Lately, I’ve been marveling at some of the silent films TCM has been showing from before 1910. But none of them impressed me as much as this:
The world’s first colour moving pictures dating from 1902 have been found by the National Media Museum in Bradford after lying forgotten in an old tin for 110 years.
The discovery is a breakthrough in cinema history.
Michael Harvey from the National Media Museum and Bryony Dixon from the British Film Institute talk about the importance of the discovery.
The previous earliest colour film, using the Kinemacolour process, was thought to date from 1909 and was actually an inferior method.
The newly-discovered films were made by pioneer Edward Raymond Turner from London who patented his colour process on 22 March 1899.
The story of Edwardian colour cinema then moved to Brighton. Turner shot the test films in 1902 but his pioneering work ended abruptly when he died suddenly of a heart attack.
Watch the video. It’s pretty cool. Some guy just invented it on his own, and shot home movies of his kids — but he couldn’t figure how to make it work with a projector. So they were never seen, until now (with computer help).
This Turner, I assume, is not to be confused with colorization pioneer Ted…
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Wow! It is amazing that a color movie was made in 1902. I thought mid-20s would be the very earliest. Guess I was wrong.
Ted , who put the T inTCM.
1902: First color movie produced
1902: First time the phrase “Oh, God, the Turners are showing their home movies of their dopey kids again!” was uttered
Good one, Doug.
Something about that still image from the film looks like something George Harrison might have seen upon sampling the coffee after dinner with his dentist: “Dr. Robert, are those your children out in the garden? Whoaaaa…”
Very English, very mundane, very bourgeois, but also psychedelic. I guess it’s the explosion of out-of-register color coming off that sunflower on the left…