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.  For the news pictures of the day the “kinemacolor” and similar schemes are excellent.  But when we come to photoplays the question is no longer one of technique; first of all we stand before the problem:  how far does the coloring subordinate itself to the aim of the photoplay?  No doubt the effect of the individual picture would be heightened by the beauty of the colors.  But would it heighten the beauty of the photoplay?  Would not this color be again an addition which oversteps the essential limits of this particular art?  We do not want to paint the cheeks of the Venus of Milo:  neither do we want to see the coloring of Mary Pickford or Anita Stewart.  We became aware that the unique task of the photoplay art can be fulfilled only by a far-reaching disregard of reality.  The real human persons and the real landscapes must be left behind and, as we saw, must be transformed into pictorial suggestions only.  We must be strongly conscious of their pictorial unreality in order that that wonderful play of our inner experiences may be realized on the screen.  This consciousness of unreality must seriously suffer from the addition of color.  We are once more brought too near to the world which really surrounds us with the richness of its colors, and the more we approach it the less we gain that inner freedom, that victory of the mind over nature, which remains the ideal of the photoplay.  The colors are almost as detrimental as the voices.

On the other hand the producer must be careful to keep sufficiently in contact with reality, as otherwise the emotional interests upon which the whole play depends would be destroyed.  We must not take the people to be real, but we must link with them all the feelings and associations which we would connect with real men.  This is possible only if in their flat, colorless, pictorial setting they share the real features of men.  For this reason it is important