In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese in July 2015.

100TH ANNIVERSARY OF TECHNICOLOR™ (July 7, 6am)-- We use the term "color" as if it were a category-- color as opposed to black-and-white--but really, it's a vast range of possibilities. When we get up in the morning and look out the window, we're arranging the world in colors and gradations of light according to our own palette, and that's what painters do, of course. The ocean and the sky as painted by Manet is a universe away from the seascapes in Turner's paintings, the color values in Winslow Homer's paintings are as different from those of Edward Hopper as Whistler's are from David Hockney's. In movies, the filmmaker's relationship with color is in one way the same as the painter's, and in another way quite different. In cinema, you're dealing with mechanical processes and while you're doing your best to control the color, you're also opening yourself up to the surprises it can yield. Even now, when we've achieved a level of control over color that was unthinkable to filmmakers of previous generations, you have people experimenting, pushing digital technology--in cinematography and in post-production--as far as it can go. That's exactly what the greatest "colorists" did when Technicolor™, the first color process used throughout the industry, did in the '30s and '40s and '50s. TCM is saluting the 100th anniversary of Technicolor™, developed by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Frost Comstock, and W. Burton Wescott. The company went through different processes before they arrived at 3-strip Technicolor™ in the 1930s. The process itself was cumbersome and difficult to manage (it was called 3-strip Technicolor™ because it involved enormous cameras requiring three separate rolls of film shot at once), but the results were glorious. Technicolor™ always looked like it was going to spill over beyond the images and that was, in part, what was exciting and magical about it. Technicolor™ certainly wasn't "naturalistic" in any way, and it played a very important role in the development of cinema around the world from the early '30s through the '60s (after that, it became scarce, and the last film processed in Technicolor™ was The Godfather Part II in 1974). TCM is starting their tribute with the 1922 film Toll of the Sea, the first Technicolor™ feature. In the early days, Technicolor™ was 2-strip and it wasn't till the early '30s that 3-strip was perfected and the full range of color was available. The first Technicolor™ feature, the 1935 Becky Sharp, is not a part of this tribute but there are many other films from the period including two pictures that William Wellman made for David O. Selznick, Nothing Sacred and the first version of A Star Is Born, and two high points in the history of Technicolor™: The Thief of Bagdad and The Adventures of Robin Hood. When great artists like Vincente Minnelli, Michael Powell, Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock and Luchino Visconti started working in Technicolor™, the process became a real creative tool. Meet Me in St. Louis, The Red Shoes, The River, North By Northwest and The Leopard are not only five of the greatest films ever made, but five miracles of color and light (The Quiet Man, a great color film from another great artist, is also showing this month in a program called "Seeing Red"). Of course, you won't be seeing transfers of actual Technicolor™ prints--many of them are worn, decaying or long gone--but you will be experiencing the sense of Technicolor™, so wondrously beautiful.