Page 17 - RD_0314

Solarchrome - Continued

The little I know about the Solarchrome process comes from remembered conversations with
the late Tom Nurse – who spent his working life in a succession of film labs. He managed the
Supreme Films lab in Sydney for many years, then moved to Colorfilm when they took over
that facility.
In Australia, it was always necessary to do things as simply and cheaply as possible. All film
stock was imported. In this case, the Cinecolor method you described was the one used:
orthochromatic and panchromatic stock being run together through a standard camera. The
resulting two camera negatives then became the contact printing masters, and the print stock
had emulsion on both sides. What I’m not sure about is how the prints were made: how was
each side of the print stock exposed separately to its negative while leaving the emulsion on the
other side of the print stock unaffected (Tom probably explained this to me but I don’t
remember the explanation).

After black and white processing of the print stock, it was then floated on the meniscus of a
toning bath (made out of a long piece of rain guttering) to tone the image on one side
red/orange, then flipped and the process repeated to tone the other side blue. You can imagine
the precision with which this had to be done: if anything happened with the steady progress of
the print and the meniscus tension was lost, so that the film sagged into the toning solution, the
print was ruined. On top of that, you had all the obvious registration problems in the printer.
Does that mean the films tended to be processed in short lengths (like a
newsreel item or a commercial) so that when things went wrong you minimised your losses?

I don’t know whether the dyes were constant. The tinting and toning processes used in the silent
years employed a number of dye formulations and I imagine these would still have been well
known among older lab technicians in the 1940s – 1950s. In a small market like Australia there
could have been supply problems, so there might have been some variation in the two colours
depending on the continuity of supply of the dye solutions at the time, but I don’t know – all we
can do is look at the surviving examples and guess! There is also the question of whether the
dyes faded with time or because of repeated exposure to the arc light in the projector. Checking
out some tinted prints at the NFSA, one can see that fading did occur – the colour has faded in
the picture area, compare to the colour along the edges between the perforations (where there
was no exposure to the projector light.)

To the best of my knowledge, all films with the Solarchrome/ MalComm and other local trade
names were processed in Australia. Obviously we did import Cinecolor, Technicolor and other
prints straight from the US: whether US companies supplied bipack dupe negs for local
Australian release printing (as happened with black and white films in the 1940s) seems
unlikely. I doubt if the quantity of work would have warranted it.

Maybe some other RD readers can add to this information. You are right in that the early days
of colour processing in Australia haven’t been well documented, and the knowledge is now
rapidly passing out of living memory.

I’ve checked the Wikipedia entry on “bipack color” which is worth a read but still leaves
questions unanswered.

Kind regards
Ray
Reproduced with the permission of the author
Reel Deals - 17 - March 2014