ABSTRACT

In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille complained that ‘color movies diverted interest from narrative and action, offended the color sensitivities of many, and cost too much’. Douglas Fairbanks voiced a similar objection, arguing that color took ‘the mind of the spectator away from the picture itself, making him conscious of the mechanics – the artificiality – of the whole thing, so that he no longer lived in the story with the characters’. This paper explores Fairbanks's efforts in The Black Pirate (1926) to control the colour, putting it to the service of the film's narrative and relying, in part, on ‘blackened dyes’ to desaturate the film's color.

KEYWORDS

Two-Colour Technicolor, The Black Pirate, Douglas Fairbanks, Herbert Kalmus, Leonard Troland, Arthur Ball

This essay looks at the anxieties that surround the introduction of a new motion-picture technology – in this case, two-colour Technicolor – in terms of its potential threat to the aesthetic norm of black-and-white cinematography and at the ways in which those anxieties are managed. Inasmuch as colour provides the potential of spectacle, its status as spectacle enables it to disrupt a film's narrative flow, diverting the spectator's attention from the world of the narrative to the means of that world's representation. A tension exists in every film and at every moment within every film between the spectator's belief that she is in the world of the film and her knowledge that she is not, between inhabiting the film and watching it from outside of it, between immersion in the narrative and awareness of its operations. This tension tends to find its ‘equilibrium profile’ as the new technology, which initially foregrounds itself in the display of itself as spectacle, begins to lend itself to narrativization and its elements of novelty disappear into narrative practice. But when that technology is inherently flawed, as was the case with two-colour film processes, which can never achieve the more accurate colour rendition of three-colour processes, the struggle for normativization can be particularly neurotic, as the story of the repression of colour in The Black Pirate (1926) illustrates. From its initial conceptualization in preproduction, to its production and postproduction phases, the film's producers sought to ‘take the color out of color’, as its director, Albert Parker, famously put it.