ABSTRACT
Kinemacolor, the first commercially exploited ‘natural colour’ process, has often been considered as a step in the wrong direction for colour cinema. But it was an extraordinarily coherent system, based on a mechanical apparatus and involving a whole conception of what cinema was, what it should be, how it should be done and sold, and what was to be its place within culture. Moreover, the characteristics of the process involved highly original perceptual traits that are of major theoretical interest today. Technically invented by George Albert Smith, it was its promoter Charles Urban that gave it its real coherence. For Urban, Kinemacolor was conceived as a true reinvention of cinema. Cinema thus never ceases to be confronted with reinvention projects.
