Additive processes as format: The Synchrome Corporation and the politics of early experimental film
by Pierre J. Pernuit
In April 1921, the American writer Willard Huntington Wright published two intriguing critiques of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, describing Robert Wiene’s Expressionist classic film as an unsuccessful German attempt to put an American concept of cinema into practice.[1] An anonymous insert published in the magazine Variety a few days earlier supplemented this assertion with a claim that the ‘master of the group of Germans who made Caligari’ to whom Huntington Wright was mysteriously referring to was in fact none other than his own younger brother: the painter Stanton Macdonald-Wright. This critical nepotism was promoting the idea that the transposition of modernist research from painting to cinema was initiated by the pictorial movement that Macdonald-Wright had inaugurated in June 1913 in Munich, one of the hotbeds of German Expressionism.
Synchromism (Figure 1), as this Paris-based avant-garde movement was known in the early 1910s, is one of the key tendencies of early abstract art, in particular through the work of its other co-founder, the American painter Morgan Russell, one of the architects of non-objective painting alongside Kandinsky, Kupka, and Mondrian.[2] In a similar yet concurrent vein to Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s contemporary research, the synchromists’ path to abstraction was essentially through colour, a factor Russell and Macdonald-Wright understood as capable to ‘exalt and intensify the expressive power of painting’.[3] As art historians have suggested, this project would eventually lead the Synchromists into several decades of multifaceted experiments with the moving image.[4] This article focuses on one aspect of this venture, the Synchromists’ little-known experiments in colour film with the Synchrome Corporation, a company founded by Stanton Macdonald-Wright in Los Angeles at the outset of the 1920s with the engineer Walter L. Wright (unrelated namesake).[5]
Fig. 1: Morgan Russell, Der Neue Kunstsalon Exhibition Poster, 1913. Oil paint, graphite, and letterpress printing on paper, 42 1/4/ x 28 1/8 in. (107.3 x 71.4 cm). The Vilcek Foundation, VF2025.05.11. © Jean-Pierre Joyce
In what follows, I will analyse the experiments conducted under the auspices of the Synchrome Corporation, a venture which resulted in several experimental short films, the construction of many devices, and the acquisition of some 30 patents. I will discuss the Synchromists ventures into colour film as an example of an attempt to circumscribe an idiosyncratic format for experimental cinema, in the highly political context of the interwar period. Film scholars have already discussed the relation of early experimental filmmakers with different formats in the nationalist and industrial setting of the interwar period.[6] The format created by the Synchromists was, in many respects, subversive. I will analyse this aspect in a discussion of the idiosyncrasy of the Synchrome Corporation equipment and patents, which I will interpret as a way to maintain the autonomy of the avant-garde movement of Synchromism. It should be noted from the outset that this program was structured by a fundamental paradox. The preservation of autonomy was in fact only necessary because the ultimate goal of the Synchrome Corporation was to become a successful company that could potentially win the interwar industrial battle of film colour, an ambition that would eventually dissolve the Synchromist avant-garde movement into the film industry. I will, however, show that regardless of the Synchromists’ resolutely confrontational stance towards the film industry – and also and more importantly for my argument, towards the entire chemical-industrial complex that supported it – their experiments should in fact be understood as inseparable from it.
Scholars have situated early film practices and discourses on colour within a rich intermedial ‘chromatic modernity’ that includes, among other manifestations, early abstract painting and the tradition of visual music and ‘colour organs’,[7]themes at the intersection of which the Synchromists’ research certainly lies. These approaches are largely informed by the intermedial and cultural concept of ‘visual music’, which film historian William Moritz introduced in 1985 to describe the musical ideals of moving image pioneers.[8] While this paradigm has yielded rich and expansive cultural analyses in art history, film, and media studies, it has also tended to treat early film experiments in isolation and to produce a somewhat uniform narrative of the enthusiastic adoption of cinema by the historical avant-garde. Such a narrative tends to neglect two interconnected issues that the complex history of the synchromist venture into film renders particularly salient: the first concerns the relationship between the avant-garde and the film industry, and the question of the autonomy of avant-garde practices; the second is that of cinema as a technology. In addressing these issues, I draw on Benoît Turquety’s model of an epistemology of machines that would attempt ‘to understand, through the analysis of the objects and their genesis, the epistemological conditions of their conception and the “implicit conceptual structures” that they put into play’.[9] Through this lens, the history of the Synchromists venture into film I will retrace is more than an addition to the historical timeline of film colour. It sheds new light on early film experimentation, by reversing a tendency that Turquety has cogently articulated, noting that the history of the legitimation of cinema as an art has been accompanied by a downplaying of the history of cinema as a technique.[10]
