The Prizma four-colour additive process was the company’s first publicly demonstrated natural colour process and it was the precursor to later Prizma processes, as well as many other two-colour processes. During the less than two years of its existence, Prizma #1 colour films received positive reviews from both the film industry and the public. With the introduction of subtractive colour processes soon to arrive, Prizma’s four-colour additive process reportedly obtained some of the best results that an additive colour process could achieve. It was also one of the last processes to use colour projection filters to achieve natural colour on film.

The inventor William Van Doren Kelley had been experimenting with colour on film since 1912, when he developed a process called Panchromotion. He formed a company, with the same name, the following year in New York. After four years of research and experimentation – with Charles Raleigh, from Kinemacolor, and Elias B Koopman and Joseph Mason, from Biograph, on board – Panchromotion incorporated as Prizma in 1916, with capital amounting to $2 million (Theisen, 1936; Anon., 1916).

Prizma #1 was a four-colour additive process based on Kelley and Raleigh’s invention. It also built upon ideas patented by Max Mayer and Maurice J. Wohl. The Prizma camera took four-colour records in successive frames on a single negative through a colour filter wheel; the B/W positive film, with latent colour information, was then projected at 32 fps, through a spinning colour filter disc attached to a normal projector. 

Like the early cinema pioneers, such as the Lumière brothers, Kelley sent his cinematographers with the Prizma cameras throughout the United States and the East Asia (China and Japan), in 1916, to make travelogue and nature films – the negatives were returned, and processed at the Prizma laboratory in Jersey City, New Jersey.

The first Prizma #1 colour film exhibition was on Thursday, February 8, 1917, at the auditorium of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Preceding each short subject screening, explanatory remarks were given by Ernest Fox Nichols, Professor of Physics at Yale University, regarding the application of scientific principles and laws of light and optics to the Prizma four-colour process (MacDonald, 1917). Later, these Prizma #1 colour films made their theatrical debut on February 25, 1917, at the Strand Theatre, Broadway, New York (Anon., 1917). After this debut, demand for four-colour Prizma shorts grew gradually among the cinemas and theatres of New York. All of these shorts were travelogues, or nature films, with subjects such as Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Coast, New Mexico and the like (MacDonald, 1917).

The first feature-length film photographed using the Prizma #1 colour system was Our Navy (1917), a 12-reel documentary film about the US Navy, filmed and directed by Dr. George A. Dorsey, a celebrated traveller and anthropologist. It was filmed during September 1917, and opened on Sunday evening, December 23, 1917, at the 44th Street Theatre, New York City – running for eight weeks (Anon., 1918a). After this successful run, the director Dr. Dorsey took the film on a tour of cities throughout the United States (Anon., 1918b).

As a diligent inventor, Kelley never stopped working to perfect the Prizma process. By the end of 1917, he had already successfully developed the next version of Prizma: a two-colour additive process employing an alternate-dye method. In this new process, alternate frames in the positive prints were dyed red and green. The result was like transferring the colour projection filters onto the film print itself, thus eliminating the need for the spinning filter wheel that previously had to be attached to the projector. The projector still had to run at 32 fps to achieve the natural colour effect on screen.

Although Our Navy was shot on four-colour negative, the opening screening of the film on December 23, 1917, was a demonstration of the new alternate-dye version of the Prizma process (Cory, 1918). However, since this process was complicated and time-consuming, not many prints of Our Navy were made using the alternate-dye method. As reported by The Washington Post, the screening of the film at the National Theater in Washington, DC, in July 1918, was still projected from a B/W print through a colour wheel filter (Anon., 1918c).

Kelley’s vision for natural colour films was to make them as easy to project as B/W prints, without the requirement for any attachments to the projector, or frame-rate adjustments. He eventually achieved this goal at the end of 1918 with the third version of Prizma process using double-coated positive film. The introduction of this improved version of the Prizma process marked the end of the Prizma’s four-colour additive process.