ABSTRACT
In 1928 when natural color photography was still a rarity in commercial movie theatres, amateurs claimed color filmmaking as their own terrain for aesthetic experimentation and discovery. 1 That year, Kodak introduced their Kodacolor process and amateurs encountered a new technology that set their medium apart from the commercial cinema. For over a decade, from 1928 until the end of the 1930s, amateur filmmakers explored color film aesthetics, first with Kodacolor, and later with the much-improved Kodachrome process, introduced in 1935. An editorial titled “Color Unlimited,” published in 1935, articulated the amateur’s position in explicit terms:
While sound movies were a definite product of the theatrical motion picture industry, it is indisputable that a wide use of color movies has been a specific product of personal filming ... Amateurs are several jumps ahead in the intelligent use of color in cinematography, because their employment of it has been so extensive. As amateur soundhas been aided by Hollywood pathfinding, so can amateurs extend to their professional friends a helping hand in this new color field which will rapidly engage Hollywood’s interest.(Movie Makers1935a: 193)