If the Synchrome Corporation remains outside of the scope of recent scholarship on colour film, it is because intermedial approaches can only partly account for Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russel’s venture into film. The idiosyncrasy of their technical solutions also complicates their integration into the narratives of colour in cinema. Their work is neither discussed in approaches favouring general trends, nor in the more detailed analyses of chromatic processes. This suggests the need for an intermediate analytical level that has recently been called forth in media studies through suggestions of a turn towards the study of formats. The term format denotes here a wide range of choices that shape the appearance, functionality, and operation of a medium. The heuristic value of this concept lies in its ability to describe a given protocol within a given medium. As such, formats ‘unfold considerable cultural effects’, and are ‘sites of condensed power, power struggles, and valuable commodities’.[11] In particular, I subscribe to the readjusting of media studies described by proponents of format studies as an attempt to consider different scales, ‘focusing on both small aspects like software and codes, as well as larger aspects like infrastructures and international corporate collaborations’.[12] This notion, which has its origin in the study of the conception and circulation of small-gauge film formats,[13]brings about a new heuristic device to continue the project of a media archaeology of film practices.[14] As such, my argument builds upon the project of a cross-disciplinary archaeology of experimental cinema, film materiality, and the film industry, as proposed by Miriam de Rosa and Andrea Mariani in their recent format focused study of the Agfa-funded documentaries shot by the Italian filmmaker Ubaldo Magnaghi in the interwar period.[15]
Besides patents, the main source of the long-lost Synchromists’ venture into film are the letters Stanton Macdonald-Wright sent his fellow Synchromist Morgan Russell throughout the interwar period. In these, both men conceived of the transition from avant-garde painting to the colour film industry as requiring a partial abandonment of the abstract painterly style for which they had initially gained recognition. As Macdonald-Wright wrote to Alfred Stieglitz in 1920, the colour film processes he sought to develop were meant for both abstract and dramatic productions.[16] Through this assertion, Macdonald-Wright defended the idea, often conveyed in the American interwar period press, that only the pioneers of abstraction possessed the necessary knowledge of the ‘emotive quality’ of colour to facilitate the arrival of colour film.[17] In the 1910s, the self-proclaimed ‘Macdonald-Wright-Motion Color Picturist’ expressed the idea in American avant-garde reviews that art is an essence that evolves over time towards more ‘intense’ media, a fate that painting could not escape. This notion of ‘intensification’ of the visual arts was at the heart of the Synchromists’ avant-garde programme. They conceived the need of such intensification as an inevitable consequence of the change in the attentional regime of the modern subject. According to an idea Morgan Russel borrowed from the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, it was the new mental and sensitive disposition of the individual, now capable of absorbing a greater number of stimuli, that condemned painting to obsolescence. If Macdonald-Wright considered that ‘the stupidity of the [current] photodrama’ led cinema away from its mission of aesthetic intensification, it would sooner or later usher in an emotional revolution, given that ‘the medium is stronger than that which utilises it’.[18] This revolution would result in more colourful, more intense moving images, of a stronger empathic value than any painting. This cinematic development of Synchromism was described by Macdonald-Wright to Russell as:
[…] a screen 20 feet square bathed in an ever-changing colour stream, like an aquarium whose water changed with the movement of the fish, whose colors also changed with their every movement – all moving into new formation of salubrious harmonies, fluent, vibrating with pure liquid colour every second of time bringing a new picture to the onlooker a new scheme of colour, new sculptural arrangement and a feeling that they were plunged into a world of ambient light whose waves travelled in color-zones.[19]
At the turn of the 1910s and 1920s, the great pioneer of film theory Ricciotto Canudo, who had been closely following the work of the Synchromists since their Parisian beginnings,[20] echoed these conceptions of cinema and described Morgan Russell as the ‘screen artist’ [écraniste][21] through which a colour cinematography made of ever-changing light intensities would come about:
In the not-too-distant future – I am announcing – a new art will set not just the line, but colour itself in motion, creating emotional interplays of intensity from which the viewer cannot escape. One man, a talented young American painter, is working on this: Morgan Russell.[22]
According to Canudo, Russell was part of those who would ‘help the evolution […] of the Cinematograph’[23] towards a chromatic future, an aim the Italian critic summed up with a comparable axiom to the one defended by the synchromists: ‘to express life more intensely, to signify, across space and time, the sense of life constantly renewed’.[24]
Morgan Russell had in fact neither the means nor the technical knowledge necessary. If his ideas were seductive to many members of the French film avant-garde of the 1920s, including Abel Gance and Blaise Cendrars, the only experiments he would ever conduct were in fact crude mechanisms and modest paintings on transparent paper, of which several examples are conserved in American museums (Figs 2, 3). Russell considered the art that was to follow on from painting as a practice in which the rhythm of images was performed by an operator. The movement of coloured light, he specified, must seek ‘to reproduce’, by means of various mechanisms, the agitations of the ‘artist’s mind while creating’.[25] Animation with a ‘cinematographic-type’ machine, which required painting as many images as photograms, was deemed by Russell a tedious ‘chore’.[26] These conceptions echo those of some of his contemporaries who, while sharing the synchromists analysis of the obsolescence of painting, argued for the autonomy of an art of coloured light; a resolutely anti-filmic practice known at the time in the United States as ‘the art of Mobile Color’. Russell clearly opted for the interactive conception of the moving image that was defended by key figures of Mobile Color in the 1920s, such as Thomas Wilfred, inventor of the colour-organ type device called the Clavilux, and Mary Hallock-Greenewalt, inventor of a similar instrument christened the Sarabet. If French film critics depicted Russell as the hero of the colour cinema to come, what he called the ‘synchromie lumière’ was in fact framed by a logic of mediatic antagonism towards film: his art of light was part of the non-filmic tradition of Mobile Color, a specific US trend usually treated in historiography as an example of ‘colour music’ and ‘visual music’.[27]
Fig. 2: Morgan Russell. Study in Transparency, c. 1922. Oil on transparentized paper, 4 3/4 × 13 1/2″ (12.1 × 34.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of Miss Rose Fried.
