Agfacolor

An Agfacolor slide dating from the early 1940s. While the colors themselves hold up well after 60 years, damages visible include dust and Newton's rings.

Agfacolor is a series of color photographic products produced by Agfa of Germany. The first product named Agfacolor, introduced in 1932, was a film-based version of the Agfa-Farbenplatte (Eng: Agfa Color Plate, introduced in 1916), a 'screen plate' similar to the Autochrome plate, but in late 1936 Agfa introduced Agfacolor-Neu transparency film, based upon the patent no. 253335 of Dr. Rudolf Fischer 1911, Berlin. The Agfacolor brand has also been associated with several color negative films (i.e. "print" films) produced by Agfa for still photography.

One of the first motion-picture three-color films developed in the 1930s, Agfacolor was the German response to Technicolor and Kodachrome. The new Agfacolor film was a 'tri-pack', like Kodachrome, introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1935. Unlike the Kodachrome process, the color couplers were integral with the emulsion layers. This greatly simplified processing of the film. The basic difference between the Agfacolor and Kodachrome materials is that Agfacolor contains several layers of emulsion in the film itself, creating the color as it is being developed. With Kodachrome, colors are added to the film at a later stage by different development baths.

There is a special ‘touch’ to Agfacolor that has delighted audiences since it was introduced. The character of the material is rather pastel colored, emphasizing golden and warm tones, making the picture look like "old paintings." A significant number of Agfacolor movies shot between 1939 and 1945 survived the war, but most of them exist only in fragments today.

History of Agfacolor

Background

Realizing they were at least one year behind their American competitors, German technicians decided to steer away from Kodak’s approach to capturing color images on film and invested on their own technology. Their work bore fruits in the summer of the same year, when chemical engineers of the Agfa company in Germany tested their new material Agfacolor at the swimming competition of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. Although the German technology promised the use of one and the same material for different purposes, ranging from photographic negative-film for prints to photographic slides and motion-picture films, it took another three years––until July 1939––for any German film-maker to experiment with the film.

The Third Reich's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels was in a hurry. He admired Hollywood movies and examined them carefully in regular private screenings (sometimes with Adolf Hitler and his staff). Technicolor films such as A Star Is Born (1937), The Garden of Allah (1936) or Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) made him realize that Hollywood feature films presented a threat to Germany's internal market and that Hollywood's dominance of color film technology should be matched, at least if Germany was serious about entering in a cultural war with the U.S. and Britain.

Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten

It was not until the beginning of principal photography for Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten in 1939 (English title: Women Are Better Diplomats), starring the popular singer/dancer Marika Rökk and actor Willy Fritsch, that Agfacolor was used to shoot a major motion picture. The use of Agfacolor was reinforced by the top of the Nazi film industry, Reichsminister Joseph Goebbels, and the executives at UFA eventually gave in to his pressure. Agfacolor was then used throughout the entire film shoot of Women Are Better Diplomats.

Throughout the shoot, the film yielded mixed results as it was still very sensitive to different color temperatures caused by solar altitude at different times of the day. Thus, outdoor shots were difficult to handle: A lawn in front of a castle appeared completely yellow, later brown, then bluish. The technology was not fully developed yet, and Agfa labs were virtually using the shooting of the film as testing grounds for their new stock, continually changing the formula throughout the shoot based upon unsatisfactory results so that entire scenes had to be repeated once a new formula was being tested.

Meanwhile the production costs had risen from 1.5 to 2.5 million Reichsmarks. More than two years after its start date, Women Are Better Diplomats opened in October 1941. Despite its rather weak color quality, the film proved to be a major hit, earning more than 8 million Reichsmarks by the end of the war.

The Golden City

After the process's growing pains had been overcome throughout the production of Women are better diplomats, the following Agfacolor movies were shot and printed much quicker and with better results. The technology was improved at a rapid pace. Veit Harlan, perhaps the most prominent 'official' film director of the Third Reich, was allowed to shoot his next picture in Agfacolor. Between the summers of 1941 and 1942, Veit Harlan finished Die goldene Stadt (Eng: The Golden City), a dreamy propaganda fairytale starring his wife Kristina Söderbaum as a young, innocent country girl who comes to the golden city of Prague and is seduced by an unscrupulous gigolo.

The Golden City premièred at the Venice Film Festival in September 1942 and was awarded for its outstanding technical quality and actress Kristina Söderbaum won an acting award.

Shot by cameraman Werner Krien, who had done black-and-white-pictures before, and assisted by special effects specialist Konstantin Irmen-Tschet (once in charge of the SFX camera in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis), the film displays an impressive symphony of colors.

Later Agfacolor films throughout the Third Reich

Made for the UFA's 25th Anniversary, Münchhausen (1943) was the third German feature film––out of over a dozen––to be produced using Agfacolor film between 1939 and 1945.

Other notable Agfacolor productions include Kolberg (1945), a dramatization of German resistance throughout the Napoleonic Wars and the regime's last major propaganda feature film.

Legacy after WWII

Towards the end of World War II, large quantities of raw Agfacolor stock were seized by the Soviet Union and served as the basis for the Sovcolor process, which was widely used in the USSR and other Eastern bloc nations. One of the best-known Sovcolor films is War and Peace (1965-'67).

After the war, Agfa's former production plant at Wolfen was located in the Soviet occupation zone which was to become East Germany. For several years after the war, the Wolfen plant continued producing Agfacolor films, until in 1964 East Germany lost the licence to the Agfa brand name. From 1964 onwards, the plant was re-named into ORWO (short for Original Wolfen), producing color films under the name of ORWOcolor.

Agfacolor consumer products were also marketed in North America under the names Ansco Color and Anscochrome (from Agfa's U.S. subsidiary, Agfa Ansco, which was later merged with General Aniline and had the name changed to General Aniline and Film), but met with limited success.

Ansco Color was also used in Hollywood films, including some produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where it later appeared under the handle of Metrocolor (the generic name used for all films processed by MGM's lab). Films shot in Ansco Color included The Man on the Eiffel Tower (1949), Brigadoon (1954), Kiss Me, Kate (1953), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and Lust for Life (1956), the final film shot on this film stock.

In 1978, Agfa ceased production of color film based upon the original Agfacolor process, switching to Kodak's E-6 process.

References

• Coe Brian, Colour Photography: The First Hundred Years 1840–1940, Ash & Grant, 1978
• Gert & Nina Koshofer, Dr. Rolf Giesen, Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung, Wiesbaden, 2005
• www.pixpast.com a source for collectors of original 35mm and 16mm agfacolor film from 1936 to 1945.