Charles Urban and the Early Non-Fiction Film in Great Britain and America, 1897-1925

‘Something More than a Mere Picture Show’ Charles Urban and the Early Non-Fiction Film in Great Britain and America, 1897-1925 Submitted by Luke McKernan to Birkbeck College, University of London as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film Studies, June 2003 ‘Something More than a Mere Picture Show’ 3. The Eighth Wonder of the World And what shall be said of ‘Kinemacolor’, the eighth wonder of the world? At the outset it was regarded with mistrust and mentioned with dubiousness – just as Daguerre’s first sun-pictures were; just as John Hollingshead’s first searchlight from the roof of the Gaiety Theatre was in ’69; aye, just as the Lords of the Admiralty of Queen Victoria’s girlhood once solemnly reported that steam power could never be of any service in her Majesty’s Navy … The history of its development would read like a page of romance, of seemingly insurmountable problems finally solved …1 While Urban had been building up his career as a producer of documentary and educational films, he had also been nurturing a strong interest in the possibility of natural colour cinematography,2 leading to what became the world’s first successful such system, Kinemacolor. The period 1908-1913, when Kinemacolor flourished, was to see Urban become a public figure of note. Kinemacolor lay at the core of everything Urban wanted to achieve. The Age of Colours In 1909, in an essay surveying the history and philosophy of colour printing, Charles T. Kock declared, ‘This is the age of colours; it is colour everywhere’.3 The inference was that it would be within the memory of the writer, or his audience, when it was not an age of colours. This is not to say, of course, that those of the mid-nineteenth century lived their lives in monochrome, but it was undoubtedly from around 1870 that manufactured colour in the form of illustrations, advertisements, popular prints, posters, magic lantern slides, wallpaper designs and artificial dyes began to make its particular mark on people’s lives in Western society. 1 ‘Junius Junior’, ‘Mayfair Gallery: Men of the Day no. 163 – Mr Charles Urban’, Mayfair, 14 August 1912, p. 996. 2 ‘Natural’ here means images as a photo-chemical record of light, as opposed to ‘artificial’ means of adding colour to film such as hand painting, stencil colour or tinting and toning. 3 Chas. T. Kock, ‘Colour Printing: A Treatise on the Possibilities, History, Philosophy and Technic of the Art’, Penrose’s Pictorial Annual: The Process Year Book - A Review of the Graphic Arts Vol. XIV, 1908-9, p. 100. 122 Chapter 3 – The Eighth Wonder of the World The emergence of colour reproduction in Europe and America can be traced along a number of routes. Particularly significant was the invention of lithography by the Austrian Alois Senefelder in 1796, a means of producing prints from limestone or a metallic plate using a greasy ink. Senefelder experimented with producing colour prints, but it was not until 1837 that the term ‘chromolithographie’ was named in a French patent, and the first chromolithographs were produced in Britain in 1839 and in the United States the following year.4 Chromolithography proved to be a popular and democratising force that brought colour and culture into millions of homes in the form of reproductions of oil paintings between the period 1840-1900. In the words of Peter C. Marzio, ‘At the peak of America’s Victorian age, the mass-produced color lithograph waved unchallenged as the flag of popular culture … Chromolithography was a technical accomplishment with a vibrant social presence’, a phrase that could serve as a fine description for Kinemacolor in its time.5 Such mass-production of ‘high’ culture inevitably brought about a reaction, particularly in response to some of the more garish reproductions that cheaper processes created. Chromolithographs seemed to be emblematic of a dilution of culture through mechanical reproduction, and the snobbish term ‘chromo- civilization’ arose to describe the supposedly meretricious tastes exposed by mass culture. Louis Prang, the most noted and most vocal of American chromolithographers, protested that, ‘the business of this age is to make the products of civilization cheap … what the people want and admire are not the dry bones or the syntax of art, but life pictures, full of the bloom and brilliancy of nature, to brighten their homes and make their own existence more pleasant’, but E.L. Godkin, editor of the elitist journal The Nation responded that ‘the confusion of ideas which assumes that “what the people want and admire” is the same thing as “what the people need and ought to admire” is 4 Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: Chromolithography 1840-1900 – Pictures for a 19th- Century America (Boston: David R. Godine, 1979), p. 6. 