The Year 1926. Year. Event and Significance. 1926. In New York, Warner Brothers debuted Don Juan, the first Vitaphone sound film (developed by Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1926) and the first publically-shown 'talkie' with synchronized sound effects and orchestral music (but no dialogue) - starring John Barrymore.
In actuality, it was cinema's first docu-fiction film, reconstructing the traditional life of islanders in Samoa in its semi-fictional tale. 1926. Flesh and the Devil (1926), released late in the year, marked the start of the famous (on and off-screen) romance of Greta Garbo and John Gilbert during Hollywood's Golden Age.
Future star John Wayne (a former prop man) made his debut feature film appearance as an uncredited football player (on the Yale team) in the college comedy-drama, Brown of Harvard (1926). 1926.
1926. Alfred Hitchcock's second feature film, the 57-minute The Mountain Eagle (1926, UK) remains a "lost film" - the only one in Hitchcock's oeuvre that is missing. All that remains are a collection of dozens of production stills from Hitchcock's own archives. It was released in the US as Fear O' God.
1926. British director Alfred Hitchcock's first completed and credited feature film, the melodramatic The Pleasure Garden (1925, UK) , was released in the US in 1926 . The silent film was made after years of Hitchcock serving as a title designer, set designer, writer, and assistant director.
Many people think of Wizard of Oz as being the first color film in cinema history. While this is not technically true, we will dive into why that is a common misconception in just a bit.
The first commercially produced film in natural color was A Visit to the Seaside (1908). The eight-minute British short film used the Kinemacolor process to capture a series of shots of the Brighton Southern England seafront. The first feature length, non-documentary film was The World, the Flesh and the Devil produced in 1914.
Before the Kinemacolor process was used in film, filmmakers used more laborious and expensive methods to introduce color in cinema. Color films date further back than people think. Tinting was used in the early days of motion pictures to represent color in film, but portrayed an entirely monochromatic image.
The first known film to successfully use the Kinemacolor process was A Trip to the Moon (1902). The Kinemacolor process was revolutionary. It utilized red and green filters on alternating frames to simulate the colors of the film.
In 1914, Technicolor was born and began experimenting with various techniques to produce color movies. They used two projectors to try and create color through a prism. They even tried to imprint color on film stock which proved to be too costly.
Filmmakers had been trying to include color in film as early as the invention of motion pictures. When was the invention of motion pictures? In our next article, we break down the history of cinema and the invention of movies.
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