In the 1920s and in contrast to Morgan Russell, Stanton Macdonald-Wright believed the ‘future of painting’ to be realised through film. After initial attempts at painting directly onto celluloid, Macdonald-Wright quickly shifted his focus to natural colour film, a system based on photographic processes pioneered by figures such as James Clerk Maxwell and Louis Ducos du Hauron. The letters the two Synchromists exchanged in the interwar period bear witness to an ongoing debate about the value of colour film, on the one hand, and the art of Mobile Color on the other. Using arguments such as the continuity of the ‘métier’ (i.e. the possibility of maintaining painterly techniques through photography, as opposed to the adoption of the new projective techniques of Mobile Color), the ubiquity and the reproducibility of film, Macdonald-Wright tried several times in the interwar period to persuade Russell to leave his reclusive life in France and join him in the business venture of the Synchrome Corporation in California, ‘the incubator of the great future art’ where he had been living since 1918.[28] The significant progress made by Macdonald-Wright’s Synchrome Corporation in the first half of the 1920s quickly tipped the scales in favour of film, as advocated by Macdonald-Wright. This issue of the debate is reflected in a clear division of tasks that became henceforth clear in the Synchromists correspondence: while Russell would probe the ‘emotional validity’ of coloured light, Stanton Macdonald-Wright would be the engineer of the colour cinema to come, thanks to a series of inventions developed by the Synchrome Corp which he referred to in his correspondence with the generic term ‘chromatograph’.[29]
Fig. 3: Morgan Russell. Study in Transparency, c. 1922. Oil on transparentized paper, 5 × 21 1/2″ (12.7 × 54.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Gift of Miss Rose Fried
Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s chromatograph: A format reading
Tom Gunning has outlined the dual functions of colour in early cinema: one is its role in constructing a realistic representation of the visual world; the other is ‘a purely sensuous presence, an element which can even indicate a divergence from reality’.[30] The way Stanton Macdonald-Wright conceived of the Synchromists’ role in the film industry involved collapsing these two functions, following the idea that colour in cinema is governed by the same rules as those employed in painting: it is understood in both cases in context and as part of a closed system, an ensemble whose psychological impact depends more on correct composition than on the faithful reproduction of local colours. According to Macdonald-Wright, for cinema to become an art, it must be imbued with a sense of plastic harmony by an artist who would correct the inherent ‘deformities and discords of colour and form’ of the ‘slavish’ cinematographic devices.[31]
The idea is common to many interwar film writers. Ricciotto Canudo, Rudolf Arnheim, Élie Faure and even the future essentialism advocate Béla Balázs suggested film could learn from the practices and theories of colour harmonies developed in older arts, most notably in painting.[32] This notion is in part at the origin of the emergence of the figure of the ‘colour consultant’. In the interwar period, most of them were crossover figures coming from various sectors of the arts. A notable example in the US is the stage director Robert Edmond Jones, who would design the colours of La Cucaracha (Lloyd Corrigan, 1934), the first Technicolor live-action film.[33] If the proximity of Hollywood suggests that the Synchrome Corporation (located, according to the patents, in Santa Barbara) might eventually have led Macdonald-Wright to serve, along the same lines, as a colour consultant to the film industry, no such collaboration ever occurred.[34] The nature of Macdonald-Wright’s experiments and discourses, as well as his well-established stature in Los Angeles, indicates that this was not the result of failure, nor of a lack of opportunity. Rather, it was a deliberate refusal to partake in conventional cinema.
Macdonald-Wright’s antagonism towards the film industry is first evident in the choice of an additive system, a decision that significantly contributes to the formatting of cinema undertaken by the Synchromists. The term additive refers to a method which involves mixing light beams to create colour, as opposed to a subtractive method which involves mixing pigment. In an additive film system, colour is thus created by the addition of coloured light, usually using a black and white standard film and a system of filters, while in the subtractive system, the film itself is coloured. After the early 1920s, the subtractive colour synthesis was widely adopted by the film industry. Additive synthesis, which incidentally is now the dominant method used in contemporary optical media, was, however, the system used in most early attempts of cinematography in natural colours, such as the famous British Kinemacolor invented in 1906, which used black and white film projected at double speed (32 frames per second) with a revolving shutter of alternating red and green filters in front of the lens.
The first patent granted to Macdonald-Wright and his partner in the Synchrome Corp venture, Walter L. Wright, describes a ‘successive frame’ camera recording three colours (violet, green, and orange) on three separate negatives of a single black-and-white panchromatic film (Figure 4). The film projector which was later patented used what is known as spatial synthesis, i.e. a system in which each colour frame is projected through three separated colour filters. These two devices were likely operational in the early 1920s. According to Macdonald-Wright, it was around that time that he made a short film of stop-motion animation using more than 5,000 coloured pastels. Far from being the culmination of the Synchromist venture into moving images, this film was described by Macdonald-Wright as a simple experiment, initially aimed at exploring the colour possibilities of his ‘chromatograph’ through the ‘stupid and illustrative’ subject of ‘an eruption of a volcano on a tropical island’.[35] Macdonald-Wright claimed to have encountered numerous difficulties in framing his drawings and described rudimentary production methods that made the film’s movement awkward. In postwar interviews and publications, however, he would claim that this experiment, which he sometimes referred to as a ‘full-length’ production, was the ‘very first stop-motion colour film’ in the history of cinema.[36] The exaggerated claims and self-glorifying speeches to which the Synchromists were accustomed, in a typical avant-garde habit, call for caution on this point. While Macdonald-Wright’s claim is obviously debatable in the context of a larger history of colour in cinema, if his film had indeed been made in 1919 as he claimed in the 1970s, it would rank among the earliest attempts at colour animation – the earliest being The Debut of Thomas Cat, shot in February 1920 by John Randolf Bray with a Brewster Color System. There is however scant evidence to substantiate the 1919 date, as, according to Macdonald-Wright, the film was destroyed six months after its completion in the fire of the Blum film laboratories of Los Angeles where it was stored. The substantiation of Macdonald-Wright’s claims is made even more complicated by the fact that his correspondence with Morgan Russell, the principal historical source of these film experiments, is partially undated. If a thorough examination of the Synchromists’ correspondence can confirm the existence of this film, it suggests a date range between 1921 and 1923. A simple explanation may justify this backdating. The dating of his first attempt in 1919, argued much later in the 1960s, conveniently precedes the film industry’s first animation in natural colour by one year. This coincidence suggests Macdonald-Wright intentionally timed his own experiments, a strategic move revealing a complex relationship with the industry and its history – a relationship that, although denied in an attempt to maintain the autonomy of the avant-garde, fuelled his own venture into film.
