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Humphrey Jennings was one of Britain's greatest documentary film-makers, described by Lindsay Anderson in as 'the only real poet the British cinema.
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This mosaic pattern was situated between the base and the emulsion, and the photograph was registered through the base. The light then passed through this mosaic pattern, registering a colour image on the emulsion. He had at the time working with him T. Thorne-Baker, a colour expert from Britain, who was asked by the British paper manufacturing firm, Spicers to report back to them on the possibilities of the process. He evidently responded favourably, since in Spicers bought the process, and set up Spicer-Dufay the same year.

Research into making the Dufay process suitable for cine film took place over four years at the Spicer plant in Sawston in Cambridgeshire, under the direction of T. The research was undertaken in secret, without any publicity, until when Dufaycolor was presented firstly at the Royal Society in March, and then at the British Kinematograph Society in September. Firstly, there was the problem of the visibility of the reseau. The angles of the lines of the reseau 67 degrees to the frame for the red and green lines and 23 degrees to the frame for the blue — had been chosen after careful experiment to minimise its visibility on projection.

This caused three significant problems. Firstly, the image was consequently darker than normal film, and so required more illumination upon projection. Secondly, any combined sound-track would, for the similar reason that light had to pass through the base and the reseau first, be necessarily quieter.

And thirdly, due to these problems, the film had to be laced a different way from normal, with the emulsion facing away from the camera or projector lens, so that an extensive re-education programme was required for projectionists and camera operators using Dufay film. Both projectors and cameras required re-calibrating, since by lacing the film the other way round, the emulsion was a fraction of an inch further away from the light source, so re-calibration was necessary to ensure the picture could be focussed. There were also problems of shooting in artificial light, and of cost.

The advantage that Dufaycolor had over Technicolor is that it was comparatively cheap. The Dufay Company, in all its various incarnations, was at pains to promote the relative cheapness of its process, but being relatively inexpensive was not the same as being actually inexpensive. Dufaycolor prints cost around 3. J Gell, head of Pathe, claimed that the cost of a colour negative was five times as much as for a black and white negative, whilst the cost of a print was six times the cost. Horace Shepherd, whose company Inspiration Films used Dufay extensively claimed it was nearer four times the cost.

In addition, although Dufaycolor was simple to use out of doors, requiring only a gelatine filter and little fiddling in the camera, its use in artificial light was problematic at best. It required at least one and a half times the usual amount of light for interior lighting, and also required that light sources were not mixed. For example, in lighting interiors for Dufaycolor it was inadvisable to use arc lamps and tungsten lamps.

The reason for this was that the three colours within the Dufaycolor matrix, red, green and blue, had to be balanced so that together they made white. This balance was created at the printing stage, but light sources are not consistent. For example, as sunlight is yellow rather than pure white, yellow light passing through the matrix would stimulate one colour above the others, causing an off-balance. To compensate for this off-balance, Dufay issued gelatine filters free.

Using two different light sources was therefore impossible, since the filter could not compensate for both. Dufay were nothing if not helpful in terms of their customer relations, even going so far as to engage a company, Mole Richardson Ltd, to devise a lighting set-up for Dufaycolor interior shots which could be bought or hired direct from Mole Richardson themselves.

The added complications of interior shooting, plus the extra cost involved, served to limit the attractiveness of Dufaycolor for the feature market, but did not prohibit its use in shorter subjects. Spicer-Dufay, having raised their profile with the presentations in , went back into the labs to continue research. The following year, , saw four significant developments in the history of Dufaycolor, which bring us back to the article in The Times about colour and to the point where our story begins.

O Film Unit as an advert for the sixpenny parcel post. These films mark the beginning of the use of Dufaycolor in documentary film and newsreels.

The third and fourth developments in are the release of the first full Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp in June, and the release in December of the British feature film , Radio Parade of , which featured two sequences in Dufaycolor. These are outside the scope of this article, dealing as it does with documentary films and newsreels following the developments mentioned above. However, in terms of the rise of public awareness of colour and its eventual dominance in fiction film, the release of Becky Sharp is evidently important. It is important to note, however, that as mentioned earlier, the documentary-realist tradition encompasses only a relatively small number of non-fiction mostly short films that were made in the years running up to, and during, the Second World War.

This limited approach to documentary suggests that its value lies in its content. To reveal and to dramatise a subject is to contribute to the fuller art of the documentary. Housing Problems or as fetishised male hero e. What is more, the landscape is predominantly the urban and industrial, rather than the pastoral.


