The Use of Color for the Embellishment of the Motion Picture Program

THE love and appreciation of color is firmly ingrained in the human consciousness. Our oldest written historical records show that color was appreciated and used extensively by the peoples of those early ages. Prehistoric remains dating back centuries before the existence of a written language indicate that the Cro-Magnon men, the first true men (later Paleolithic age, approximately 20,000 B.C.) decorated the walls of the caverns in which they lived with colored paintings. Wells¹ states “It greatly aids us to realize their common humanity that these earliest true men could draw. Both races, it would seen, drew astonishingly well. They were by all standards savages, but they were artistic savages. They drew better than any of their successors down to the beginnings of history. They drew and painted on the cliffs and cave walls that they had wrested from the Neanderthal men…‥ They buried their dead, often with ornaments, weapons, and food; they used a lot of colour in the burial, and evidently painted the body. From that one may infer that they painted their bodies during life. Paint was a big fact in their lives. They were inveterate painters; they used black, brown, red, yellow, and white pigments, and the pigments they used endure to this day in the caves of France and Spain. Of all modern races, none have shown so pictorial a disposition; the nearest approach to it has been among the American Indians.” So from the very dawn of civilization color has played an important part in the lives of men. Nor is this to be wondered at since color is an inseparable part of vision. Every visual sensation carries with it its color content, and as stated by Hering, “Our visual world consists essentially of differently presented colors: and objects as seen, that is visual objects, are nothing but colors of different nature and form.” This fact has been recognized by many others, among them Clerk Maxwell who states, “All vision is color vision, for it is only by observing differences in color that we distinguish form.”

Print ISSN

0096-6460

Published

1925-05

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J10333