Eventually one gets to the point where
waking up in the morning to check the Internet for the latest film
news gets to be a rather pointless task. Let’s be frank with
ourselves: a lot of this movie news is just a bunch of press releases
being recycled for mass consumption. The only difference is the voice
doing the recycling. We – the CHUDs, the Aint It Cools, and SlashFilms
– are all pimping the same studio marketing materials, but in
different ways.

To top it off we tend to get wrapped up
in ourselves, as writers and readers. Writers can develop a kind of
Moses-complex, like we’re handing down law from the
mountaintop, inscribed in tiny italic blurbs on the backs of DVD cases. Readers can tend to take everything personally. It’s a tiresome
relationship, I can attest, as a devoted reader and writer.

It’s easy to forget why we started coming
here in the first place: to celebrate the movies, for the love of
cinema. It’s the one reason I still read CHUD and try to write for CHUD as often as I can.
There’s a lot of love here. It doesn’t pay the bills, but on the
mornings where it’s hard to care about the latest remakes
or sequels or comic book adaptations, Nick lets me post about the things that remind me why I fell in love
with film. You can’t put a price tag on that.

Now that we’ve got all the mushy stuff out of the way, what follows is footage from the first Kodachrome film tests, performed in 1922. It’s not the earliest example of color motion picture film* – but it may be the earliest existing example of color reversal motion picture film. (The Technicolor processes used negative.) 

This isn’t just a bunch of pretty pictures; it’s a historical record of just how far the movies have come, and how far they still have to go. Consider the hundreds of film formats and processes that have come and gone since these early tests, and then try to think how different things will be in another 90 years.

Read Kodak’s article on the restoration and then HUG IT OUT ON THE MESSAGE BOARDS.


* Britain’s Kinemacolor (two colors, red and cyan) was used commercially from 1908 to
1911; the Technicolor Process 1 (red and green) was introduced in 1916, and evolved
into Process 2 by the time the Kodak tests were photographed. Chester M. Franklin’s The Toll of the Sea is an example of Process 2 color.