April 9

The World, the Flesh and the Devil: How the First Color Feature Film Arrived—and Vanished

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On the evening of April 9, 1914, an audience gathered at the Holborn Empire on High Holborn in London for the premiere of a fifty-minute British silent drama called The World, the Flesh and the Devil. The title came from the Litany of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: “From all the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil, spare us, good Lord.” The film's cast list included, in a role presumably requiring some theatrical bravado, an actor credited simply as H. Agar Lyons—playing the Devil himself.

What made this evening genuinely historic had less to do with its plot—a melodrama of mistaken identity involving switched babies, frustrated social climbers, and the inevitable complications of confused inheritance—and considerably more to do with how it looked. The World, the Flesh and the Devil was one of the first dramatic feature films ever made in color. Not hand-tinted, not chemically dyed frame by frame in the laborious manner that had produced tinted films since the 1890s, but genuinely, technologically, deliberately filmed and projected in color — the red and green wavelengths of the natural world captured through spinning filter wheels and rendered on screen for a paying audience in a fashionable London theater.

The technology was called Kinemacolor and, by the time this film premiered, it was already dying.

Who the Devil Made It

The desire to capture the world in color was present in photography almost from the moment photography itself existed. The Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had demonstrated the theoretical basis for color photography as early as 1861—projecting three separately filtered images through red, green, and blue filters to produce the first recognizable color photograph. The principle was sound. The practical challenge was formidable: film emulsions of the nineteenth century were orthochromatic, sensitive to blue and green light but effectively blind to red. Making color cinematography work required solving problems in chemistry, optics, and engineering simultaneously, at a moment when the cinema itself was barely twenty years old.

The man who came closest to solving them, in the years before the First World War, was a Brighton-based inventor named George Albert Smith—working with, and backed by, a German-American film pioneer named Charles Urban who had become one of the most significant figures in early British cinema. Urban was a man of extraordinary commercial energy who had, among other achievements, filmed the funeral of King Edward VII, the Coronation of George V, and a documentary expedition through India with the King and Queen — all events of mass public fascination, all produced and distributed through his Natural Color Kinematograph Company.

The process Smith and Urban developed was called Kinemacolor. It was, by the standards of what came before it, a marvel: a two-color additive system in which a specially adapted camera filmed through alternating red-orange and green filters at thirty-two frames per second—double the normal silent film speed. The resulting black-and-white footage, when projected through a corresponding spinning color filter wheel, produced through the human eye's persistence of vision a convincing approximation of natural color. The colors were not perfect—blue skies in particular were notoriously difficult, rendered with a yellowish cast that the process could not fully overcome—but to audiences accustomed to black-and-white or crudely tinted films, the effect was extraordinary. One contemporary promotional slogan captured the reaction: They are not pictures, but realities.

Kinemacolor was publicly launched in 1909 and became a genuine commercial and cultural sensation. Urban's company filmed royal ceremonies, military reviews, documentary expeditions, and eventually dramatic fiction films in the process. A dedicated showcase theater—the Scala in Londo —became the flagship venue. Kinemacolor licensees operated across Europe, in America, and in Japan. The company grew, expanded, and began to look like the permanent future of how cinema would look.

The World in Color

The dramatic feature was, for Kinemacolor, a more challenging proposition than documentary footage. The process worked best in bright sunlight — the double film speed required intense illumination, and studio work under artificial light was difficult. Color fringing appeared around moving objects as the two filtered frames, taken at fractionally different moments, failed to fully register. Audiences occasionally reported eye strain from the flickering. But Urban was determined to push the technology toward genuine narrative cinema, and The World, the Flesh and the Devil, produced in 1914 under the direction of F. Martin Thornton, was his most ambitious attempt.

The film was based on a play by Laurence Cowen and told a story that its Victorian-inflected title perfectly suited: a conniving woman hatches a scheme to switch the infants of a poor family and a rich one, seeking to give her chosen child the advantages of wealth and position. The nurse hired to execute the switch refuses, leaving each baby in its proper cradle. When the children grow up, the young man from the poor family—who has been deceived into believing himself the heir to the rich one—arrives to claim his supposed birthright, throwing out the true heir and precipitating a cascade of social and romantic confusion. The remainder of the film, in the manner of the best Victorian melodrama, untangles identity, restores order, and presumably delivers the appropriate moral satisfactions.

