Film History, Volume 21, pp. 164–176, 2009. Copyright © John Libbey Publishing ISSN: 0892-2160. Printed in United States of America

‘Harmonious sensations of sound by means of colors’: vernacular colour abstractions in silent cinema

‘Harmonious sensations of sou nd by means of colors ’ Joshua Yumibe Why should I prefer the colored picture? Yan- essay, I want to use this modernist tradition of colour kee-like I answer ‘Why should you?’ Why do and abstraction as a context for discussing more the poor of a great city spend their small sav- popular or ‘vernacular’ experiments with synaesthe- ings in occasional efforts to get away from the sia in silent cinema. This discussion will focus spe- dull gray monotony of their lives to where they cifically on the work of two technicians: Charles can obtain a glimpse of radiant sea or vari- Francis Jenkins, who designed an early film projector egated woodland? The beauty of nature lays in the 1890s and was one of the first exhibitors of hold of our senses as does the charm of good colour films, and Loyd Jones, who developed a music without our being aware of an effort of number ofcolour technologiesatthe Kodak Research attention; we lose consciousness of ourselves Laboratories. Through this history I will show that a and our bitter thoughts when we are pos- ‘synaesthetic’ approach to colour was not only crucial sessed by the external will; the love of colour- for experimental modes of filmmaking but was also audition seems to be universal. If I am central to how colour in the cinema was thought about mistaken set me down as an impressionist. in general since the very emergence of the medium. – Louis Reeves Harrison (1912)1 Before discussing Jenkins and Jones, it will be useful to first outline a brief history of colour and abstraction Abstract painting is not so much an anti-real- in silent cinema in order to situate their experiments. istic movement as a realistic revelation of the Colour was present in the cinema throughout prevailing abstractness. its emergence, both in the intermedial context of – Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film (1960)2 lantern slides and lithographed posters that accom- n various strands of abstract cinemacolour has panied the earliest exhibitions and also through often been used ‘synaesthetically’ to invoke an various applied-colouring techniques that were used Ianalogy with music. This derives from a tradition dating to antiquity in which colour is thought to have the potential to provoke one physiologically to Joshua Yumibe is an Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies at Oakland University. He has hear music, even in silence. Such a provocation to published essays on Paul Fejos’s Lonesome, colour ‘colour-audition’ may be suspect, at least as a uni- theory and design in silent cinema, and the Davide versal response to colour, but, nonetheless, it has Turconi and Josef Joye film collections. He is currently historically been a key metaphor in modernist film preparing a manuscript for Rutgers University Press on silent cinema colour aesthetics titled ‘Moving Color: (and more generally art) for explaining the abstract On the History of Color in Mass Culture, Modernism, uses and sensual-emotional influences of colour vis- and Silent Cinema’. à-vis the non-representational nature of music. In this Correspondence to [email protected]

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 164 ‘Harmonious sensations of sound by means of colors’ FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) 165 on films from at least 1895 on. Unfortunately, many instance, makes a version of this argument in ‘The silent films now only survive in black-and-white cop- Myth of Total Cinema’, categorizing natural colour ies, but originally most were manually coloured in (along with sound) as one of the elements that en- part or in whole through techniques such as hand ables the cinema to bring about a more complete colouring, stenciling, tinting, and toning. In hand-col- ‘recreation of the world in its own image’; applied oured prints, elements of each coloured frame were colouring, by contrast, fakes reality even as it shows individually treated by hand, usually by women and a desire for it.4 Rudolf Arnheim also makes a similar, young girls working slowly with tiny brushes and functional analysis of colour’s relation to realism in magnifying glasses [Plate 1]. The work was repeti- his 1933 chapter on ‘The Complete Film’, though for tive, as every release print would have to be individu- different aesthetic reasons than Bazin.5 Colour, for ally hand coloured, frame by frame. Stenciled prints Arnheim, functions to bring about a more total imita- were similar to hand-coloured ones in that selected tion of nature on film; however, this degrades the elements of each treated frame would be coloured. medium, for with Arnheim the cinema’s aesthetic However, the stencil process used to achieve this strength lies not in technological reproduction but in was quite different and eventually much more pre- its modernist ability to produce for the viewer an cise. Each colour on a print (typically numbering experience formally different from reality. between three and seven for a segment) would have Such emphases on colour’s realistic function its own stencil strip, cut in registration for the se- are too limiting to account fully for colour’s role in the quence of frames. Ink was then sponged through the cinema. If one examines the historical record more stencil cuts onto a print, one stencil at a time, pro- closely, interest in the realism of colour cinema was ducing in some instances an extremely verisimilar secondary and subsumed to broader concerns effect and in others a dazzling, spectacular quality. about its sensual and affective nature. To understand Though laborious to cut, once produced, stencils the contours of this broader aesthetic horizon, it is could be reused on multiple prints, thus saving time necessary to explore cinema’s relation to concurrent and labor on large print runs. In contrast to hand media practices and theories of colour perception in colouring and stenciling, tinting and toning were rela- the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Specifi- tively quicker processes. With tinting, a length of a cally with regard to colour perception in the cinema, print (typically a scene or a shot) was dyed a specific a central issue is the way in which historical under- colour, whereas with toning, the silver in the emulsion standings of this topic interrelate with the nineteenth- (again, either of a scene or a shot) was chemically century theorization of colour’s influence upon the changed into a coloured compound or was bleached observer. In the latter half of the century, much of the and then coloured by a dye that would only adhere interest in colour perception focused on the notion of to the bleached silver [Plate 2]. Tinting was often synaesthesia: the mixing not only of the individual used with other colour processes to produce a wide senses (which is a documented physiological condi- variety of effects: tinting with hand-colouring, tinting tion among a small percentage of people) but also with toning, tinting with stenciling3 [Plate 3]. more broadly, and perhaps metaphorically, of the What fascinates me about early colour cinema, nervous, emotional, and spiritual impulses suppos- however, is not only this technical history but also the edly coursing through the human body. With roots aesthetic questions that it raises. Why, for instance, running at least to the Greeks, synaesthesia was was so much labour invested in creating these col- most frequently a subject of scientific and aesthetic ourful images, and how were they thought about, inquiry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted to, and received by audiences? Accounts among physiologists, philosophers, and artists. In of colour in film theory and history have often sub- opposition to positivist epistemologies that vener- sumed questions about the aesthetics of colour to ated quantifiable data, this historical interest in issues of realism and have privileged the develop- synaesthesia often emphasized the significance and ment of so-called ‘natural’, photographic colour sys- complexities of sensory experience for the attain- tems (e.g. Kinemacolor and Technicolor). ment of transcendental knowledge.6 Non-photographic, applied colouring has been deni- To illustrate how the history of synaesthesia grated in this logic as a primitive attempt to simulate interrelates across various media, and gets taken up reality before technology evolved enough to repro- by film technicians such as C. Francis Jenkins and duce the ‘natural’ colours of reality. André Bazin, for Loyd Jones, I would like to focus on an image from

