Page 35 - RD_2021-03

needed to be a man of mechanical discretion) had to adjust the amount of this scattered light
against the total brilliance of screen illumination so that residual “travel ghost” on the screen was
not more than the audience could be got to put up with.

As to the films, everything depended upon how many hands they had passed through before you
saw them. They were not rented, but sold outright, each exhibitor selling them to a less opulent
brother exhibitor when he had done with them.
After about six sales, with a couple of months’ intensive usage between each sale, the films had
gathered a crop of trick effects and rainstorms which made them additionally effective !

A story used to go that the first trick film was made by accident. It had been taken as a news film
of a well-known statesman entering a train. Somehow the part where he stepped into the carriage
came to grief, and had to be cut. Thus the picture showed the statesman one moment on the
platform and the next vanished. (That was long before my time.)
Shortly before I took my first moving pictures, an attraction at the Alhambra, Leicester Square,
was the screening (after the regular variety show) of beautifully hand-coloured or stencil-
coloured trick films made by Pathé Frères in Paris.
Then, to the Palace Theatre, came
Charles Urban’s yet more
wonderful Kinemacolor, a system
of additive two-colour
cinematography which is said to
have made a quarter of a million
pounds for its promoter, which
was big money for those days.

The directness and simplicity of
Kinemacolor was to me its
greatest charm. Pictures were
taken in a camera similar to any
other cine camera of the claw type
except that it had geared in front
of the lens a rotating frame containing in either half a green and a red gelatine colour filter. This
“filter frame” travelled at half the speed of the intermittent mechanism. Thus, each alternate
picture taken with such a camera became a red or a green colour-record negative. The camera was
run at not less than 32 pictures a second, or a minimum of double the then full silent picture speed.
(Talkies were not to come in till sixteen years later.)

From the negative a black and white positive was made in the ordinary way, and this was run
through a projector also driven at double the normal speed and fitted with a rotating filter frame
very similar to that in the camera. To-day such a system would be the height of simplicity. In
those earlier times, commercial panchromatic film being unobtainable, we had to panchromatise
our own. There were other snags, which did not prevent Kinemacolor from giving quite a
wonderful show for its own time, with possibilities of improved presentation that have even now
never been taken advantage of.

One thing in those days was just the same as now. From time to time we learned that true
stereoscopic cinematography had been accomplished at last. And then we waited!

March 2021 REEL DEALS 35