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Partially, the Dodds argue, this is due to a cultural shift from South to North as the locus of masculine British-ness. After the grievous and perceived loss of an entire generation in the carnage in France and Belgium, the image of the heroic worker, aside from drawing upon the roots of the documentary movement in Russian montage aesthetics, serves to reassert the male figure in national identity. So the art of the Movement documentary, according to Grierson, reveals to the rest of the country, in the aid of an education of national community, an unknown Britain of the working class heroes and victims.

What it does not do is invite women to join in, nor invite identification between audience and subject. Bruce Woolf, one of the great producers of non-Movement Documentary subjects wrote in The Commercial Film that the film audience was predominantly female. It fails to address the needs of the audience, taking a middle-class viewpoint on the education of the masses, not just in images of nation, but also of what makes good cinema. New criticism is seeking to address this issue. This was a genre of bawdy romps. It was popular and mass produced, and successful with female audiences.

It was also a genre full of spectacle: of costume, of stars, of setting, each aspect drawing attention to itself from outside a homogenous reality. Its inherent historical lapses only add to this. Gainsborough, frivolous, spectacular, lurid and female, is traditionally held up to, and found wanting against, the masculine art of the documentary-realist tradition; intellectual, realist and male. It is also worth noting that Gainsborough is similarly held up and found wanting against the output of Ealing Studios.

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Ealing too is honoured for its realist tradition, its location shooting and its gritty urban life, its presentation of its comedy within real Britain. Similarly, the non-Movement Dufaycolor documentaries are similarly feminised in their subject matter, dealing as they do not with the heroic worker or the working class victim, but with the pastoral, the rural, and the scenic. Whereas the image of the heroic worker is predominantly leftist in its connotations, and the majority of the Movement film-makers were on the left, the image of the rural is more inclusive.

Such films have an interest in history and culture, and are more likely to cover local crafts and beauty spots than heavy industry, as, for example, in Lakeland Heritage pc Denning Films, and Devon c In The Lancashire Way c for example, the images specifically defy the convention of the industrial image of Lancashire, in favour of pastoral scenes of the Lake District, of woodlands, cottages and gardens.

The Lancashire Way is in fact an advertising film for Lanry, a miracle soap to cure the washday blues all for sixpence, plus a small return on the bottle! In the film Beauties of Britain women representing each nation of Britain are shown performing some sort of task which is similarly representative of that nation, for example the woman from Ireland is shown sewing, the woman from Scotland is shown at a loom.

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Each section begins with a shot of the particular beauty carrying out this particular task before the flower which is the representative of that nation, and is followed by a close up of the woman. The film is, in fact, an advertisement for Galatea Toilet Soap and its kindness to hands. But the film clearly equates female beauty with national stereotypes. Far from building the nation from the image of the industrial working class male hero, here we see the nation represented by beautiful women, none of whom are seen in workers clothes, whose beauty is enhanced by the particular brand of soap.

The Heritage Film has been the subject of critical discussion as a new form of British cinema that is distinct from Hollywood. One of the key identifying factors in the Heritage Film is the notion of display, of a fetishistic insistence on the presentation of heritage features in the form of country houses, pastoral landscapes, elaborately decorated sets, and the customs and manners of the upper classes.

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Conversely, as the realist film is deliberately anti-spectacle, it can be said that the use of colour should similarly exist outside the diegesis of the realist film, existing upon it as spectacle by the very nature of its sensuality and its novelty. As we shall see, this argument holds true within the Movement, where the use of colour was purely sensual.

As we shall see, far from being imposed upon the realist text, colour can exist within the realist text as well as standing outside it. As such, the resoundingly male, anti-female, anti-spectacle emphasis of the documentary-realist tradition gives way to a more feminised spectacle of reality. What is more, and this will become evident as we look at the films themselves, this notion of the spectacle of reality serves to produce a more inclusive form for the documentary, a more national form. Instead of assimilating the heroic industrial worker into a middle class ideology of nationhood, or presenting a victim for sympathy and conscience, the pastoral and colourful topics of the Dufaycolor documentary invite an identification with the nation as locus, as a place, and a state of being.

It does this precisely through this spectacle of reality, the spectacular and sensual presentation of real people within real images of the nation.

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It presents a nation seen as it is seen, in colour, with which an audience can identify. On the other hand, can we then turn this idea upon its head and suggest that there are certain subjects which already contain a rhetoric of the spectacular, and which in the medium of colour film are being represented in a realistic context?

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But as we shall see, part of the very nature of the presentation of those subjects that are particularly suitable is the blending of the spectacular with the real. It is not perhaps surprising, given the more or less absent place of colour in the Movement films, that colour is introduced into documentary with the work of its two most controversial figures, Len Lye and Humphrey Jennings. Both were artists, and Jennings, was also a poet. Grierson was happy to promote colour, or rather use colour to promote the GPO, in abstract form, but his cordiality did not extend to the live action subject.


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