And all of it—the drawing rooms and confrontations and dramatic reversals—was filmed and projected in Kinemacolor. The world, the flesh, and the devil, rendered in the red and green wavelengths that the spinning filter wheel could capture. The Devil himself, played by H. Agar Lyons, appearing in color on a London stage for the first time in cinema history. The premiere took place as part of a Kinemacolor season at the Holborn Empire, one of London's great music hall venues—the appropriate theatrical frame for what was, in its quiet way, a genuinely historic evening.

The Dying of the Light

What the audience at the Holborn Empire on April 9, 1914 could not have known—though Urban certainly did—was that the technology illuminating their evening was in the process of being extinguished. The month before, in March 1914, a court of appeal had delivered a verdict that effectively dismantled the legal foundation on which Kinemacolor's commercial dominance rested.

The case had been brought by William Friese-Greene, a British inventor who had developed a rival color process called Bicolor and who argued that Smith's Kinemacolor patent was invalid. The lower courts had found for Urban and Smith. But the appeals court reached a different conclusion—and its reasoning was almost elegantly simple. Kinemacolor's patent claimed to reproduce natural colors. With only red and green filters, it could not reproduce blue. Therefore it did not produce natural colors. Therefore the patent was invalid.

It was, as legal arguments go, unanswerable. The same month that The World, the Flesh and the Devil premiered, Urban put the Natural Color Kinematograph Company into voluntary liquidation. The process continued briefly under the name Colorfilms, but the exclusivity that had made Kinemacolor commercially formidable was gone. And then, four months later, the First World War began, and the European film industry's immediate concerns became considerably more urgent than the color of its images.

Kinemacolor made its last film in 1915. By the time Europe began rebuilding its cinema industries after the war, a new color process—Technicolor, developed in Boston by Herbert Kalmus and his partners — had taken the lead, and would eventually produce the saturated three-color splendor of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Kinemacolor's two-color compromise was simply outrun by history.

Lost to Time

The World, the Flesh and the Devil is now considered a lost film. The print—or whatever prints may have survived the decades of neglect, nitrate film deterioration, and the various catastrophes of the twentieth century—has not been located. The film that inaugurated color dramatic cinema, that brought the Devil himself onto the screen in red and green on an April evening in London in 1914, exists now only in cast lists and premiere programs and the occasional surviving brochure from Charles Urban's company.

There is something fitting in this—not merely sad, but genuinely resonant. The first color dramatic feature was a film about mistaken identity, about the confusion between appearance and reality, about a world in which things are not what they seem. Its technology was a system that reproduced color through a trick of human perception—persistence of vision, the eye's willingness to blend two separately filtered images into a convincing whole. And the film itself has now become, in its absence, something that exists only in imagination, reconstructed from the fragments of historical record.

The world, the flesh, and the devil—the three great temptations of the Christian tradition, the three forces that the Litany prayed for deliverance from—were, in 1914, precisely the forces that cinema was beginning to capture in all their chromatic complexity. The natural world in its color and light. The human flesh in its warmth and movement. And the old adversary himself, given a face and a name in the credits, walking in red and green across a London screen.

Color Remains…

For readers of Modern Occultist, the story of The World, the Flesh and the Devil sits at the intersection of several themes we explore regularly: the relationship between the visible and the invisible, the technology of perception, and the way that the names we give to things carry their own history of meaning.

The title is a theological formula from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer—a seventeenth-century Anglican liturgy's naming of the three great adversaries of the devout soul. That these same three adversaries should become the title of the first color dramatic film in cinema history is, to put it mildly, a coincidence worth pausing over. The cinema, from its very earliest years, had been understood by religious authorities as precisely this kind of danger — a technology of illusion that appealed to the world's vanity, the flesh's appetite for sensation, and the devil's gift for disguising unreality as experience. The choice of title, whether deliberate provocation or simple dramatic convenience, carries an unintentional weight.

Color made the cinema more immersive, more seductive, more convincing in its simulation of reality. The process that achieved this—Kinemacolor—was itself a kind of theological argument: it demonstrated that natural color could be approximated through a system that worked by exploiting the limitations of human vision rather than actually capturing the full spectrum of light. The eye was convinced. The blue was missing. The perception was complete. It is, when you look at it directly, a remarkably good metaphor for the nature of representation itself—and for the particular kind of magic that the cinema, from its beginning, has always practiced.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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