A Kodachrome film

If memory serves, the dates of those photos are: defense plant worker, 1942; D.C. corner market, 1940; John Wayne, 1951; postwar London, 1949. They're almost hyper-realistic, but what they do is bring an immediacy to a past that suddenly seems not at all distant.

Did you ever read the old Calvin and Hobbes comic strip? If you did, you'll recall that young Calvin's father often told the tyke tall tales just to flummox him. One strip had Calvin asking why old TV shows and movies were black and white, and Calvin's father explained with a straight face, "That's because there was no color until about the late '60s; before then, the entire world was black and white." The final panel had Calvin running to the kitchen yelling, "MOM!?" from which a thought bubble emerged, "NOW what's he been telling him?"

Below is a sampling of some remarkable photos made in a process called Autochrome by Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky during the czarist era, mostly 1909-1910. Talk about bringing a distant past to life.




 
I hope Mr. Dacron won't consider this threadjacking; given the topic, they seemed apropos, and are so fascinating in the way they bring living, breathing vitality to faces and places normally represented by only monochrome light and shadow.

Autochrome was an additive color process (as were the first versions of Kodachrome and Technicolor), where the Kodachrome first marketed in 1935 was a subtractive one (as was the final three-strip Technicolor introduced in '33). And if anyone needs an explanation of the difference, I'm not the one to ask. Even the link below describing the basics says the concepts "can take some time to wrap your head around," and I've been trying for years.

lucaskrech.com/blog/index.php/2010/01/22/color-theory-basics-additive-and-subtractive-color-mixing/ 

Below is some film made at Deauville in 1912:
 

In films from the hand-cranked era, when speeds were variable but rarely exceeded 18 fps, I find that even more than something like color, the proper speed is important for removing that sense of "distance" and rendering them lifelike.

In fairness to Mr. Dacron, I'll return the thread to Kodachrome with these 1922 tests of the early additive system based on two, rather then three, colors (the blonde in the second half with the curly bob and grandly affected manner was Mae Murray, who in Norma Desmond fashion, vanished from the screen with the advent of talkies):