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 165 166 FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) Joshua Yumibe

thetic horizon of colour theory and practice that I aim to explore here within the context of silent cinema. As one last point of contextualization, I would like to return to the issue of colour abstraction in modernist film and art. When synaesthesia and col- our are discussed in relation to the cinema, it is typically in reference to a particular strand of high modernism dating from this period for which synaes- thesia brings together the interest in abstraction in, for example, the romantic and symbolist poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky, the musical compositions of Al- exander Scriabin, the experimental films of Léopold Survage, Walter Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger, and so forth [Plate 4]. This is a varied genealogy running from Romanticism and Symbolism into abstract painting, music, and film. The late William Moritz, for instance, explored this history of abstraction through Fig. 1. an 1899 research article in the journal Medical Re- Fischinger (and others), and the recent 2005 visual Illustration from cord7 [Fig. 1]. A patient reclines on a divan before an music exhibit mounted by the Smithsonian’s Hir- J. Leonard abstract, colour image produced by a chromatrope schorn Museum focused on its importance to various Corning, ‘The (a rotating magic lanternslide) while listening to mu- abstract painting and media projects of the twentieth Uses of Musical 9 Vibrations Before sic (preferably Wagner) on an Edison phonograph century. Although this vein of scholarship has pro- and During through a custom made ‘acoustic helmet’. In the ductively examined the relationship between Sleep’, Medical article, J. Leonard Corning, a pioneering New York synaesthesia and abstraction, it has at times over- Record LV neurologist – one of the first to experiment with spinal emphasized the artistic, theosophical, and spiritual (1899). anesthesia – documents his study of the psychologi- aspects of these works These aspects are funda- cal effects of musical vibrations before and during mental, but in focusing on them scholarship has sleep on melancholic patients. Before the advent of tended to downplay the importance of mass culture sleep, Corning contends, colour ‘vibrations’ can on synaesthetic abstraction.10 powerfully combine with the effects of the music to Artistic interest in mass culture and cinema is produce within patients, ‘veritable hallucinations, by no means a new topic: it has long been recog- carrying joyous or tranquil moods in their brain and nized to be a crucial aspect of modernist aesthetics. largely displacing the kind of ideation which carries The work of the Italian Futurists, for example, has a melancholic consequent’. This treatment, of often been characterized by others and by them- course, was not a new phenomenon nor is it one that selves as being cinematic.11 However, what I am has disappeared. Numerous theories of musical interested in exploring here is not simply the fact that and/or colour therapy have come and gone through- mass culture provided imagery and tropes for certain out history. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth modernist artists, but to invoke Miriam Hansen’s centuries, experimental psychologists conducted concept of ‘vernacular modernism’, wherein particu- extensive research into the area, often relating it to lar elements of mass culture (specifically classical work on synaesthesia. Scientists such as G.T. Fech- cinema in her analysis) offered a vernacular form of ner and Francis Galton studied the phenomena, and modernism to the public. That is to say, the cinema during this same period, Charles Féré was develop- not only reflected the modern world but also provided ing his related notion of Chromotherapy, which used mass audiences a means of negotiating the libera- colour’s mood inducing power to treat hysteria.8 tory and traumatic experiences of modernity in ways What is striking about Corning’s synaesthetic image, akin to the sensory-reflexive practices of high mod- though, is its cinematic nature. Although it does ernist works in a popular or ‘vernacular’ context.12 As depict a private screening, nonetheless the coupling a corollary, it is the mass appeal of vernacular-mod- of projected and moving colour abstraction with re- ernist media such as the cinema that was influential produced sound profoundly demarcates the synaes- on high-modernist aesthetics – in other words, it was

