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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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.