Fig. 4: Wright, W. et AL. ‘Color Motion Picture Photography’, US1641466, filed February 4, 1924, published September 4, 1924.
The evolution of the technical processes outlined in the Sychrome Corporation patents suggests Macdonald-Wright and his business partner encountered many issues. These challenges were primarily linked to the inherent limitations of additive colour film systems, which, as noted by experts at the time, required ‘first-class apparatus’.[37] The primary issue that led to the massive abandonment of additive film processes at the beginning of the 1920s is known as the temporal parallax, i.e. the tendency for coloured separate negatives recorded to cause colour discrepancies during projection. The slightest shift in position on the film between one photogram and the next caused a shift on the screen between different coloured images. The design of optical mechanisms to distribute light evenly and register it on the three negatives without any loss of intensity was also a major challenge in additive systems. The Synchrome Corporation patents all demonstrate an ongoing effort to overcome these issues. A significant number of them are devoted to improving the film handling mechanisms and some describe larger-than-average film onto which the colour negatives are vertically spaced, so as to correspond to the optical configuration of a light dividing system.[38] Others describe a recording and projection process in which the three-colour sequences are recorded alternately (rather than consecutively, as in most additive processes) on a black and with colour film which is curved during exposure and projection, so as to be presented in front of a single lens with a crossed reflector.
The unique technical configurations outlined in the Synchrome Corporation patents contribute to a formatting of film technologies in the simple sense of imparting a distinctive shape and dimension to film stock and film devices. The justification for this formatting necessitates a short detour through the theory of the transition from painting to film championed by the Synchromists since the early 1910s. Its most striking formulation is an essay titled ‘The Future of Painting’ published by Willard Huntington Wright in the American magazine The Freeman in the winter of 1922. This text was the first unveiling of the Synchromists’ ambitions in the field of moving images. Its central argument, widely debated at the time, was that painting had reached its obsolescence in the first half of the nineteenth century, and that artists who had since then worked with colour were unwittingly leading the way to a new art, ‘fundamentally distinct from that of painting’, which explored colour as light, given that ‘pigments are merely color by proxy, without purity and low in vibration’.[39] This modernist pronouncement of the death of painting permeated the unpublished writings of Morgan Russell in the 1910s, in which the intensity of coloured light was described as a way of achieving ‘purity’ in the visual arts, one of the central aims of modern paintings claimed by many fellow abstract artists of the time.[40] In these two texts, it appears that it was in fact the intensity of coloured light, and not colour per se, which was understood by the Synchromists as the quickest way to achieve what they described as the ‘intensification’ of the visual arts.
This analysis led to the establishment of a new method of creating visual art, the sources of which were found in Gustav Fechner’s psychophysics, the nineteenth century new science of the measuring of mental phenomena. The Synchromists took the principle of a standardised unit of sensations from Fechner, which is precisely what is revealed by the logarithmic relationship between mental excitation and sensation known as ‘Fechner’s Law’.[41] The method consists in measuring mental activity by means of a double analogy: first, between a sensitive unit and a dimension functionally related to it; and second, between mental impressions and material quantities. This logic does not simply lead the Synchromist to treat colour as an analogue of a given emotional state, as many of their ‘visual musicians’ contemporaries, since the main criterion for the affective characterisation of colour was according to Russell and Macdonald-Wright light intensity.[42] The theory led the duo to describe the ideal way of composing a luminous image as indexed on a scale of 64 light intensities which would be determined through the preliminary work of establishing the minimum threshold of differentiation between hues,[43] a task corresponding to what Fechner calls the ‘discrimination threshold’. The theoretical a priori for such a scale was the dynamogenic effect of light, i.e. the idea that a high intensity of light provokes a highly intense psychological state. According to this logic, the most important task of the modern artist was not so much to harmonise colour but to harmonise light intensities, a project that suggested a total control of the medium and required training in both psychology and engineering.
The process of creating scales of light intensities amounted to a manipulation of the conventions of the medium before any creative involvement with it. For Stanton Macdonald-Wright, this act of formatting would eventually liberate the visual artist from the uncertainties of ‘inspiration’ and brought about an empirical way to regulate the psychological impact of the visual arts.[44] Such reasoning precluded any exploration of the affordances of existing film devices; it also effectively ruled out the use of a subtractive system which had been widely adopted by the film industry in the interwar period. The subtractive process, commonly used in printing and painting, was likely associated by Macdonald-Wright with the pigment – an impure mediation of colour, constrained by the absorption of light – which as such could be considered as a form of technological regression. Macdonald-Wright also favoured the additive system, as it presented the potential to be modified by the integration of a mechanism for modulating light intensity – something that he could not conceive to be possible with subtractive processes. This is made evident in a 1928 patent filed by the Synchrome Corporation which details a mechanism for regulating the intensity of a film projector’s light source. Through rheostats, as well as the use of coloured bulbs, the Synchrome Corporation device would thus help ‘to obtain a color balance which results in pictures in true natural colour’, a possibility hailed in the patents as the ‘marked improvement’ over subtractive processes brought about by the Synchrome Corporation.[45]
The so-called Synchrome Corp ‘chromatograph’ was an interactive film projector; an intermediary mechanical solution to solve the debate between Macdonald-Wright, a proponent of film, and Morgan Russell, a champion of the Mobile Color interactive systems. With this system, the painter-turned-colour expert Macdonald-Wright could freely adjust the intensity of coloured light, thereby engaging with what the Synchromists regarded as the essence of the modern quest in the visual arts. The choice of an additive colour system is an act of formatting, guided by considerations of better flexibility in the use of the medium, with the aim to find a correct balance of light intensities in the film image. The act of formatting amounts here to implementing within colour film ‘a coherent pattern of order and composition, a standardised template for the organisation of space, time or information according to some rhythmical, structural, aesthetic or volumetric rules’.[46] Format was not only integral to how the Synchromists perceived and engaged with film, but it also shaped, more broadly, the way the film avant-garde approached the paradigmatic modern medium of cinema. Macdonald-Wright’s experiments represent an extreme case of formatting, one that reveals a complex engagement with cinema as both a medium and a technology. By prescribing a particular structure and colour ratio that drastically affected the aesthetic and perceptual configuration of film, his approach went beyond the experimental filmmakers’ affinity for specific film stocks, which also constitute manifest acts of formatting.