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 166 ‘Harmonious sensations of sound by means of colors’ FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) 167 not just the cinema’s imagery and tropes but also the stage of a girl dancing in colored lights is ways in which it engaged the public that appealed to reproduced with charming results, making, artists in the early twentieth century. probably, the most gorgeous exhibit of the For the rest of this essay I aim to explore these entire evening.15 issues by tracing a vernacular tradition of synaes- Before addressing these methods, it should thetic abstraction from C. Francis Jenkins to Loyd be noted that on the facing page is a discussion of Jones. While neither diametrically opposing nor ig- synchronous sound accompaniment for the Phan- noring the differences between vernacular and high toscope: modernist abstraction, what I want to draw attention to is that though these popular experiments dis- Graphophone / Phonograph / Gramophone played certain modernist tendencies, they did so with When desired, the Phantoscope will be fitted a different emphasis. Specifically, abstraction is mar- with an attachment for the synchronous opera- shalled in these experiments, professedly, as a tion of the phonograph or gramophone; or, means of educating – and even, as with Corning, when so requested, each Phantoscope will be restoring to health – the aesthetic sensibilities of the fitted to operate synchronously the Columbia ‘motion picture public’.13 Phonograph Company’s splendid grapho- C. Francis Jenkins developed one of the first phone. motion picture projectors, named the Phantoscope, and with Thomas Armat exhibited Kinetoscope films No specific details are given about the nature of the on it at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Geor- music, but this juxtaposition of sound with colour gia in September of 1895. According to Terry Ram- does suggest that Jenkins was at least considering saye, one of the films that Jenkins and Armat their relationship at this early stage. projected was a hand-coloured print of an Annabelle Jenkins’s first description above regarding col- Moore/Whitford Kinetoscope film14 [Plate 5]. If Ram- our cinema pertains to projecting abstract, coloured- saye is correct, this may have been the earliest public lighting effects during the one to two minute projection of a colour film. Jenkins’s first known de- threading changes of the Phantoscope projector, scription of colour cinema came seven months later, and, in the context of this catalog, one would assume after he had broken with Armat (who separately with musical accompaniment. His use of the phrase made a deal with Thomas Edison to re-brand the ‘chromatic effects’ here is likely indebted to the his- Phantoscope as the Edison Vitascope, which de- tory of colour organs and other visual music appara- buted in New York on 23 April 1896). Jenkins, how- tus that were popular, synaesthetic entertainments at ever, continued developing the Phantoscope on his the end of the nineteenth century. The British colour own and issued his first promotional catalog only organ inventor and performer, Alexander Rimington, three days after the Vitascope’s debut. In it he for example, patented in the United States a ‘Method spends a page discussing three options for the col- and Apparatus for Producing Color Effects’ in 1894, ouring of Phantoscope projections: concurrent with Jenkins’s early experiments16 [Fig. 2]. It is unclear from Jenkins’s description if coloured Chromatic effects lights would be projected through the Phantoscope During the interim [of reel changes], to enter- or through a separate device during exhibitions. tain the audience, colored lights – chromatic However, if he did use multiple projection devices effects can be projected. their boundaries are not clearly demarcated. That such chromatic effects are thus promoted as part of Enchanted pictures the experience of the Phantoscope illustrates the intermedial nature of the cinema at this time; that is, An exceedingly pretty and very fascinating the cinema was not conceived so much as a unique effect is secured by projecting the Phan- medium but rather as an extension of existing me- toscope pictures upon the white circle inside dia.17 these chromatic rings. Intermediality is also central to Jenkins’s sec- ond suggestion about colour cinema, ‘Enchanted Colored pictures Pictures’. Jenkins’s use of this term embeds his work The beautiful effects seen upon the public within the magic lantern tradition, and specifically

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 167 168 FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) Joshua Yumibe

Fig. 2. Jenkins suggests colouring Loïe Fuller-esque, ser- Alexander pentine dancers for the cinema. [Fig. 3] Importantly, Rimington’s the discourse surrounding and promoted by Fuller patent for a often emphasized the synaesthetic pleasure inherent ‘Method of and Apparatus for to her colourful, multimedia performances, and this Producing Color performance aesthetic was one of the grounding Effects’ logics of early colour cinema.19 It is difficult to ascer- (1894/1895); tain exactly how Jenkins achieved these coloured U.S. Patent images with the Phantoscope at this time: he may 547,359. only have double-projected chromatic lights directly onto the screen image, as he later suggests this in other publications.20 However, in his 1898 mono- graph, Animated Pictures, along with double-projec- tion methods Jenkins also promotes the hand colouring of prints and discusses the tedious labour involved with colouring ‘the hundreds of little pic- tures’ on a filmstrip.21 Whatever his actual methods in early 1896, these three suggestions from the Phan- toscope catalog illustrate his early fascination with colour abstraction in the cinema. What is of particular interest in Animated Pic- tures for a discussion of synaesthesia and abstrac- tion is a passage under the heading, ‘Harmonious Sensations of Sound by Means of Color’. Here Jenkins discusses the tinting of clear filmstrips through dye immersion (which significantly is the earliest discussion of film tinting by this method that I have found): Colors for projection are washed upon blank (given the name ‘Phantoscope’) within the history of [film] strips suitable for reproduction in the the phantasmagoria. Jenkins makes no reference to Phantoscope. These strips which were col- Étienne-Gaspard Robertson’s phantasmagoric lan- ored crudely represent the coarser or louder tern device, the ‘Fantascope’, from the late 1790s; notes, and the soft colors or colors of short however, in light of his emphasis on ‘enchanted wave length to represent the soft tones pictures’ and the ‘Historical Sketch’ in his mono- (92–93). graph, Animated Pictures, he was certainly aware of this tradition.18 Jenkins describes double projecting Jenkins suggests that through this style of Phantoscope pictures within the empty white space tinting one can ‘produce the same impression upon of separately projected ‘chromatic rings’, presum- the senses of feeling through the medium of the eye ably related to the chromatic effects he first mentions. which music does through the ear’. He goes on to One can imagine what this might like look: a film describe his experiments with the successive juxta- image within a circular and perhaps moving ring of positions of these ‘loud and soft’ colour tints in what colours – an effect also possible with dual magic perhaps amounts to the earliest example of a colour lanterns. Though little technical detail is given here, flicker film – something akin to Paul Sharits’s experi- presumably Jenkins used some type of coloured mental work, only in 1898. However, it should be lantern slide or chromatrope to achieve this effect. pointed out that Jenkins’s film experiments are much Jenkins’s third and final point regarding colour slower than what we think of as a flicker film: he in his 1896 Phantoscope catalog is a relatively stand- proposes using a time scheme of a foot for a whole ard suggestion for this period regarding ‘Colored note and six inches for a half, and unlike filmmakers Pictures’ and seems to support Ramsaye’s account such as Sharits, Jenkins tries to avoid clashing after- of the Jenkins and Armat Cotton States screening. images. He writes that because of persistence of

