I Want My Technicolor
I just watched David Lean’s 1955 film Summertime with Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi. It’s a boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy loses girl story, but with complications. They are middle aged, the woman is a virgin and the man is married. It all takes place in Venice. Lean says it was his favorite of the films he made (which include Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, A Passage to India). Partly because of Venice, which Lean made his second home.
I first saw this on television when I was quite young. I don’t remember how young, but I do remember it made an impression on me. I saw it in a movie theater in New York back when they had revival houses. It was probably at the Regency on Broadway and 68th Street, one of the great old houses that showed classic films in double features with very high projection and sound quality. They often had brand new prints.
One of my favorite aspects of this film is that it is from the golden age of Technicolor, which was one of the earliest processes for color cinematography. There were several stages of development for Technicolor, using various processes of shooting and splitting the light into separate beams and filtering the film stock. Early processes required gluing multiple filmstrips together and running them through special projectors to merge the colors. All required special cameras with prisms and filters. The golden age was Technicolor 4, a three strip process that printed the film in a dye transfer process similar to lithography and the film could be run through any projector. The Wizard of Oz was a great example of Technicolor. Vincente Minelli, himself a painter, made great use of Technicolor in films like Meet Me In St Louis.
Other companies developed less expensive color processes and Technicolor fell out of favor. The newer processes aimed more for verisimilitude. But what I liked most about Technicolor was that it wasn’t naturalistic. It was painterly. The colors were oversaturated, but in a way that reminded me of Renaissance Italian Painting. The technology of cinematography has come a long way, but the artistry of Technicolor still pleases me more.
I wish someone would produce a digital video camera with sensors that could record in a way that simulates Technicolor.
The painting below Bal Masque by Tiepolo reminds me of Technicolor.
