Early Experiments in Color Film (1895-1935)

Hollywood didn’t start producing color feature films until the mid 1930s. (Becky Sharp, the first Technicolor film from 1935, appears in our collection of Free Movies Online.) But experiments with color filmmaking started long before that. Earlier this year, Kodak unearthed a test of Kodachrome color film from 1922 (above). But then you can travel back to 1912, when a filmmaker tested out a Chronochrome process on the beaches of Normandy. Or how about moving all the way back to 1895? Here we have footage from Thomas Edison’s hand-painted film Anabelle’s Dance, which was made for his Kinetoscope viewers. For more on the history of color film, visit here.

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Related Content:

How Technicolor Revolutionized Cinema with Surreal, Electric Colors & Changed How We See Our World

Color Film Was Designed to Take Pictures of White People, Not People of Color: The Unfortunate History of Racial Bias in Photography (1940-1990)

Tsarist Russia Comes to Life in Vivid Color Photographs Taken Circa 1905-1915


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  • Robert Regan says:

    Thank you for posting this. It is stunningly beautiful. I feel transported as I do watching Lumiere. I watch over and over. Thank you again. Does Kodak have a record of the people’s names?

  • Elli Davis says:

    I saw the one from 1895 before and it is pretty amazing work for those times. The one you’ve posted is exactly the one I have been searching for. I have been trying to look it up for some time now. It is much smoother-running than I’ve expected.

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