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 168 ‘Harmonious sensations of sound by means of colors’ FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) 169 vision, the shorter notes, ‘the eighths, sixteenths, Fig. 3. C. etc., cannot be readily reproduced owing to the fact Francis Jenkins, that the eye will not quickly enough lose the impres- ‘Life Motion Realism – The sion of the preceding color’. Jenkins thus can only Phantoscope’ play ‘slow music, hymns, and the like’, though he (July 1896). The does propose the Chevreulian idea of coordinating image but not the successive tint contrasts to neutralize afterimages in text can also be faster paced films.22 Jenkins’s insistence on produc- found in his ing a harmonizing rather than dissonant experience earlier 26 April illustrates that while his synaesthetic project shares 1896 catalog for the Phantoscope. certain affinities with modernist abstraction, in its dedication to traditional forms of popular music it is not necessarily what one might consider avant- garde. Rather, it is more genteel in attitude, even as it usefully complicates the distinction. Beyond these formal affinities and disso- nances, what is essential to note is the aesthetic language that Jenkins uses to describe the goals of his experiment: to investigate how colour impresses itself on the senses of feeling. Jenkins thus invokes a broader, intermedial history of nineteenth-century colour theory, which, as discussed earlier, was deeply concerned with the physiological investiga- tion of sensory experience. What is particular to ver- nacular experiments with colour abstraction, such as Jenkins’s, is the emphasis they place on relating this language of the senses to the nineteenth century use of colour theory, raw colour materials, and visual project of aesthetic uplift – a project also entwined iconography that helped foster a tradition of abstract with the origins of nineteenth-century art education.23 imagery in the nineteenth century. Though Jenkins For example, in 1893 the chromolithographer and does not make this educational connection explicit supposed ‘father’ of art education in America, Louis in his passage about synaesthesia, nonetheless the Prang, wrote in one of the first educational manuals way in which the cinema provides a new means of on colour for public schools that: aesthetic and scientific uplift is the stated theme of Animated Pictures and is implicit to his colour-sound The true aim and purpose of color instruction experiment. ... can be nothing less than the awakening, The connection between aesthetic uplift and through cultivated sense-activity, of the child’s colour abstraction is made more explicit in Loyd higher spiritual powers, the opening up of new Jones’ work in the 1920s. Jones was a central figure avenues of thought and enjoyment through at the Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, enlarged observation of beauty in nature and New York from the 1910s into the 1950s. Better in art, and the cultivation of better possibilities known for his research on tonal reproduction and film of usefulness to others through enlarged ca- speed values, he also developed and theorized both pability of expressing thought and feeling by applied and natural colour systems for still and mov- the use of color materials. The object of such ing Kodak film stocks.25 One of his early inventions instruction is thus both personal culture and was a cinematic device ‘for producing and recording practical usefulness.24 mobile color effects’, which he patented in 1924 and To cultivate the sensual and spiritual uplift of promoted throughout the mid to late 1920s26 [Fig. 5]. children, Prang’s book goes on to suggest a series The device was a kaleidoscopic lens attachment of lesson plans in which children play with and ma- meant to be used on film projectors to create ‘mo- nipulate colour blocks into abstract patterns and bile’, abstract images that could be projected pub- colour wheels [Fig. 4]. It is this type of educational licly and also recorded on colour film stock (such as

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 169 170 FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) Joshua Yumibe

Along with using the kaleidoscopic mecha- nism to create self-contained films, Jones also envi- sioned incorporating the effect as a stylistic device in dramatic performances and motion pictures to en- hance their scenic or background effects. The patent seems worded broadly enough to encompass such uses within narrative films. However, from Jones’ other writings about the mechanism, and from extant film samples, the device seems to have been used primarily to create abstract films, like Color Dynam- ics, that were screened as preludes to feature pic- tures and as backgrounds for title sequences in narrative and non-fiction films.29 Whether in title se- quences or in shorts adjacent to feature films, this emphasis on the use of colour abstraction in the background of the moving image is of particular Fig. 4. Prang’s Kodacolor or Kodachrome) as abstract sequences interest given that in his later writing Jones also ‘Color Tablet, for use in films. Regarding the potential applications emphasized the emotional expressivity and influence Assortment B’. of this device, Jones writes: of colour. He thus envisioned abstract colour in the Illustration from cinema as having the synaesthetic ability to guide the Louis Prang, et [I]t is my object to reproduce the infinitely moods of the audience, both in dramatic films (thus al., Color varying effects that can be produced in kalei- being useful for classical, unobtrusive narration) and Instruction doscopic apparatus. By continuously moving also in advertising and public communication (as a (1893). the kaleidoscopic prism, a color design and an tool for marketing, education, and cultural influ- ornamental design simultaneously at inde- ence).30 pendently variable speeds, designs are pro- Jones repeats this suggestion about the emo- duced that merge one into the other and are tional influence of colour in his discussions of Ko- expressive of and conducive to varying emo- dak’s Sonochrome film stock, which he helped tions. These designs when reproduced by a develop at the end of the 1920s. Sonochrome was a color motion picture process can be projected pre-tinted film stock meant to be used for positive for purposes of entertainment; they can be prints with soundtracks. The tints were specifically used as color settings for background or sce- engineered so as not to interfere with the soundtrack; nic effects for dramatic and motion picture hence, the name combines sound (sono) with colour productions, for backgrounds for titles used (chrome) to invoke a synaesthetic analogy. [Fig. 6] for motion pictures, advertising, or an- In a full-colour, four-page Kodak advertising insert nouncement purposes and in many other promoting Sonochrome, one can get a sense of what ways.27 the iconography of Jones’s kaleidoscopic projec- He thus situates it as an apparatus for enter- tions may have looked like: abstract, pastel beams tainment, advertising, and public display. For the of yellow, green, pink, and blue criss-cross in the cinema, he suggests using the device to create background to illustrate and advertise the film stock31 abstract films, and indeed, in the 1920s Jones and [Plate 8] . the Kodak Research Laboratories exhibited at least Not only was Sonochrome based at least one such five-minute film titled Mobile Color regularly metaphorically on a colour-sound correspondence, at the Eastman Theater in Rochester, NY, which was but also inherent to it was the codification of the accompanied ‘in perfect harmony’ by Debussy’s Ara- sensual and emotional resonance of its tints with the besque. Jones and Kodak also exhibited another film cinema spectator: it was, according to this same (or possibly the same film re-titled), Color Dynamics, advertisement, ‘keyed to the moods of the screen’. which screened with Paul Leni’s Waxworks, Fernand This and various other descriptions of the Sono- Léger and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet mécanique, and chrome tints propose an elaborate, Goethean sys- Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim at the Cameo Theater tem of colour correspondences between the hues of in New York City in March of 192628 [Plates 6 and 7]. the tints and the emotions unobtrusively produced in

