Forget vinyl, tubes, and magnetic tape. Technicolor, as in “Glorious Technicolor!,” a 14-film survey beginning Saturday at the Museum of the Moving Image, may be the most absurdly analogue technology ever invented. On first examination, the most glorious thing about “Technicolor Process 4,” as the specific application that yielded the classic colors of Hollywood from the 1930s to the ’50s was called, is that it worked at all. It was a union of unwieldy optics, multiple-camera negatives, and a dye-printing process more akin to lithography than assembly-line film production.

Exhibit A is the rare, original “three-strip” (one for each primary color, all exposed simultaneously and combined in printing) Technicolor camera that the museum recently added to its collection. When placed within the necessary soundproofing box (appropriately called a “blimp”), a Technicolor camera was roughly the size of a riding mower. And yet it did work. Beautifully.

“Watching a Technicolor film from the classical era is a perceptual luxury,” writes Scott Higgins, an associate professor of film studies at Wesleyan University, in his fascinating and lucid new book, “Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow.” So much so that even though the aesthetically extravagant and physically unwieldy process is rarely if ever used (the museum will show Francis Ford Coppola’s unfortunate self-mutilation, “Apocalypse Now Redux,” in a version that was printed using the old-dye transfer process, though not shot using a three-strip camera), the term “Technicolor” remains synonymous with colors more vivid than those in real life. Like sound and widescreen, Technicolor was considered a long shot when it made its debut. Indeed, the first live-action Technicolor feature, a 1935 version of Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” entitled “Becky Sharp,” had to be created outside of the studio system. “It was made by an independent company called Pioneer Pictures and released through RKO,” said Mr. Higgins, who will be on hand to introduce “Becky Sharp” when it screens in a vintage “IB” print (using dye transfer technology) at the museum tomorrow night. Pioneer’s owner, the venture capitalist John Hay Whitney, was also a major investor in Technicolor at the time. “The films that Pioneer made,” Mr. Higgins said, “were essentially prototype or demonstration films for Technicolor. The job was to convince people that Technicolor could be used in mainstream studio productions.”

Though a critic in Liberty Magazine dismissed the jaw-dropping profusion of color shadings in “Becky Sharp” when it was released as making the cast look like “boiled salmon in mayonnaise,” the film “really is an experimental movie,” Mr. Higgins said. Whitney and Technicolor’s technical brain trust let director Rouben Mamoulian and color designer Robert Edmond Jones (who was lured away from Broadway to supervise the film’s new makeover) “run with the ball and try to make Technicolor the key dramatic actor in the movie,” Mr. Higgins said. As a result, “Becky Sharp” “is like a laboratory for trying all the possible color effects they thought were valuable. They keep color on display throughout the entire movie. It never recedes.”

The unrelenting visual extravagance in “Becky Sharp” served its purpose. The film was a hit and the studios opted to license the coloring process for their own films. Director Henry Hathaway’s 1936 “Trail of the Lonesome Pine” is typical of a more restrained approach to cinema’s newfound palette.

“The goal in ‘Trail of the Lonesome Pine’ was to make color serve the story,” Mr. Higgins said. So much so that even though the film’s rustic outdoor construction scenes would logically call for the bright red Pendleton shirts that were de rigueur for such endeavors in the 1930s, cinematographer Ray Rennahan later confessed to American Cinematographer Magazine that he and Hathaway deliberately clad their extras in neutral-toned clothing so as not to push the color over the top — to “Becky Sharp” intensity.

“What they figured out was that by reducing the palette, very, very small changes took on a great deal of power,” Mr. Higgins said. With the exception of a spectacularly lit phone-call love scene between stars Fred MacMurray and Sylvia Sydney, which throbs with pastel hues, “Trail of the Lonesome Pine” gently gooses Mother Nature in a series of richly textured landscapes and forest backgrounds. “It’s high melodrama,” Mr. Higgins said, but nevertheless, “a very subtle film.”

Among the many delights in the museum’s “Glorious Technicolor!” roundup is a screening of the apotheosis of MGM’s giddy run of color musicals, 1939’s “The Wizard of Oz.” With a yellow brick road, ruby slippers, an emerald city, and a rainbow, L. Frank Baum’s book was “a property that has color built into the script,” Mr. Higgins said. “Musicals, fantasies, and adventures were allowed to play with a much more assertive and broad palette.”

Vincente Minnelli’s sentimental 1944 musical masterpiece “Meet Me in St. Louis” took a more subdued approach. The film’s storied lamp-dousing scene, a characteristically ornate and exquisitely choreographed Minnelli camera move, is one of the revelatory highlights of studio filmmaking in the 1940s. In light of Technicolor’s three negatives, notorious lack of light sensitivity, shallow focus, and a camera about as handy as a piano case, the golden-age Hollywood visual poetry of “Meet Me in St. Louis” and the rest of the classic films on display in “Glorious Technicolor!” are transcendently beautiful monuments of an unwieldy yet ingenious technology that yielded artistic perfection.

Through December 2 (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, Queens, 718-784-0077).