At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union used captured German film stock and Agfacolor patents to add color to their movies for the first time—or so goes the usual story. But the Soviet experience with color film turns out to be more complicated than this, explains historian Philip Cavendish in his exploration of the Soviet Union’s “political imperative of color.”
People in the USSR were actually experimenting with color film processes as early as the mid-1920s. After a quartet of Technicolor shorts from the US wowed the 1935 Moscow International Film Festival, the nation went all out to make color films. At least seventy-four color films were made in the Soviet Union before the Nazi invasion in 1941.
“The discourse that emerged stressed the need to overcome the relative technological backwardness of the Soviet film industry,” Cavendish writes, “to compete on an equal footing with the United States, and thus to demonstrate the dynamic potential of the Soviet Union’s planned economy.”
Stalin himself took a keen interest in color film, making the acquisition of color film technology a prime political goal. Color was ideological, reflecting “the new rhetoric of consumer choice and material abundance” that “stressed the beautiful, joyous, and fulfilling quality of life in the Soviet Union.” Film director Grigori Aleksandrov put it this way in 1940:
“Color is essential for the expression of joyfulness and happiness,” he claimed. “Our festivals are bright and saturated with color. All our folk art dazzles with the richness of its palette. Color is an essential element in the multinational art of the Soviet Union.”
Color motion picture film came in two types in the 1930s. There was a two-color process that “reproduced a limited range of the color spectrum,” Cavendish writes. This was something the Soviets were able to figure out relatively easily and use for live-action feature films, documentaries, and animations produced and distributed between 1931 and 1941. A restored version of the two-color The Carnival of Colors (1935), a documentary that extols color film, has a credit sequence worthy of the trippy Sixties.
But three-color processing, which reproduces a full spectrum of color, was a much greater challenge. The gold standard was Technicolor, an American company that “fiercely protected” its commercial secrets. Making something similar was a technological puzzle—it had taken Technicolor itself a dozen years to perfect its three-color process.
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“First, it required the design and manufacture of a special ‘three-strip’ camera for the purposes of live-action filming,” Cavendish explains, “and, second, because it involved complex chemical processing and printing procedures that had to be developed ex nihilo.”
The fire behind the effort for a three-color process was lit at that Moscow International Film Festival in 1935. Pioneer Pictures’s La Cucaracha, a live-action short, and three Disney Silly Symphony cartoons, all made with Technicolor’s “three-strip’ camera and dye-transfer and imbibition method” were a sensation: these were first Technicolor films seen in the Soviet Union. The Disney cartoons were awarded a special prize and purchased for general release.
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A Soviet alternative to Disney then became the Soviet ideal. But when the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution came in 1937 without much to show for it, color-wise, heads started to roll. In the Soviet dictatorship, this was meant literally: engineers and senior managers in charge of color film production would be denounced, arrested, and executed during the Great Purges of 1937–1838.
Eventually, a three-color process would be worked out and used for 1939’s The Blossoming Young (a.k.a. Blooming Youth), which documents a parade of athletes in Red Square. Stalin himself can be glimpsed in color in this film, evidently rather faded in this version. But the war largely put an end such experiments, and no full-length three-color feature film would be made until the Red Army got its hands on “war trophy” German Agfacolor.
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