Dufaycolor

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Dufaycolor was an early British/French additive colour photographic film process for motion pictures.

The basic principles underlying Dufaycolor were the same as those behind the Autochrome process for still photography.^[1] Attached to the film base was a colour filter consisting of a mesh of red, green and blue lines.^[2]^[3] known as a reseau. This meant that when exposed to light (with the reseau at the front), any given part of the film base would only be exposed to one particular colour component (the others having been filtered out by the reseau). Thus, different parts of the film recorded the values for different components.

Upon projection, the reseau served to filter the white projected light, so that parts of the photograph corresponding to the recorded (e.g.) red value were only shown in red. The same principle applied to green and blue components.

Dufaycolor was based on a four-colour screen photographic process invented in 1908 by Frenchman Louis Dufay. The process was purchased by British paper manufacturing firm, Spicers in 1926, who carried out work to turn it into a workable cine film process. It was finally released in 1931.^[4]

Dufaycolor was used in only two UK features Radio Parade of 1935 (1934) for two sequences, and Sons of the Sea (1939), an all-colour film directed by Maurice Elvey. Len Lye also used Dufaycolor for his short films Kaleidoscope (1935), A Colour Box (1935), and Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1940).

Although far cheaper than Technicolor, Dufaycolor was still relatively expensive next to black-and-white film. As colour became more common in the motion picture business, Dufaycolor suffered in the face of better-funded rival processes, such as Technicolor. However, Dufaycolor was the only successful additive process for motion pictures until Polaroid designed a system using similar principles in the 1970s.^[2]