Perhaps it is because I’m used to see it in black and white, but it’s fascinating to see how incredibly modern Berlin looks in this colour film from 1936. It was a beautiful city. Except for the bloody Nazis.
You may want to turn off the music, as it made me want to invade Poland.
The crisp quality and natural look of the picture is impressive, considering that colour films were cumbersome and offered quite imperfect results at the time. Keep in mind that, by 1947, only 12 per cent of American films were colour. And it wasn’t until the ’50s, with the advent of television, that colour had a major push in the film industry. Still, by the middle of that decade, only 50 per cent of Hollywood films were in colour.
Modern colour didn’t come to life until 1952, when Kodak introduced an advanced version of their 35mm Eastmancolor film. This was the first economical colour system that used a single strip of film instead of the multiple-strip methods available at the time. It replaced the three-strip Technicolor system that was the most popular at the time but costed three times as much money as black-and-white films. [Thanks Karl!]