The Invention of Cinema: Cinema's First Colors. 2021. France. Directed by Eric Lange. Written by Eric Lange and Serge Bromberg. Narrated by Leonard Maltin. 60 min.
Narrated by Leonard Maltin, this documentary details the complicated history of efforts to bring color to the motion picture screen, from 18th Century pre-cinema to the dawn of Technicolor. Grounded in a wealth of recent scholarship and illustrated with rare ephemera and excerpts from restored films preserved in eighteen international archives, the film offers a visually rich, engaging narrative of scientists, technicians and businessmen working together to satisfy our desire to see color in motion.
Le Tour du Monde d’un policier (A Detective’s Tour). 1905. France. 17 min.
Partly tinted and hand-colored, a detective’s assignment to track a bank embezzler takes him around the world from Paris through Calcutta, Bombay, and Yokohama to New York. Matched stage sets and point of view shots through mattes that suggest telescopic views make clever use of documentary stock footage in this Pathé production, ambitious for its time.