By CHIARA MARAÑÓN & JUAN SOTO TABORDA
Most people know Technicolor as the hallmark of Hollywood’s golden age of colour cinema, yet few have heard of one of its most direct predecessors: Gasparcolor—a groundbreaking three-channel monopack film stock, the first of its kind and the most stable system of its era. Its trailblazing, complex technology marks a fascinating, if brief, chapter in cinema history, and the vibrancy and endurance of its colours remain unmatched to this day. The majority of available prints of Gasparcolor films today are modern reproductions of the original nitrate copies from the 1930s and 1940s, when the system became the main stock for animation artists such as Oskar and Hans Fischinger, Gyula Macskássy, Len Lye, George Pal, Jean Painlevé, or Irena Dodalová and Karel Dodal. Preserving and restoring the original materials has been (and remains) challenging. There have been successful experiments with digital reconstructions, such as the early Gasparcolor commercial animation IZZÓ SZERELEM (1938) by Hungarian Gyula Macskássy, which was restored by the National Film Institute Hungary (NFI) in 2022 along with the rest of his commercial body of work, and the restoration of Hans Fischinger’s TANZ DER FARBEN (1939) by the Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum (DFF) in collaboration with the Bundesarchiv and Scan2Screen. Our main goal with this programme was to screen from prints, however. Even if many are Gasparcolor imitations transferred to Kodachrome, Eastmancolor, or other modern emulsions, we have purposefully chosen grain over pixel, because this is a stock built around the very notion of colour and the photochemical miracle of capturing it on film. Most of the works in this programme are animated or experimental—genres where the heightened, vibrant hues of Gasparcolor could shine in all their glory, free from the rules of realism and representation. Moving to digital would allow us to perhaps retrieve those colours as they once were, but would also mean letting some of the magic go. And who would choose to cut out the magic, especially when it comes to young audiences?
There is also a (not so) hidden fetishistic pleasure in taking the prints out of the vaults for another excursion—a ritual that quickens our hearts: opening the canisters, loading the 35mm and 16mm projectors, switching on the Xenon bulb and listening to the film travel through the mechanism before it reaches the screen, creating a play of light and shadow, flickering illusions engendered by dancing silver grains, bringing the allure of the old days to today’s audiences. In this case, that includes children like our own little Gaspar—named after this very film colour technology—who, at one and a half years old, has never seen celluloid in action, even though his eyes are already full of pixels.
Hungarian-born engineer and chemist Béla Gáspár began experimenting with colour film as early as 1906, and by 1926 he was working at Agfa’s laboratory in Berlin. His breakthrough came in the early 1930s with the publication of his first patent for Gasparcolor, the first practical three-colour, multilayer film stock. Unlike earlier systems, Gasparcolor used a special double-coated film: one side carried a cyan layer, while the other side held magenta and yellow layers. To create an image, the process needed black-and-white records of red, green, and blue light, captured either with a beam-splitter camera or by photographing through colour filters in succession. In the words of film scholar Barbara Flueckiger, Gasparcolor was both chemically and optically sophisticated.
As the method suited controlled studio techniques, most Gasparcolor films ended up being animations. A notable exception is a 1935 live-action film made by the Gasparcolor technical manager Adrian Klein in London. As Sarah Street describes, COLOUR ON THE THAMES (1935) is a “gently paced film, [and] the journey into London provides an excellent vehicle to display Gasparcolor, with its rendering of the red funnels and blue skies in particular,” which we will present in a 1990 print made on Kodak Eastman Color stock from the BFI.
When Béla Gáspár crossed paths with artist and cinema technician Oskar Fischinger, the Gasparcolor process found its first public showcase. Fischinger engineered special camera mechanisms for Gáspár that synchronised the shutter with a rotating wheel containing three colour-filter segments, enabling successive cyan, yellow, and magenta exposures. The result was KREISE (1933), originally conceived as a purely abstract work of art. However, since abstract art was deemed “degenerate” by the Nazi Censorship Board, the film was unable to be approved. To circumvent this, Fischinger added a final title card reading “Tolirag reaches all circles of society,” which reframed the film as an advertisement and thus exempted it from censorship. KREISE established Gasparcolor as the premier medium for colour animation. Fischinger’s mechanism was not flawless, but with better luck it might have secured an international market for the system. Instead, the outbreak of war altered the course of history, and Béla Gáspár and his company’s success ebbed away. Like Fischinger, he also left Germany—first for the UK, where some of the most extraordinary demonstrations of Gasparcolor artistry were created by filmmakers such as Len Lye and George Pal. All of them would eventually migrate to the United States, where Technicolor was already firmly establishing itself as the dominant colour system for the studios and would end up buying the Gasparcolor patent.
It’s exhilarating to see how the work of iconic New Zealand artist Len Lye, whose RAINBOW DANCE (1936) and COLOUR FLIGHT (1938) form two of the most dazzling films in this programme, propelled Gasparcolor to new heights. Making inventive use of its three-channel separation process and black-and-white intermediate negatives, Lye’s visionary approach, which experimented with the insertion of materials of various textures and origins, rendered the film material into a kind of kinetic collage. He playfully fused live-action footage with hand-painted and stencilled designs, layered positives and negatives, and devised unique, self-made effects, each frame pulsing with eye-popping, candy-coloured dynamism.
We stumbled upon Béla Gáspár and his Gasparcolor almost by chance some years ago, yet were immediately captivated by the spectacular brilliance of its palette—a palette that enabled great artists of early cinema to paint worlds that would otherwise have remained monochrome, muted by the looming shadow of World War II. Today, we cannot help but wonder whether the aggressively bright, oversaturated colours of our own digital age will be preserved, and if so, what traces they will carry of the destruction and inhumanity they inevitably refract and reflect. Are these our true colours?
Last but not least, this programme is only possible thanks to the work of the archives who have taken care of these treasures and keep them available and visible: NFI Hungary, NFA Prague, Filmmuseum Vienna, Eye Filmmuseum, Les Documents Cinématographiques, British Film Institute and Light Cone.
Sarah Street, Colour Films in Britain. The Negotiation of Innovation 1900–55 (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 47.