The format of the avant-garde
There exist other reasons to explain the Synchromists’ choice of an additive system. Well into the interwar period such processes were particularly favoured in the field of animation. The inherent drawbacks of additive film processes were easier to solve in stop-motion animation than in location filming. Additive processes possessed the undeniable advantage of cost effectiveness in production, as it used conventional black-and-white film, and the projection positive was always a direct print of the negative. The colour rendering of an additive system was also frequently described by its adherents as more truthful than any subtractive system.[47] These reasons indicate that Macdonald-Wright’s choice thus coincided with the usual practices of the trade that he intended the Synchrome Corporation to mainly engage in. This is confirmed by his early 1920s attempt in colour films, but also by the several film projects he shared in his correspondence with Morgan Russell, all of which suggest the making of semi-abstract animation in colour. Among these were plans for an adaptation of the myth of Prometheus as well as a film based on Stéphane Mallarmé’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, but also a somewhat more abstract short showing ‘rhythmically moving objects […] in colour and line about as illustrative (of course in a different way) as a Cubist picture’.[48] Accounting for the Synchromists’ formatting through these trade practices, however, misses an important dimension of what formats are. The regulation of the nature of a medium through formatting is not without political motivations and social consequences. Macdonald-Wright’s task of creating an alternative format for colour film was inscribed within a series of dialectical oppositions that are as much political as they are technical: colour vs light, additive vs subtractive, industry vs experimentation, entertainment vs avant-garde, standard apparatus vs special machines, norms vs margins.
The technical options described in the Synchrome Corporation patent further compounded the idiosyncrasy and lack of compatibility of additive systems, which was already understood in the interwar period as the reasons for the eventual demise of these processes. Unlike films shot with the subtractive method which can be projected on a standard black-and-white projector, additive systems require a special projector, or at least an attachment, since the synthesis happens during projection. The formatting of the Synchrome Corporation implied the use of a special film stock, a special camera, and a special film projector. These idiosyncrasies, I contend, contributed to the development of the Synchromist’s elitist conception of experimental cinema.
The Synchrome Corporation was among the numerous unsuccessful contenders in the interwar battle of patents and innovations for colour cinema. Within this competitive market, it defended an alternative format which in many regards aligned with Macdonald-Wright’s political affiliations and his ideal of a cinéma d’art. The Synchromists’ dream of colour film was at the same time a speculation about the future of cinema, but also an alternative to a progressive industrialisation of the medium in the interwar period, which they violently criticised. In the early 1920s, the years Macdonald-Wright launched his Synchrome Corporation, these critiques echoed the political and social conception of cinema d’art that Willard Huntington Wright and Ricciotto Canudo defended in their writings. The Synchromists took a clear position in a highly polarised debate between the advocates of a ‘democratic’ conception of the arts (self-described followers of Leo Tolstoy and William Morris) and the proponents of ‘aristocratism’. Huntington Wright was himself one of the most identifiable champions of the latter side of the debate in the US since the 1910s. This major advocate of the Synchromists defended the idea that art is profoundly individualistic, and that the mediocrity of the masses was harmful to the progress of creation. In proto-fascist terms, Huntington Wright even argued for historical convergence between art and political violence.[49] In 1923, Ricciotto Canudo also critiqued the ‘demagogy’ of Tolstoy and theorised a renewal of cinematography that would respect the ‘natural’ hierarchy between the ‘upper and lower strata of society’.[50] Canudo’s Club des amis du septième art (C.A.S.A.), which Russell frequented in the early 1920s, also advocated an elitist conception of the medium, that of an ‘intellectual’ cinema screened in ‘special’ theatres of ‘a different spiritual level’ antithetic to the average filmic entertainment of the working classes.[51]
The alternative format outlined in the patents granted to the Synchrome Corporation was a strategy to give the ‘special cinema’ claimed by the Synchromists and their elitist critiques a ‘special format’ of an allegedly higher quality that would suit a more sophisticated spectatorship. This was conceived in an apparent clear antagonism toward the industry, but as I have already noted, Macdonald-Wright’s views on this point should be understood as a posture. His experiments were primarily a reaction – a reactionary one – to the state of the industry. As such, they cannot be understood independently of it. His conception of additive processes as ‘superior’ formats was in itself a redeployment of the discourses and tropes of the film industry. As Benoît Turquety has noted, in the late 1900s and in the 1910s, the Kinemacolor process was conceived as ‘an apotheosis of the cinematograph’; a highbrow spectacle of special aesthetic value, displayed in specialised theatres with expensive admission fees that signalled a return to an ideal form of cinema, a medium which was perceived as having been led astray by its process of industrialisation.[52] This aspect reflects the limits of Macdonald-Wright’s antagonistic and autonomous policy towards the film industry. The choice of a fundamentally idiosyncratic format is by no means a solution to ensure the autonomy of the avant-garde, since the attribution of a superior value to additive systems was in fact an invention of the industry; a promotional discourse which was probably the source of Macdonald-Wright’s formatting project.
