Agfacolor

[4] 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 in their own technology.

The Third Reich's Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels admired Hollywood movies and examined them carefully in regular private screenings (sometimes with Adolf Hitler and his staff).

[citation needed] It was not until the beginning of principal photography for Women Are Better Diplomats (German: Frauen sind doch bessere Diplomaten) a 1939 musical starring the singer/dancer Marika Rökk and actor Willy Fritsch that Agfacolor was used for 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.

[citation needed] 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.

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.

Other Agfacolor productions include The Woman of My Dreams (1944), a musical starring Marika Rökk and Kolberg (1945), a dramatization of German resistance throughout the Napoleonic Wars and the regime's last major propaganda feature film.

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,[5] which was widely used in the USSR and other Eastern bloc nations;[6] such films produced in Poland were also described as Polcolor, the first being Adventure at Marienstadt (1954).

[12] Agfacolor consumer products were also marketed in North America under the names Ansco Color and Anscochrome (from Agfa's then-US subsidiary, Agfa-Ansco).

At the request of the War Department, Ansco then developed a similar color film, which it produced in its own factory in Binghamton, New York.

[15] Agfacolor[16] was used in one of the first color French comedy and topless films with Louis de Funès called Women of Paris[17] (fr.