Kinemacolor was the world’s first successful natural colour motion picture process. Between 1908 and 1917 it was exhibited across every continent, greatly influencing perceptions of cinema, as much through its subject matter as its depiction of colour. Its technical limitations – limited colour range, reported audience eye-strain, fringing that accompanied lateral motion – were outweighed by the exoticism of its travel subjects and the prestige of its actualities, which featured British royalty. Kinemacolor brought new audiences to cinema and increased appreciation of what cinema might achieve. Its success inspired efforts to develop more accurate colour systems, leading ultimately to three-strip Technicolor.

The two-colour additive process was invented by British filmmaker and film laboratory owner George Albert Smith, based in Hove, near Brighton, East Sussex. Smith undertook the project in 1902 at the behest of Anglo-American film producer Charles Urban, who had been funding the development of the three-colour process of Edward Turner, which had failed to work in projection. Smith concluded that a three-colour mechanical solution was unfeasible, but (probably inspired by the experimental work of W.N.L. Davidson and Benjamin Jumeaux, which he had processed at his Hove studio) he discovered that he could use just two primary complementary colours, red and green, to yield a satisfactory colour record. He patented his solution in 1906 (McKernan, 2005: pp. 207–9).

Kinemacolor was exploited through exhibition rights, the sale of international patent rights, and exclusive use of Kinemacolor apparatus and films. Kinemacolor was shown in many more countries than those few countries for which patent rights were sold, and there were mixed fortunes for those territories that paid handsomely for those rights. The Kinemacolor Company of America, formed in February 1910 (over which Urban had limited influence before it became independent of him the following year), flourished for a while, obtaining a licence to operate from the Motion Picture Patents Company, the only new company to join the trust following its formation in September 1908. Studios for fiction films were rented in 1912 in Whitestone, Long Island, NY, and at 4500 Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, but the latter had closed within a year (Bowser, 1990: pp. 229–32). Insufficient numbers of new films, combined with the reluctance of exhibitors to install specialist equipment, led to the company’s failure before World War I. A French venture, initiated by Raleigh et Robert, copied the British strategy of having a dedicated film company, Kinemacolor de France, and showcase theatre, the Théâtre Edouard VII in Paris. But the company flotation failed, and the theatre was a financial disaster that helped bring down Kinemacolor. However, in Japan, where Kinemacolor was controlled by the Tenkatsu film combine, local exhibition and production flourished (McKernan, 2013: pp. 109–15). Other countries exhibited Kinemacolor but did not engage in local production. In Italy there were Kinemacolor films produced by Comerio Films c.1912–14, but it is unclear whether it did so under licence (Gervasio, 2017: pp. 38–9).

Over a three-year period, from April 1911 to March 1914, Kinemacolor in Britain – having started out in March 1909 with £30,000 in capital – showed receipts of £297,048 and expenditure of £260,070, demonstrating a potentially productive and profitable business, but at a high cost (McKernan, 2013: pp. 122–3). Though in theory it was in competition with the artificial, stencil-coloured systems of Gaumont and Pathé, in practice the films of the latter were shown in conventional cinemas, while Kinemacolor films were sold to a different market, one that was predominantly theatre-based and able to attract audiences willing pay higher prices for a luxury entertainment. Rival natural colour systems, notably Gaumont’s three-colour Chronochrome, first shown in November 1912, could boast a more naturalistic color rendition than Kinemacolor, but was not shown widely enough to be a commercial threat (McKernan, 2013: pp. 98–9).

What brought down Kinemacolor, however, was a patent suit from a rival film colour system that was seen by almost no-one. It came from William Friese Greene, British inventor of the Biocolour system, who sued the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company for infringement of his supposed patent rights. Though Charles Urban won the initial case (December, 1913), he lost on appeal (March, 1914), the judge damning Kinemacolor for failing to reproduce the blue that its patent said that it could (McKernan, 2013: pp. 118–22). This outcome did not prevent further Kinemacolor production, but destroyed its exclusivity. Urban liquidated the Natural Color Kinematograph Company and formed a new production company, Colorfilms, but future production plans were stymied by the onset of World War I. Urban lobbied to have Kinemacolor used in British official propaganda films, but succeeded no further than having some colour sequences in the documentary feature Britain Prepared (1915), which were dropped for its international release version (McKernan, 2002: p. 370). Kinemacolor production and exhibition worldwide had mostly ceased by 1914, though films using the system continued to be made and exhibited in Japan until 1917. The last film to use Kinemacolor was the Japanese fiction film Saiyûki zokuhen (1917) (Komatsu, 1995: p. 79).

Urban moved his diverse businesses to the United States following the war under an umbrella company Urban Motion Picture Industries, formed in 1920 and located at Irvington-on-Hudson, NY (McKernan, 2013: p. 178). He attempted to revive Kinemacolor through a projection system devised in 1915 by engineer Henry Joy, with an improved intermittent movement that halved the time interval between taking red and green records, entitled Kinekrom (Thomas, 1969: p. 35). Lacking the capital to produce new Kinekrom films, Urban made use of his Kinemacolor library for a trial public screening at the Wurlitzer Fine Arts Hall, New York, in November 1916, followed by a short run at Samuel Rothafel’s Capitol Theatre over June and July in 1924. The collapse of Urban Motion Picture Industries in 1925 brought an end to Kinekrom, and the Kinemacolor library of films was largely lost, either melted down, or passed on to film libraries as oddly slow-moving B/W stock footage (McKernan, 2013: pp. 188–96).

Engineers who had worked for Urban in London, or with the Kinemacolor Company of America, worked on improvements based on Kinemacolor’s principles, among them William Crespinel, who would devise the two-colour subtractive colour system Cinecolor, and William Francis Fox, who experimented with both additive and subtractive colour systems. American inventor William Van Doren Kelley, having experimented with a four-colour rotating disc additive system similar to Kinemacolor, turned to subtractive solutions and produced (with Charles Raleigh, of Raleigh et Robert, and Kinemacolor de France) two-colour Prizma Color which enjoyed some success in the early 1920s. Also keeping an eye on Kinemacolor, during his early colour development work, was Herbert Kalmus, whose subtractive three-strip Technicolor would consign Kinemacolor, and all other additive colour systems, apart from television, to the history books (McKernan, 2013: pp. 188–9, 196).