The failure of the Synchromists’ foray into film, which became increasingly apparent in the 1930s, led to bitter reflections on the antagonism between industrial cinema and the avant-garde. The inflection is evident in the case of Morgan Russell who opted for a philosophy of retour à l’ordre in his painting, writing, and personal correspondence, which reflect a sense of despair towards cinema.[53] If this went no further than aesthetic discourses in the case of Russell, Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s assessment of contemporary cinema was imbued with fascist and xenophobic tropes. Repeating the typical antisemitic discourse of the era, Macdonald-Wright described a contemporary ‘lowering of cultural standards’ caused by a Jewish domination over Hollywood and the American mass media as a whole. The misfortune of his ‘chromatograph’ was according to this scheme caused by the fact that the ‘Semitic race’ favoured mediocre and utilitarian cultural production at the expense of ‘idealistic’ projects.[54] The pattern is clear enough and recalls a familiar trajectory of a part of the European historical avant-garde: the fascist vulgate opportunistically justifies the failure of the Synchrome Corporation through a conceptual conjunction under the banner of so-called purity, a common obsession of fascist and modern visual artists.
Conclusion
The Synchrome Corporation did not produce any significant artistic or industrial outcome in the interwar period beyond the lost film Macdonald-Wright made in the early 1920s, although patents were regularly filed by Walter L. Wright on behalf of the company until 1942. Macdonald-Wright’s most significant achievement would only come a few years later, with a device called the Synchrome Kineidoscope built in 1959 (Figure 5) and publicly demonstrated in 1967.[55] It consisted of four projectors of three 35mm black-and-white films. A control panel allowed the operator of the machine ‘17 different operations which send overlapping colour shapes, marching across the screen in different directions, make them disappear in a fade-out, or subtly effect, a complete transformation or “mutation” of colour “key”’.[56] This intricate device is a radical departure from the apparatuses patented by the Synchrome Corporation in the interwar period. What remains, however, is the choice of an additive system, an unconventional option that, both in the interwar and postwar era, went against the grain of the usual practices of the colour film industry. The Synchromist’s heretical approach to colour film illustrates the pivotal role played by material and technical decisions in the formation of early experimental film. These decisions were guided by an understanding of cinema as an inherently problematic medium, for the technical, social, and cultural reasons I have analysed through a focus on formats – an approach which, beyond the case of the Synchromists, has the potential to help uncover and renew overlooked aspects of media history.
Fig. 5: Stanton Macdonald-Wright. Synchrome Kineidoscope, 1960-1969, Machine; metal and plastic color filters, 39 x 23 x 19 in. (99.06 x 58.42 x 48.26 cm). Gift of the Estates of Jean and Stanton Macdonald-Wright (M.2008.229.1-.6) © Ilene Susan Fort.
The relation Morgan Russell maintained throughout the interwar period with the French art historian and film critic Élie Faure is indicative of the historical and theoretical tensions of the Synchromists’ venture into colour film. In the early 1920s, Faure attributed a task to Russell that was akin to the one ascribed to him by Ricciotto Canudo. In a text full of clichés about the combination of the ‘practical energy and [the] slightly mad dream’ of the American character, Faure described Russell as the future craftsman of a colourful ‘cinéplastie’.[57] In the 1930s, however, this conjunction was no longer valid. In the letters the two men exchanged, Faure could not convince Russell of the value of Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies, a milestone series in the history of colour films. The ‘admirable cartoons bringing an enormous gravity of rhythms and materials into the eternity of the mind’ that Élie Faure enthusiastically described to a somewhat sceptical Morgan Russell could not have been further from the Synchromists conception of colour film.[58] The reasons such a dialogue was now impossible were as much technical as they were political and aesthetic: the Silly Symphonies were shot with Technicolor; a company that had won the battle of processes the Synchromists attempted to wage, with a subtractive system which was the opposite to the one Macdonald-Wright championed.
Influenced by what he called the Soviet ‘symphonic spirit’,[59] Faure was discussing the collective and anonymous mode of film production, which he explained to Russell would soon replace exhausted conceptions of ‘the works of art derived from Platonic ideas’.[60] This point of view, imbued with political considerations radically opposed to the Synchromists, led Élie Faure to articulate a theory of film experiments through a form of positive determinism.[61] This proto-theory of the affordance posited a ‘constant reversibility between technicality and affectivity’ in cinema.[62] It explored the dimension the Synchromists avoided by rejecting the film industry. This choice has certainly cost Macdonald-Wright his place in the history of cinema, since the ultimate reason of the failure of his Synchrome Corporation seems to be his denial of the fact that film experiments, in so far as they take place at the intersection of technical and aesthetic concerns, are inseparable from the industry.
Author
Pierre J. Pernuit researches and teaches contemporary art history and media studies at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, where he is Maître de Conférences. His first book, Mobile Color: Essai d’écranologie (Mimésis, 2025), examines experimental media practices in the United States. Pierre has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University and has held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.), the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (Paris). In 2023-2024, Pierre was a researcher in the PRIN2022 Project FilmBaseMatters: A Material Approach to the History of Small-gauge Film in Italy.
References
Apollinaire, G. Chroniques d’art 1902-1918. Paris: Folio Essais, 1960.
Arnheim, R. ‘Remarks on the Colour Film’, Sight and Sound, 4, no. 16, Winter 1935: 160-162.
Balázs, B. Early film theory: Visible man and the spirit of film, translated by R. Livingstone. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010.
Baker, M. ‘The Art Theory and Criticism of Willard Huntington Wright’, PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1975.
Canudo, R. ‘L’art Cérébriste’, Le Figaro, 9 February 1914: 1.
_____. ‘Le Septième art et son esthétique: la tâche de l’Ecraniste’, L’Amour de l’art, 10 October 1921 in L’usine Aux Images. Edition intégrale, R. Canudo, J. Morel, and J. Dotoli. Paris: Séguier: Arte éditions, 1995: 78.