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 170 ‘Harmonious sensations of sound by means of colors’ FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) 171 spectators.32 For instance, the second page of the advertisement explains that: Sonochrome colors have definite affective val- ues. Some excite, some tranquilize, some re- press. Properly used, they enhance the moods of the screen and aid the powers of reproduc- tive imagination in the observer, without making a distinct impression on the con- sciousness. A description of one of the tints provides a sense of what Kodak means by this: ‘ROSE DOREE: A rose pink that quickens the respiration. The tint of passionate love, excitement, abandon, fête days, carnivals, heavily sensuous surroundings’. In a 1929 article in the Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Jones histo- ricized the emotional resonance of Sonochrome tints. Color has been so inseparably linked with sen- sory experience throughout the evolution of mankind that it has acquired by objective and subjective association definite and important emotional value.33

Again, one finds here a discourse on the senses being used to theorize colour perception and ground arguments about the emotional resonance of Sono- chrome tints. Reinforcing this connection, Jones cites the early nineteenth-century British chemist and romantic colour aesthetician, George Field, and the early twentieth century colour theorist, Matthew Luckiesh.34 Through these writers, Jones mobilizes an understanding of the physiology of the eye, which he then relates to colour style. Ultimately, he intends for Sonochrome stocks to be incorporated as ab- stract elements in motion pictures. However, likely because film tinting was much less obtrusive than the general not good, since such colors are usu- abstract patterns create by his kaleidoscopic device, Fig. 5. Loyd ally obtrusive or distracting and may defeat Jones’ ‘Apparatus here he emphasizes much more strongly Sono- rather than promote the attainment of the de- for Producing chrome’s usefulness in narrative films: sired effect. A more subtle method will yield Kaleidoscopic It is not desired that the reader shall gain the better results. This involves the employment of Designs’ (1924/1928); impression from this rather enthusiastic dis- pastel tints which may be increased in subjec- U.S. Patent cussion of the potential emotional value of tive strength for a brief period of time by the 1,690,584. color that the lavish and unrestrained use of action of successional contrast or juxtaposi- color treatments is advocated. On the contrary tion in time. Thus the eye accommodated to, it is desired to emphasize the necessity of or fatigued by a green, such as Verdante, will using the color accompaniment to a motion perceive, at the beginning of the following picture production with care and discretion. scene done on a pink tint, a color of enhanced The use of too strong or saturated colors is in subjective saturation. This immediately fixes

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 171 172 FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) Joshua Yumibe

Fig. 6. Eastman Thompson, and Staiger, for instance, discuss the Sonochrome subordination of realism to causal motivation in clas- advertisement. sical Hollywood style: ‘verisimilitude usually supports Variety (17 compositional motivation by making the chain of September 1930). causality seem plausible’.36 Following this logic, if colour becomes unreal and pronounced, it will thus hinder the spectators’ absorption by the causal chain of the narrative. Aspects of this classical logic are clearly pre- sent in Jones’ passage, for part of his aim in the essay is to promote the colour stock as being ame- nable to classical norms of narration. However, as he also makes clear, the incorporation of colour as a restrained, abstract element in film is indebted not only to unobtrusive standards of motivation, narra- tion, and style but also more broadly to nineteenth- century colour theory. His discussion of successive and juxtaposed tint contrasts derives at least indi- rectly from Chevreul’s De la Loi du Contraste Simul- tané des Couleurs (1839), which was the first systematic work to theorize the visual effects of col- our contrast, and directly relates to Jones’ under- standing of the affective nature of his kaleidoscopic device. Colour is conceived as an abstract element that harmonizes sensually and, by synaesthetic/ metaphoric extension, emotionally with an audience. This synaesthetic correspondence constitutes for the mood of the scene, after which the accom- Jones a primitive, underdeveloped ‘language of col- modational processes in the retina begin to our’.37 Developing this point further, he discusses the operate and cause the effective saturation to educational value of the cinema. According to Jones, decrease appreciably. Thus the color having colour cinema’s social purpose as a mass medium fulfilled its mission, saying definitely that this is to refine the primitive language of colour ‘in the scene has a specific emotional atmosphere, collective mind of the motion picture public’ thus fades into the background and while continu- uplifting the public’s ‘colour consciousness’ through ing to make itself felt in the subconscious mind a modern education of the senses.38 of the observer by lending a warmth and soft- In closing I want to tease out the broader ness to the scene permits the action to carry implications of this educational impulse towards col- forward the dramatic sequence without the our cinema. I have focused on these two figures, unpleasant and distracting influence of pro- Jenkins and Jones, partially because their work on nounced color.35 colour technologies neatly spans silent cinema, from This passage epitomizes an approach to col- its emergence in the nineteenth century to its decline our design that first developed during the single-reel at the end of the 1920s. As such, they illustrate and era: the earlier, colourful attractions of the beginning bracket key attitudes towards colour during the silent of the first decade of the 1900s began to give way to period. But I have also highlighted these technicians restrained uses of colour that are amenable – because they provocatively emphasize the poten- synaesthetically like styles of musical accompani- tials of synaesthesia in the cinema in ways that have ment – to unobtrusive narration. Colour style became typically been associated with high modernist ab- less distracting and as such more narratively realis- straction, rather than in the vernacular context of tic. Various theorists of classical cinema have related Jenkins and Jones. However, I am not interested in stylistic restraint and verisimilitude to causally based whether there is any direct influence at work here: modes of unobtrusive narration. Bordwell, Jenkins’s early colour experiments precede the hey-

