sophisticated, these distinctions held together the
narratives of countless films in diverse genres.
After tonality, the next thing we notice about
black-and-white films is their use of, and emphasis
on, texture and spatial depth within their images.
The cinematographer can change the texture of an
image by manipulating shadows and can control
the depth of the image by manipulating lighting
and lenses. The best-loved black-and-white movies
employ such visual effects to underscore and
enhance their stories. Looking at the work of cine-
matographer James Wong Howe on Alexander
Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957), for
example, we are immediately struck by how his
deft manipulation of tone, texture, and spatial
depth have captured the sleazy allure of New York
City’s once notorious Times Square, and how the
look of this movie is absolutely essential to its story
of urban menace, corruption, and decay.
Color Although almost all movies today are shot
in color, for nearly sixty years of cinema history
color was an option that required much more labor,
money, and artistic concession than black and
white did. Color movies made prior to 1960 were
typically elaborate productions, and the decisions
to use color were made with the expectation from
producers that the movies would justify the
expense with impressive box-office returns. To gain
a better understanding of the period prior to 1968,
when color was not necessarily the default choice,
let’s take a moment to review briefly the history of
color-film technology.
Although full-scale color production began only
in the late 1930s, it was possible to create color
images soon after the movies were invented, in 1895.
The first methods were known as additive color
systemsbecause they added color to black-and-
white film stock. These processes included hand-
coloring, stenciling, tinting, and toning, but because
they were so tedious, at first only selected frames
were colored. Nonetheless, impressive achieve-
ments were made by such pioneers as Thomas A.
Edison, Georges Méliès, Edwin S. Porter, and the
filmmakers at Pathé Frères.
Hand-coloring involved the use of dyes applied
directly by hand to the print to be projected, and
stenciling, by contrast, was a complex, machine-
driven process that enabled a film to use six different
colors. However, the most common techniques were
tinting and toning. Tinting consisted of dyeing the
base of the film so that the light areas appeared
in color; this technique provided shots or scenes
in which a single color set the time of day, distin-
guished exterior from interior shots, created an
emotional mood, or otherwise affected the viewer’s
perception. D. W. Griffith used this technique very
effectively in such films as Broken Blossoms(1919; cin-
ematographer: G. W. Bitzer), as did Robert Wiene in
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920; cinematographer:
Willy Hameister). Toning, a chemical process dis-
tinct from tinting, offered greater aesthetic and
emotional control over the image by coloring the
opaque parts of an image to a general color. Tinting
and toning were often used together to extend the
color of a single image.
As imaginative as these processes are, they do
not begin to accurately reproduce the range of col-
ors that exists in nature. Further experimentation
with additive color processing resulted in a crude
two-color additive process that used two comple-
mentary colors, usually red-orange and blue-green.
Kinemacolor, an early process, used persistence of
vision and a faster frame-per-second rate to simu-
late color in a lengthy documentary, With Our King
and Queen Through India(1912). In 1915, the Techni-
color Corporation introduced a similar two-color
additive process, used effectively in aesthetic terms
for the first time in Chester M. Franklin’s The Toll of
the Sea(1922; cinematographer: J. A. Ball), available
on DVD, and a good example of the progress made
to this point. This process was also used to photo-
graph Albert Parker’s impressive epic The Black
Pirate(1926; cinematographer: Henry Sharp).
By the early 1930s, the additive process—with
its technological difficulties and their economic
consequences—had given way to a two-color sub-
tractive color system, which was later refined to
a three-color subtractive process introduced in
1932 for cartoons and 1934 for live-action features.
The subsequent development of modern color cin-
ematography is based on this subtractive system.
How does it work in theory? Very basically, color
results from the physical action of different light234 CHAPTER 6 CINEMATOGRAPHY