The First Movie In Color Is Not The One You Think
One common misconception about cinema history is that color film was invented sometime in the 1930s. It's easy to understand why people assume this — the films most commonly identified as classics of early color cinematography come from the late 1930s or later, and black and white films still outnumbered color ones until the 1960s.
If you survey members of the general public on what the first color film was, many will guess 1939's "The Wizard of Oz," a historically significant classic which had a nightmarish production. But getting the quality of color film to the point where Oz's Technicolor beauty could exist required decades of gradual technical innovations, predating the widespread adoption of synchronized sound.
Even cinephiles who know that "The Wizard of Oz" was not the first movie in color might have trouble guessing what the actual first one was — probably because most of them don't spend much time watch old British documentary shorts.
Why everyone thinks The Wizard of Oz was the first color movie
If "The Wizard of Oz" had been the first film to use color, it would have been a mind-blowing introduction to the format. That iconic transition from Dorothy's sepia-tinted house into the hyper-saturated land of Oz ("Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore") is a perfect demonstration of how color can artistically enhance a story.
For many who assume "The Wizard of Oz" is the first color film, it might be the oldest color film they've seen — as a children's classic and perennial TV favorite, it's stayed in the public consciousness more than perhaps any other movie from the 1930s. The one color film predating "Oz" to rival its ongoing popularity might be another fantasy musical: "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," the first Disney princess movie from 1937. Walt Disney was an early adopter of three-strip Technicolor; his Oscar-winning 1932 short "Flowers and Trees" was the first commercial release to showcase the process.
Other pre-"Oz" Technicolor films you might have heard of include the 1938 swashbuckling classic "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and the 1932 horror film "Doctor X" (immortalized in the song "Science Fiction Double Feature," from the box office flop-turned-important-cult-classic "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"). But the history of color on film goes back well before even Technicolor.
What was the actual first movie in color?
Technically, there were tons of films in the silent era shown in color — but most of them weren't filmed in color. French director Georges Méliès, who invented many of the first special effects techniques in shorts like 1902's "A Trip to the Moon," had a crew of 220 women hand-painting his films frame-by-frame. Even silent films and some early sound films which didn't have such elaborate painting often tinted their images with different colors.
The first process for filming motion pictures in color was patented by British inventor Edward Raymond Turner in 1899. Alternating between red, green, and blue filters and combining frames to create full-color images, it proved too cumbersome for commercial use. After Turner's death in 1903, George Albert Smith created a simplified two-color process (using only red and green) dubbed Kinemacolor in 1906.
Early experiments in Kinemacolor film include "Tartans of Scottish Clans" and "Two Clowns," both from 1906. The first demonstration of Kinemacolor, however, was on May 1, 1908, and the first public screenings began on February 26, 1909. While a few different Kinemacolor shorts were produced in 1908, Smith's "A Visit to the Seaside" (pictured above), a slice-of-life short showcasing women at the beach, is cited as the first to be released.
How color has changed in filmmaking and why it's important
Kinemacolor's additive color process required special projectors to screen, and it fell out of popularity by 1915. Technicolor soon supplanted it as the go-to process for color film. Technicolor Process 1, invented in 1916, was an additive two-strip process akin to Kinemacolor, using a beam-splitter behind the camera lens to film the red and green images. In 1922, Technicolor Process 2 switched from an additive to a subtractive color model. Due to technical limitations and high expenses, few features were filmed entirely with Process 2, but many black and white films, including the 1920s versions of "Ben-Hur" and "The Phantom of the Opera," had select color sequences.
Technicolor Process 3, invented in 1928, fixed some of the technical problems with Process 2, leading to a mini-boom of color talkies. But it was Process 4, aka three-strip Technicolor, that changed the game in 1932, adding blue into the previously red and green palette for a full range of vibrant color. In 1935, "Becky Sharp" became the first live-action feature shot entirely in Technicolor. Three-strip Technicolor produced amazing results — just look at the cinematography in "The Wizard of Oz," "Gone with the Wind," or "The Red Shoes" — but was still expensive and difficult to use, and thus was saved for only the biggest spectacles.
The invention of Eastmancolor in 1950 simplified the process of filming in color significantly, getting a full range of colors on a single strip of film — and finally allowing color to overtake black and white as the most common film format.