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 172 ‘Harmonious sensations of sound by means of colors’ FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) 173 day of modernist abstraction by several years, and attention to how the sensual and even spiritual ap- artists such as Scriabin, Kandinsky and Survage peal of colour abstraction is often sublimated by a would not have known his work. Jones was familiar more pragmatic call for the aesthetic uplift of the with some of these artists; however his writing and public and of its ‘colour consciousness’. Through its work on colour does not deal with them in any sub- mass appeal, the cinema is thus in a unique position stantial way.39 to carry out this mission, in the Benjaminian sense of What is of more relevance is the broader, inter- having the potential to establish at the level of sen- medial history of nineteenth-century colour theory sory experience a positive, mimetic equilibrium be- and practice, which is the shared basis for many of tween the viewer and the environment.42 This is to say these modernist and vernacular experiments with that the cinema might then be configured as a sy- synaesthetic abstraction. From Goethe to Chevreul naesthetic training ground of the senses for the navi- to Galton, the study of colour in the nineteenth cen- gation of the modern world. However, these claims tury – and particularly of afterimages – was inter- by Jenkins, Jones, and others in the film industry woven with the physiological study of the senses, should not be taken uncritically, for a political and and in the latter part of the nineteenth century, many economic dimension undergirds their rhetoric. There of these studies began to explore how the senses is a well-established tradition of hyping the educa- interrelate with one another synaesthetically to medi- tional value of the cinema as a means of promoting ate our experience of the world. It is the interest in its cultural value to critics. In these examples, even sensual experience that is fundamental to this sy- as colour abstractions are promoted as being sen- naesthetic strand of abstraction. However, one can- sually edifying for the spectator, their potential to not overlook that for many artists, such as Kandinsky influence audiences unobtrusively not only in film and Fischinger, this interest in sensory experience narration but also through advertisements (to pro- was often inflected by idealist and/or occult desires mote consumption) and public announcements (po- to experience the spiritual through the sensual. As a tentially ideological in nature) is also noted, which historical frame for this spiritual interest in the senses, should give one pause. Nonetheless, what is signifi- though, I would argue that it emerges as a response cant is that, through the abstract elements of the to the sensorial transformations of everyday life that cinema, these utopian claims of uplift and their actual began as colour surged into all facets of public and ideological effects are lodged at the level of the private life in the nineteenth century. Neil Harris has senses. Unpacking the ways in which the viewer pointed out that in the mid-nineteenth century the sensually interacts with, and adapts to, modern tech- colouring of a variety of mass-produced objects (e.g. nology is a necessary step towards a historical and cloth, advertisements, lighting fixtures, and lantern critical aesthetics of the cinema. slides) was the result of the modern development of An earlier version of this essay was published in trans- more affordable and stable colour dyes, inks, and 40 lation in Robin Curtis, Marc Glöde and Gertrud Koch print processes. By the early twentieth century, (eds), Synästhesie-Effekte: zur Intermodalität der äs- colour was saturating mass culture in a multitude of thetischen Wahrnehmung (München: Fink Verlag, 2008), new ways, and the impact was immense, generating and I am indebted to the editors of that volume for a variety of responses: amusement, disdain, exhila- generous comments and suggestions throughout, as ration, critique. The turn to synaesthesia and abstrac- well as to Kim Tomadjoglou and Richard Koszarski for tion is one response to this transformation: an their work on this version. Thanks also go to Rixt Jonk- man of the Netherlands Filmmuseum for assistance with attempt, both nostalgic and visionary, to unite the frame enlargements, and last but not least to Tom senses in a media environment that increasingly Gunning, Miriam Hansen, and Yuri Tsivian for their feed- 41 fragments them. back on this material as it appeared in my dissertation. Vernacular experiments with synaesthesia call

Notes

1. Louis Reeves Harrison, ‘Studio Saunterings’, Moving 3. In addition to the essays included in this both this Picture World (16 March 1912): 944. and the previous issue of Film History on early colour cinema also see Paolo Cherchi Usai, ‘The Way of All 2. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption Flesh Tones’, in Silent Cinema: An Introduction (Lon- of Physical Reality, intro. Miriam Hansen (Princeton, don: British Film Institute, 2000), 21–43; Daan Her- N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 294.

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 173 174 FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) Joshua Yumibe

togs and Nico de Klerk, ed., ‘Disorderly Order’: Col- versal meaning, and to dismiss such approaches ours in Silent Film (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands entirely ignores an important aspect of the history of Filmmuseum, 1996); and Giovanna Fossati, ‘When colour. the Cinema Was Coloured’, in All the Colours of the 7. J. Leonard Corning, ‘The Uses of Musical Vibrations World: Colours in Early Mass Media: 1900–1930, ed. Before and During Sleep’, Medical Record LV (1899): Luciano Berriatúa (Reggio Emilia, Italy: Diabasis, 79–86. 1998), 121–132; and the essays collected in Luke McKernan, ed. Living Pictures 2: 2 (2003), Special 8. On these treatments, see John Gage’s Color and Issue on Colour, in particular Tom Gunning, ‘Colour- Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Ab- ful Metaphors: The Attraction of Colour in Early Silent straction (Berkeley: University of California Press, Cinema’, 4–13. 1993),206–209 andColor andMeaning: Art,Science, and Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California 4. André Bazin, ‘The Myth of Total Cinema’, in What is Press, 1999), 262–264. On colour and vibration the- Cinema: Volume I, selected and trans. Hugh Gray ory, see Georges Roque, ‘Vibration Theory and Early (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), spe- Abstraction’, in M. Fehr and S. Wurmfeld (eds), cifically 20–21. Bazin briefly discusses applied col- Seeing Red: On Nonobjective Painting and Color ouring in the context of Méliès’ use of colour. In the Theory (Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2004), 110–128. logic of the essay, applied colouring registers a desire to create a perfect illusion of the world, but its 9. Of Moritz’s work, see his ‘Abstract Film and Color artificial colours relate closer to the trompe-l’œil Music’, in Maurice Tuchman (ed.), The Spiritual in fakery discussed earlier in the essay than to realism. Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (New York: Ab- Though Bazin is seemingly unaware of early, histori- beville Press, 1986), 297–312, and Optical Poetry: cal accounts of colour in the cinema, many of these The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (John Libbey discussions do revolve around the issues of realism Publishing and Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, and natural colour, and the complexity of Bazin’s 2004). On the Hirschorn exhibit, see Kerry Brougher, stance on the aesthetic relationship between illusion Jeremy Strick, Ari Wiseman, and Judith Zilczer (eds), and realism is useful for considering these discus- Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music since sions. However, his dismissive view of early cinema’s 1900 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005). supposed trompe-l’œil aesthetics marginalizes cru- 10. Kerry Brougher’s essay ‘Visual-Music Culture’, in cial, aesthetic aspects of colour cinema. Visual Music, is a useful exception to this trend. See in particular his discussion of West Coast filmmakers 5. Rudolf Arnheim, ‘The Complete Film’ (1933), in Film such as Harry Smith and Hy Hirsch who blur Clement as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), Greenburg’s distinction of avant-garde practice and 154–160. popular kitsch (120). 6. On this point, see in particular Françoise Meltzer, 11. See Edward Aiken, ‘The Cinema and Italian Futurist ‘Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse’, Critical In- Painting’, Art Journal 41.4 (Winter 1981): 353–357. quiry 5 (1978): 253–273; and Kevin T. Dann, Bright 12. See Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘The Mass Production of Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Mod- for Transcendental Knowledge (New Haven: Yale ernism’, Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999): 59–77; University Press, 1998). Also, on nineteenth century and ‘Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: colour theory and its relation to physiology, see Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism’, Film Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer: On Quarterly (Fall 2000): 10–22. Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cam- bridge: MIT Press, 1990). Along with these sources, 13. Loyd A. Jones, ‘Tinted Films for Sound Positives’, methodologically, I am indebted to Sergei Eisen- Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engi- stein’s critique of synaesthetic approaches that pro- neers #37 (May 6–9, 1929): 225. pose a universal meaning to colour. For Eisenstein 14. Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History no one colour has an absolute, symbolic meaning. of the Motion Picture (New York: Simon and Schuster, Rather, colours for Eisenstein take on subjective 1926), 194–195. meanings that are unique to each work of art. See Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Vertical Montage’, in Selected 15. C. Francis Jenkins, ‘The Jenkins Phantoscope, 26 Works: Volume 2: Towards a Theory of Montage, April 1896’, in Charles Musser (ed.), Motion Picture trans. Michael Glenny, ed. Michael Glenny and Rich- Catalogs by American Producers and Distributors, ard Taylor, 327–400 (London: British Film Institute, 1894–1908, C-002–012 (Frederick, Maryland: Uni- 1991), especially 336–337 and364.While Ifullyagree versity Publications of America, 1984), C-009. with Eisenstein’s critique, it is nonetheless essential 16. Alexander Wallace Rimington, ‘Method of and Ap- to recognize that many colour productions both in paratus for Producing Color Effects’, United States film and other media historically have been created Patent Office: Filed 16 July 1894; Patented 1 October under the influence of symbolic paradigms of uni- 1895, Patent 547,359.