5 Marzio, The Democratic Art, p. xi. 123 ‘Something More than a Mere Picture Show’ strange to see’. Chromolithography for Godkin represented a ‘pseudo-culture’ which, taken with other popular media such as newspapers, magazines and lyceum lectures, ‘diffused through the community a kind of smattering of all sorts of knowledge, a taste for “art” – that is, a desire to see and own pictures – which … pass with a large body of slenderly-equipped persons as “culture”, and give them unprecedented self-confidence in dealing with all the problems of life, and raise them in their own minds to a plane on which they see nothing higher, greater or better than themselves’.6 The arguments put forward by Godkin and others were two-fold: that the colours were inherently, and often palpably, inferior to those displayed in the original works; and that a colour work produced mechanically rather than by the hand of the artist was, by definition, a diminution and cheapening of the original. The counter-argument was democratic in sentiment but driven by commercialism. This did not simply mean in terms of the number of units that could be produced. Colour itself was the attraction. The Lithographer’s Journal assessed the effect of the chromolithograph on American popular taste by stating: …within a few decades, public taste has been lifted out of the sluggish disregard for the beautiful … and now seeks to adopt the decorative accessories, which beneficent enterprise has so cheapened as to place them within the reach of all, to the ornamentation of its homes … [T]he depressing monotony of plain walls are [sic] now relieved by bright touches of color … awakening in some degree, however faint, the innate love of beauty which marks the scale of aspiration in the human soul.7 There are, however, two kinds of colour reproductions to be considered here. There is the colour picture in the purely naturalistic sense, which offers an approximately faithful record of nature (or, as was more accurately the case with chromolithographs, a faithful record of a work of art that reproduced 6 Neil Harris, ‘Color and Media: Some Comparisons and Speculations’, in Cultural Excursions, pp. 320-321; Marzio, The Democratic Art, pp. 1-2. 7 ‘Art-Lithography of the United States’, Lithographer’s Journal, September 1893, p. 52, quoted in Marzio, The Democratic Art, p. 5. 124 Chapter 3 – The Eighth Wonder of the World nature), and there is the colour picture where colour itself, to whatever form or degree, is the attraction in itself. These two forms were not mutually exclusive. The attraction, the desirable commodity, was colour. It was seen as something additional to that which had gone before, an enhancement which could denote beauty, superiority, social status or commercial value, according to usage. Colour was truer, better, brighter; colour drew attention to itself. This twin appeal of colour as natural and colour as the subject in itself was central to the exploitation of Kinemacolor. Tom Gunning sets out colour’s ‘contradictory role’ in cinema by stating that on one hand ‘there is the claim, made most explicitly by Bazin’s essay “The Myth of Total Cinema”, that color plays an essential part in the fulfilling of the ideal of cinema’s first inventors, “the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color and relief”’, while on the other, ‘color can also appear in cinema with little reference to reality, as a purely sensuous presence, an element which can even indicate a divergence from reality’.8 The evidence of chromolithography, Kinemacolor, and other media from this period, however, indicates a more complex situation, a desire for reality and super-reality at the same time, which was to a significant extent created by the very limitations of the technical processes that enabled such colours to be reproduced. Kinemacolor and other means of reproducing colour from the some age are part of a key period in modern cultural history, where colour became a recognisable force in how society understood itself at a time of social upheaval and democratising change, how its products were commodified, marketed, owned, displayed and comprehended. It is where salesmanship met both art and science (a natural crossroads for Charles Urban); it is when colour reproduction is equated with social attainment. 8 Tom Gunning, ‘Colorful Metaphors: the Attraction of Color in Early Silent Cinema’, Fotogenia 1: Il Colore nel Cinema/Color in the Cinema, p. 249. 125 ‘Something More than a Mere Picture Show’ The Invention of Kinemacolor The technical history of Kinemacolor has been told elsewhere, though never the complete story.9 Essentially, Urban became interested in colour cinematography when he was approached by in 1901 by Edward Raymond Turner, inventor of a putative three-colour motion picture system, patented on 22 March 1899.10 The Lee and Turner system employed a rotating wheel with red, green and blue sectors positioned on a camera, and a three-lens projector of marked complexity.

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