of the film testifies to the studio’s already international clientele. The use of Technicolor suggests also that this was an important commission for the studio; at the time, many Geesink advertisements were still produced in less-expensive black and white. The Dutch version promotes a popular birch water hair tonic manufactured by Dralle, a German producer of soap, fragrances, and cosmetics with offices across Europe, including the Netherlands. In 2018, Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam added fourteen nitrate prints of Once Upon a Time to the collection of over 3,000 Geesink advertising films received in 1972 after the studio’s bankruptcy. Many of these films are now available for streaming on the Filmmuseum’s Eye Film Player.
With no splices or visible scratches, and a shrinkage range of 0.8%–0.85%, this is one of the best-conserved prints ever projected at NPS.
- Leenke Ripmeester
Three Little Pigs
(Burt Gillett, US 1933, 8 min., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Rhapsody Rabbit
(Friz Freleng, US 1946, 7 min., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: Library of Congress, Culpeper, VA
Following the rousing success of the first three-strip Technicolor short (and 2023 Nitrate Picture Show selection) Flowers and Trees (1932), Walt Disney Productions signed a six-film agreement to extend its relationship with Technicolor. Among the cartoons that followed was a landmark for both companies: Three Little Pigs. Like Flowers and Trees, Three Little Pigs showcased Technicolor IV’s wide chromatic range with subtlety, reserving strong hues for spotlighting significant elements (the third pig’s blue overalls, the wolf’s red pants) against a largely pastel palette. Though not an immediate success, the film gained momentum during the worst period of the Great Depression, thanks in no small part to the radio success of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf,” the short’s original song. Eventually the skyrocketing popularity was so great that foreign-language prints had to be screened in the US in lieu of scarcer domestic copies.
By the 1940s, Technicolor was more common in animation and the use of color was bolder and brasher. At Warner Bros., there was an open line of communication between staff layout artists and Technicolor laboratory technicians to verify that the colors on film matched the painted elements. Characteristic of this level of proficiency is the dense, gag-laden Bugs Bunny short Rhapsody Rabbit, a chamber piece of cartoon tomfoolery in which pianist Bugs brawls physically and musically with a piano-dwelling mouse. Though well-received, Rhapsody Rabbit was soon overshadowed by another film, MGM’s The Cat Concerto (1947), which bore a striking resemblance in premise, music, and gag construction. According to animator Tex Avery, Technicolor accidentally delivered Rhapsody Rabbit footage to MGM near the end of the film’s production, which may have spurred MGM to rush production on The Cat Concerto. When both shorts were screened for Academy members in early 1947, MGM’s film preceded Warners’, leading to allegations of plagiarism and perhaps guaranteeing the Oscar for The Cat Concerto.
This French-language print of Three Little Pigs is on 1935 Kodak stock, while Rhapsody Rabbit is an original release print from 1946. Although the shrinkage level of both films is quite manageable (0.65% and 0.45%, respectively), each has a large amount of splices and perforation damage, all of which had to be reinforced and repaired before projection.
– Kirk McDowell