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 174 ‘Harmonious sensations of sound by means of colors’ FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) 175

17. On intermediality, see André Gaudreault (trans. Photographic Printing by Measured Characteristics Wendy Schubring), ‘The Diversity of Cinema- of the Negative’, Journal of the Optical Society of tographic Connections in the Intermedial Context of America, 32, 10 (October 1942): 558–619. Also see the Turn of the 20th Century’, in Simon Popple and the numerous references to his work in C.E. Kenneth Vanessa Toulmin (eds), Visual Delights: Essays on Mees, The Theory of the Photographic Process,re- the Popular and Projected Image in the 19th Century vised edn (New York: Macmillan Co., 1954), espe- (Wiltshire, England: Flick Books, 2000), 8–15. cially in the chapters, ‘The Interpretations of 18. C. Francis Jenkins, Animated Pictures (Washington, Sensitometric Results’ and ‘The Theory of Tone Re- D.C.: Press of H.L. McQueen, 1898), 5–24; on production’, 866–969. Robertson, see Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of 26. For his patent, see Loyd A. Jones, ‘Apparatus for Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, trans. Producing Kaleidoscopic Designs’, United States Richard Crangle (Exeter, England: University of Ex- Patent Office: Filed 21 April 1924; Patented 6 No- eter Press, 2000), 147–171. vember 1928, Patent 1,690,584. On his promotion 19. On Fuller, see Barry Anthony, ‘Loïe Fuller and the of the device, see Loyd Jones and I. M. Townsend, Transformation of the Music-Hall’, Living Pictures 2.2 ‘The Use of Color for the Embellishment of the Motion (2003): 34–46; Tom Gunning, ‘Loïe Fuller and the Art Picture’, Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture of Motion’, in Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey Engineers #21 (18–21 May 1925): 38–66; and Loyd (eds), Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Jones and Clifton Tuttle, ‘The Reproduction of Mo- Honor of Annette Michelson (Amsterdam: University bility of Form and Color by the Motion Picture Kalei- of Amsterdam Press, 2002), 75–90; Giovanni Lista, doscope’, Transactions of the Society of Motion ‘Loïe Fuller and the Cinema’, in Cinegrafie 19: The Picture Engineers #33 (April 1928): 140–156. Signifi- ComicandtheSublime,297–313 (Bologna: Cineteca cantly, in their joint article, Jones and Tuttle contex- del Comune di Bologna, 2006); and Richard Nelson tualize the device within the history of ‘color music’. Current and Maria Ewing Current, Loïe Fuller: God- 27. Jones, ‘Apparatus for Producing Kaleidoscopic De- dess of Light (Boston: Northeastern University Press, signs’, 1. 1997). Also see Fuller’s own discussion of the ex- periments of her close friend, the astronomer Camille 28. On Mobile Color, see Loyd Jones and Clifton Tuttle, Flammarion, in which she approvingly quotes his ‘The Reproduction of Mobility of Form and Colour conclusion that ‘color must exert some sort of influ- by the Motion Picture Kaleidoscope’; on Colour Dy- ence, moral or physical, or perhaps both simultane- namics see Mordaunt Hall, ‘The Screen: Stories ously’, in Loïe Fuller, Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life within a Story’, New York Times (16 March 1926): 25. (New York: Dance Horizons, 1976), 113–117. I am indebted for these references to Daniela Currò of Haghefilm who recently restored one of Jones’ 20. See for instance his discussion of ‘Colored Back- abstract films for the George Eastman House [Ka- grounds’ in Handbook for Motion Picture and Stere- leidoscope], and exhibited it at the 2007 Giornate opticon Operators, 82–83. del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy. See her entry 21. C. Francis Jenkins, Animated Pictures,79. on ‘[Kaleidoscope]’, in David Robinson (ed.), 26th Pordenone Silent Film Festival Catalog (Sacile: Le 22. See Michel Eugène Chevreul’s influential description Giornate del Cinema Muto, 2007), 150–151. from the mid-nineteenth century of ‘simultaneous, successive, and mixed contrasts of colors’, in The 29. See Jones and Townsend’s discussion of the use of Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colors and abstract colour effects as preludes to feature films Their Applications to the Arts (New York: Reinhold, in ‘The Use of Color for the Embellishment of the 1967), 78. MotionPicture’, 39.Forextanttitlesequences infilms, 23. I explore this connection in more detail in ‘On the seeKodak’sdemoofits lenticular Kodacolorprocess Education of the Senses: Synaesthetic Perception in 1928, Garden Party, preserved at the George from the ‘Democratic Art’ of Chromolithography to Eastman House. While this is yet to be verified, some Modernism’, New Review of Film and Television Stud- of the title sequences in John Murray Anderson’s ies (forthcoming 2009). King of Jazz (Universal, 1930) appear to employ Jones’s kaleidoscopic device. See in particular the 24. Louis Prang, Mary Dana Hicks, and John S. Clark, trailer to the film found on Flicker Alley’s recent Color Instruction (Boston: The Prang Educational Discovering Cinema DVD set (2007). company, 1893), 2. 30. On the unobtrusiveness of classical narration, see 25. On his work on film speed and tonality, see Loyd David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Jones and H.R. Condit, ‘The Brightness Scale of Thompson, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Exterior Scenes and the Computation of Correct Style of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia Photographic Exposure’, Journal of the Optical So- University Press, 1985), 24–41. ciety of America 31, 11 (November 1941): 651–678, and Loyd A. Jones and C.N. Nelson, ‘The Control of 31. I am grateful to Anthony L’Abbate of the George

