In 1836, animation pioneer and kinetic sculptor Len Lye created "Rainbow Dance," a beautiful and strange animated film. Watch excerpts below. To create the wonderfully vibrant and surreal color effects, Lye used then-state-of-the-art Gasparcolor film, developed in 1933 by Hungarian chemist Béla Gáspár who was working in Berlin at the time.
From the Timeline of HIstorical Film Colors:
Gasparcolor was the first three-color multi-layer monopack film available for practical use. It was a double-coated print film with a cyan layer on one side and two layers dyed magenta and yellow on the other side (see illustrations). As a consequence of this arrangement the process required b/w separation records of the red, blue and green light, either produced by a beam-splitter camera or by successive photographs taken through the corresponding filters.
For political reasons Gaspar had to flee from Germany before the Second World War. While he established a plant in London, he could not convince the producers in the US to adopt his process. In the late 1950s, however, the principle was revived by Ciba-Geigy and distributed as Cibachrome (later Ilfochrome) for photographic paper prints.