_____. ‘Uomini e cose d’Oltralpe. Difendiamo il cinematografo’, L’Epoca, 1 February 1920, in idem L’Usine aux images, op. cit.: 48.
_____. ‘L’esthétique du Septième Art – II-Le Drame Visuel’, Le Film, June 1921b, in idem. L’Usine aux images, op. cit.: 63-67.
_____. ‘Films en couleurs’, Paris Midi, 15 June 1921c, 1–2, reproduced and translated in idem. L’Usine aux images, op. cit.: 275.
_____. ‘Esthétique du spectacle, défendons le cinéma’, Revue de l’Epoque III, 13 January 1921d, reproduced and translated in idem. L’Usine aux images, op. cit.: 49-52.
_____. ‘L’art : Pour le Septième Art’, Cinéa, 2, 13 May 1921E, reproduced and translated in idem. L’Usine aux images, op. cit.: 68.
_____. ‘La Leçon du Cinéma-La tribune des écrivains combattants’, L’Information, 23 October 1919: 2.
_____. ‘Septième art ou Démiurgie ?’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 35, 16 June 1923, reproduced and translated in idem. L’Usine aux images, op. cit.: 276.
Cheetham, M. The rhetoric of purity: Essentialist theory and the advent of abstract painting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Cornwell-Clyne, A. Colour cinematography. London: Chapman & Hall, LTD, 1951.
Daugaard, N. ‘Avant-gardist Colors in a Political Tug-of-War. Gasparcolor Between Art and Fascism’ in Color mania: The material of colour in photography and film, edited by B. Flückiger, E. Hielscher, and N. Wietlisbach. Zürich: Lars Müller, 2020: 187-195.
De Rosa, M. and Mariani, A. ‘Experimenting in Circles: Agfa, Amateur Cinema, and the Art of R&D’, NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, 13, 2023: https://necsus-ejms.org/experimenting-in-circles-agfa-amateur-cinema-and-the-art-of-rd/.
Elsaesser, T. ‘The New Film History as Media Archaeology’, Cinémas: Revue d’études cinématographiques/Cinémas: Journal of Film Studies, 14, no. 2-3, 2004: 75-117.
Ernst, W. ‘Radical Media Archaeology (its Epistemology, Aesthetics and Case Studies)’, Artnodes, 21, 2018: https://doi.org/10.7238/a.v0i21.3205.
Faure, E. ‘Morgan Russell’ in Exposition de Tableaux et Synchromies par Morgan Russell. Paris: Galerie La Licorne, 1923, n.p.
_____. ‘Introduction à la mystique du cinéma’ in Élie Faure. Fonction du cinéma, de la cinéplastique à son destin social, 1921-1937. Paris: Plon, 1953 (orig. in 1934).
_____. Ombres solides. (Essais d’esthétique concrète). Paris: Société française d’éditions littéraires et techniques, 1934.
_____. ‘Vocation du Cinéma’ in Élie Faure. Fonction du cinéma, de la cinéplastique à son destin social, 1921-1937. Paris: Plon, 1953 (orig. in 1937): 98-105.
Fihman, G. ‘De la “Musique chromatique” et des “Rythmes colorés” au mouvement des couleurs’, Fotogenia, 1, 1995: 319-232.
Gunning, T. ‘Colorful Metaphors: the Attraction of Color in Early Silent Cinema’, Fotogenia, 1, 1994: 249-255.
Higgins, S. Harnessing the Technicolor rainbow: Color design in the 1930s. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007.
Huhtamo, E. ‘From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Notes Toward an Archaeology of the Media’, Leonardo, 30, no. 3, 1997: 223.
Kushner, M. Morgan Russell. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1990.
Heidelberger, M. Nature from within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and his psychophysical worldview. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004.
Hudson, A. ‘Artist Arrives With a Picture Machine’, The Washington Post, May 1967, E1.
Levin, G. Synchromism and American colour abstraction, 1910-1925. New York: G. Braziller, 1978.
Huntington-Wright, W. ‘Noted Art Critic Praises Recent Modernist Film’, Variety, 15 April 1921a: 43.
_____. ‘The Romance of the Third Dimension’, Photoplay, 20, no. 4, 1921b: 41-42.
_____. ‘The Future of Painting I: The Confusing of Two Distinct Arts’, The Freeman, 22 November 1922: 255-262.
_____. ‘The Future of Painting II: The Art of Colour’, The Freeman, 29 November 1922: 278-289.
_____. ‘The Future of Painting III: A New Art-Medium’, The Freeman, 6 December 1922: 303-318.
Macdonald-Wright, S. Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.,
_____. ‘Photography and the New Literature’, Manuscripts, 4, 1922: 7.
_____. ‘A Treatise on Color’, 1924, in The Art of Stanton, D. Scott. Washington: Smithsonian Press, 1967: 65-100.
_____. Serenade in blue, The memoirs of S.M.W, Book II, Art – The life of creation, edited by P. Wright. Unpublished manuscript, LACMA Archives, Los Angeles. 1995.
Moritz, W. ‘Towards Visual Music’, Cantrills Filmnotes, August 1985: 47-48; 35-42.
Pesenti Rossi, E. ‘Pour un cinéma latin: Ricciotto Canudo, entre l’avant-garde et l’Action Française’, Storicamente, 14, 2018: 1-28.
Rousseau, P. ‘The Art of Light. Colors, Sounds and Technologies of Light in the Art of the Synchromists’ in Made in USA: l’art américain, 1908-1947. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001: 69-81.
Russell, M. Archives, Montclair Art Museum
Russell, M Collection, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
Salis, J. ‘Abstract Color Art and the Cinematograph’, New-York Tribune, 10 November 1918: 8.
