... and that could be because color film was not a technical innovation that completely upended the film industry and film careers in the dramatic fashion that sound did.
This entry in Serge Bromberg's and Eric Lange's documentaries on the birth of cinema focuses on the development of color films. It starts out talking about the earliest and simplest of methods - handpainting. Even when this method is automated it still is expensive in terms of both time and money.
The second method has to do with shooting film through separate filters and then superimposing or registering those images onto each other. Red and green were the filtered images that were registered, and the documentary doesn't mention this, but that was because that any human skin tone can be produced with a combination of red and green.
Technicolor came up with a way to record all three primary colors on one frame with good registration, thus bringing about the first "three strip" color film in 1935, "Becky Sharp". Oddly enough, the documentary discusses Becky Sharp at the beginning and not at the end.
Being a little French centric, it discusses how WWII stopped color filming in France for the duration of the war, but fails to discuss what ultimately brought color film into dominance over black and white movies - the advent of television. Once the big screen had to deal with the attack of the small screens, color and widescreen came into prominence. This is not discussed.
I'd say that this documentary by Blomberg and Lange is better than the one that they produced on the advent of sound films, if only because it is not so crowded with inventors and their experiments that in the end went nowhere.