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 175 176 FILM HISTORY Vol. 21 Issue 2 (2009) Joshua Yumibe

Eastman House for sharing this item with me. It can to promote three-strip Technicolor six years later in be found, for example, in the July 1929 issue of the same journal. See Natalie Kalmus, ‘Color Con- American Cinematographer, inserted after page 24. sciousness’, Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Similar rhetoric about the film stock can be found in Engineers 35. 2 (August 1935): 139–147. other Kodak promotions of the film, such as Eastman Kodak Company, New Color Moods for the Screen: 39. See his brief discussion of Scriabin, Mary Hallock A Spectrum of Sixteen Delicate Atmospheric Colors, Greenewalt, and Thomas Wilfred in ‘The Use of Color Keyed to the Moods of the Screen (Rochester, NY: for the Embellishment of the Motion Picture Eastman Kodak Company, 1930). Program’, 41. 32. See Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colors, 40. Neil Harris, ‘Color and Media: Some Comparisons trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge, Mass.: and Speculations’, in Cultural Excursions: Marketing The M.I.T. Press, 1970), 304–336. Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America 33. Loyd A. Jones, ‘Tinted Films for Sound Positives’, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 225. 318–336.

34. Of George Field’s works, see his Chromatics, or, An 41. A useful parallel can be found in Susan Buck-Morss’ Essay on the Analogy and Harmony of Colours (Lon- discussion of Theodore Adorno’s critique of the don: A.J. Valpy, 1817); Chromatography: Or a Trea- phantasmagoria of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk in, tise on Colours and Pigments (London: Charles Tilt, ‘Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Es- 1835); and Rudiments of the Painter’s Art: Or, a say Reconsidered’, October 62 (Fall 1992): 24–25. Grammar of Colouring Applicable to Operative Paint- See Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney ing, Decorative Architecture, and the Arts (London: Livingstone (New York: Verso, 2005), in particular John Weale, 1850). Of Matthew Luckiesh, see his 86–102. As Buck-Morss writes, ‘It is this pseudo-to- Color and Its Applications (New York: D. Van Nos- talization that, for Adorno, makes Wagnerian opera trand Co., 1915); The Language of Color (New York: a phantasmagoria. Its unity is superimposed. Dodd, Mead and Company, 1920); and Light and Whereas, “under conditions of modernity”, in the Color in Advertising and Merchandising (New York: “contingent experience of the individual” outside the D. Van Nostrand Co., 1927). opera house, “the separate senses do not unite” into a unified perception, here “disparate procedures are 35. Loyd A. Jones, ‘Tinted Films for Sound Positives’, simply aggregated in such a way as to make them 224–225. appear collectively binding”’ (25). 36. Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, 19. 42. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its 37. Jones, ‘Tinted Films for Sound Positives’, 225. Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)’, in Selected Writings: Volume 3: 1935–1938, 101–133, 38. Ibid. Though without reference to him, Natalie edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Kalmus adapts Jones’ notion of ‘color conscious- translated by Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn ness’ (and many of the same justifications for colour) (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2002), 117–118.

Abstract: ‘Harmonious sensations of sound by means of colors’: vernacular colour abstractions in silent cinema, by Joshua Yumibe

This essay deals with popular experiments with synaesthesia in silent cinema. In 1896, for example, C. Francis Jenkins, an inventor of one of the earliest film projectors, discussed the cinema’s potential to enchant an audience with abstract, chromatic effects. Over the next two years, he developed this idea further by projecting alternating tinted strips of film in a professed attempt to evoke through colour the sensations of sound. Similarly, at the end of the 1920s, Loyd Jones, a Kodak technician, developed the Sonochrome line of pre-tinted filmstocks, which proposed a synaesthetic correspondance among the colours of the tints, sounds, and the emotions of an audience. During this same period Jones also invented a kaleidoscopic lens attachment for film projectors meant to create abstract ‘mobile colour effects’. These various experiments will be situated in relation to early, modernist abstraction exemplified by the works of artists such as Kandinsky, Scriabin, and Survage. Key words: C. Francis Jenkins, Loyd Jones, Sonochrome, motion picture colour processes, synaesthesia

FILM HISTORY: Volume 21, Number 2, 2009 – p. 176 Copyright of Film History is the property of Indiana University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.