South, W. Color, myth, and music: Stanton Macdonald-Wright and synchromism. Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2001.
Stieglitz, Alfred/ O’Keefe, Georgia Archives, Yale University.
Turquety, B. Inventing cinema: Machines, gestures and media history. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019.
_____. ‘Le naturel et le mécanique: le Kinémacolor à la conquête de Paris, ou Charles Urban vs Charles Pathé’, 1895, Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze. Revue de l’association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma, 71, 2013: 81-105.
Spencer, D. ‘Colour Cinematography, A Review’, Sight and Sound, 5, no. 19, Autumn 1936: 104-105.
Street, S. and Yumibe, J. Chromatic modernity: Color, cinema, and media of the 1920s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.
Tudor-Hart, P. ‘The Analogy of Sound and Color’, The Cambridge Magazine, 7, 1918: 480-486.
International who’s who in art and antiques. Cambridge: Melrose Press, 1972.
Walker, J. ‘Interview: Stanton Macdonald-Wright’, American Art Review, January-February 1974: 59-68.
Wright, W. ‘Optical System for Motion Picture Photography’, US1930498, filed 19 September 1930, published 17 October 1933.
_____. ‘Apparatus For Projecting Motion Picture’, US1949892, filed 5 November 1928, published 6 March 1934.
[1] Huntington-Wright 1921(a); Huntington-Wright 1921(b), pp. 41‑42. This article is a research output conceived in the frame of the project PRIN2022 FilmBaseMatters: A Material Approach to the History of Small-gauge Film in Italy (project id. H53D23006770006 PI Andrea Mariani), funded by UE-PNRR of the Italian Ministry of University Research.
[2] Kushner 1990.
[3] Levin 1978, p. 131
[4] Rousseau 2001.
[5] Macdonald-Wright was the principal shareholder and ‘artistic director’ of this company along with Walter L. Wright, a Los Angeles-based engineer and cameraman. This collaborator is almost never discussed by Macdonald-Wright, he was by all odds the real engineer of the synchromists’ experimentations in colour films and was in fact the assignor of the more than 30 patents obtained on behalf of the Synchrome Corporation from 1924 to 1942.
[6] Daugaard 2020.
[7] Street & Yumibe 2019.
[8] Moritz 1985, p. 94.
[9] Turquety 2019, p. 22.
[10] Ibid., p. 13.
[11] Jancovic & Volmar & Schneider 2020, p. 11.
[12] Sterne 2012, p. 11.
[13] Wasson 2015.
[14] Elsaesser 2004.
[15] De Rosa & Mariani 2023.
[16] Macdonald-Wright letter to Stieglitz, August 9, 1920. Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keefe Archives, Folder 760, Yale University.
[17] Salis 1918, p. 8.
[18] Macdonald-Wright 1922, p. 7.
[19] Macdonald-Wright letter to Russell, n.d.. S. Macdonald-Wright Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C.
[20] Canudo 1914, p. 1.
[21] Canudo 1921, p. 78.
[22] Canudo 1919, p. 2 (translated by the author)
[23] Canudo 1920 p. 48.
[24] Canudo 1921b, p. 63.
[25] Russell, “Notes”, ca. 1922-1924. Morgan Russell Collection, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, I.3.b.
[26] Russell letter to Macdonald-Wright, November 1924 in Macdonald-Wright 1995, pp. 81-89
[27] I differ here with William Moritz, who argues that no discussion of visual music should separate ‘abstract film’ from the ‘colour organ’.
[28] Macdonald-Wright letter to Russell, ca. 1920. S. Macdonald-Wright Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C.
[29] Russell 1922, p. 81.
[30] Gunning 1994, p. 249.
[31] Macdonald-Wright 1924, p. 94.
[32] Canudo 1921c pp. 1-2; Balázs, p. 178; Arnheim 1935, pp. 160-162; Faure 1943 (orig. in 1937), pp. 98-105.
[33] Higgins, pp. 27-31.
[34] Nor, to my knowledge, were any of the Synchrome Corporation apparatuses used in conventional film production.
[35]Macdonald-Wright letter to Russell, n.d.. S. Macdonald-Wright Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.; South 2001, p. 82.
[36] Whose Who 1972, p. 325 ; Walker 1974, p. 65.
[37] Cornwell-Clyne 1951, p. 131.
[38] Wright 1933, p. 2.
[39] Huntington Wright 1922, pp. 8, 47.
[40] Cheetham 1994.
[41] Heidelberger 2004, pp. 191-244.
[42] Russell. ‘Notebook’, December 1912-February 1913. Morgan Russell Archives, Montclair Art Museum.
[43] Tudor-Hart 1918, p. 450.
[44] South 2001, p. 34.
[45] Wright 1934, p. 1.
[46] Jancovic & Volmar & Schneider 2020, p. 14.
[47] Spencer 1936, p. 104.
[48] Macdonald-Wright letter to Russell, n.d.. S. Macdonald-Wright Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.
[49] Baker 1975, pp. 46-50.
[50] Canudo 1923, p. 276. On Canudo’s politics, see Pesenti Rossi 2018.
[51] Canudo 1921d, 1921e.
[52] Turquety 2013.
[53] Russell 1931.
[54] Macdonald-Wright letter to Russell, 17 February 1934, S. Macdonald-Wright Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington D.C.
[55] This apparatus is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
[56] Hudson 1967, p. e1.
[57] Faure 1923, n.p. (translated by the author).
[58]Faure letter to Russell, 4 August 1933, Morgan Russell Archives and Collection, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, 1.1.13.
[59] Faure, 1934, p. 16 (translated by the author).
[60] Faure 1933, n. p. (translated by the author).
[61] Faure 1953 (orig. in 1937), p. 90.
[62] Faure 1953 (orig. in 1934), p. 71 (translated by the author).