olors like any ordinary color print. The task of cutting those many
stencils for the thousands of pictures on a reel is tremendous, and yet
these difficulties have been overcome. Any desired color effect can be
obtained by this method and the beauty of the best specimens is
unsurpassed. But the difficulty is so great that it can hardly become a
popular method. The direct photographing of the colors themselves will
be much simpler as soon as the method is completely perfected. It can
hardly be said that this ideal has been reached today. The successive
photographing through three red, green, and violet screens and the later
projection of the pictures through screens of these colors seemed
scientifically the best approach. Yet it needed a multiplication of
pictures per second which offered extreme difficulty, besides an
extraordinary increase of expense. The practical advance seems more
secure along the line of the so-called "kinemacolor." Its effects are
secured by the use of two screens only, not quite satisfactory, as true
blue impressions have to suffer and the reddish and greenish ones are
emphasized. Moreover the eye is sometimes disturbed by big flashes of
red or green light. Yet the beginnings are so excellent that the perfect
solution of the technical problem may be expected in the near future.
Would it be at the same time a solution of the esthetic problem?

It has been claimed by friends of color photography that at the present
stage of development natural color photography is unsatisfactory for a
rendering of outer events because any scientific or historical happening
which is reproduced demands exactly the same colors which reality shows.
But on the other hand the process seems perfectly sufficient for the
photoplay because there no objective colors are expected and it makes no
difference whether the gowns of the women or the rugs on the floor show
the red and green too vividly and the blue too faintly. From an esthetic
point of view we ought to come to exactly the opposite verdict. For the
historical events even the present technical methods are on the whole
satisfactory. The famous British coronation pictures were superb and
they gained immensely by the rich color effects. They gave much more
than a mere photograph in black and white, and the splendor and glory of
those radiant colors suffered little from the suppression of the bluish
tones. They were not shown in order to match the colors in a ribbon
store.