Or, wealthy folks taking "home movies" in the 1930s with expensive color film. A four-part BBC video documentary is embedded here.
BBC In Colour: Vivid images of a vanished decade, by Dominic Cavendish (The Telegraph)
"The earlier In Colour series rely overwhelmingly on still colour photographs from one source - the Albert Kahn archives in France," he says. "These only run up to 1930. After making contact with most of the world's major film archives, it became apparent that colour documentary film from the 1930s is very scarce indeed. In fact, the only colour images that I was aware of were the famous shots of Hitler at the Berghof - his home in Bavaria - which we show again. Apart from that, we had to cast our net very wide and trust our instincts. As a result, we managed to unearth some hidden treasures."
I could watch this sort of documentary all day long.
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The Thirties in Colour
Four-part series using rare, private and commercial film and photographic archives to give poignant and surprising insights into the 1930s, a decade which erupted into colour as polychromatic photographic technology came of age and three important processes - Dufaycolour, Technicolor and Kodachrome - were patented and brought to the market.
Episode 1: A World Away
This opening part looks at the work of socialite and amateur film-maker, Rosie Newman, who used her high society contacts to secure extraordinary access to the social elite. Between 1928 and her retirement in the 1960s, Newman criss-crossed the globe and shot some of the most important colour documentary footage of the period.
Some of her colour films have been seen before, but this programme features some of Newman's work that has never been broadcast and has not been seen publicly for over 70 years.
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Episode 2: Wright Around the World
Together with his younger brother Bolling, the American industrialist Harry Wright was wealthy enough to indulge his twin passions for travel and filmmaking. Both siblings collected and shot films that captured the world at a pivotal time in history.
They captured astonishing images acquired and filmed in the islands of the South Pacific, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, as well as South Africa, Morocco, Palestine, and several countries in Europe, including Britain. These destinations were visited during the golden age of ocean travel, when the well-off could escape the Great Depression and travel the world on luxury cruise ships.
The sea had become a playground but it would soon become a battleground, as the world lurched towards the bloodiest war in history.
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Episode 3: Adventures in the Americas
One of the most prolific collectors of colour film in the period was the American industrialist Harry Wright. A self-made millionaire with a passion for film, he acquired and commissioned hundreds of films, which he screened for guests at the private cinema he had built in his home in Mexico City.
The programme examines Wright's extraordinary colour films of Africa and Central America, including his so-called Ethnographic Series of Unknown Mexican Indians, a unique visual record of the lives and customs of indigenous peoples living in the remote rural regions of Mexico.
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Episode 4: End of an Era
It was Golden Age for international travel, a decade when advanced transport systems allowed people to journey all over the world. Travellers with the means recorded their experiences by using the new colour film technologies. Often unintentionally, their home movies captured defining moments at a time when the nations of Europe were about to be plunged into the disaster that was the Second World War.
The final episode features colour films shot by travelling film-makers in Europe, including footage shot on the streets of Berlin decked in red swastikas at the time of the Olympic Games, rare pictures of the Jewish quarter in Warsaw just weeks before the Nazi invasion and, in London, tourists wearing gas masks amid fears of imminent bombing raids by the German Luftwaffe.
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Finally, fast-forwarding to the 1950s, a bonus selection.
Six decades ;ater,it would be next to impossible to replicate this feat, given wars and closed borders.
BBC Timeshift: The Lost Road - Overland to Singapore
In 1955 young producer of Travellers' Tales David Attenborough was persuaded by six Oxbridge undergraduates to give some money & filmstock so they could film their unique overland journey by Land Rover from London to Singapore.
The team fly across the Channel, travel through France, brewing tea at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. Then onward through Germany, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. They inspect ancient ruins in Syria, learn to waterski in The Lebanon and spend time a Nairn Bus workshop in Iraq. They demo the landrovers to the Iranian Army, travel through Pakistan to India where they visit the Taj Mahal and the tea plantations of Darjeeling. Onto previously inaccessible Nepal and through fairly incessible Burma. There they are escorted by soldiers whose jeep they have to repair. Then through Malaya and onto the Singapore causeway where a welcoming committee awaits.
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