First Steps, 1895-1905

Hand-coloured film had clearly existed before the invention of the cinematograph. It is said that Mrs. Edison herself skilfully coloured Annabelle’s Butterfly Dance in 1894 for the Edison kinetoscope. Annabelle was one of countless imitators of Loïe Fuller, dancer and “textile performer”, who first created a furore in Paris in 1892 with her serpent and butterfly dances. These featured the projection of coloured light on to the lengths of fabric making up her costume, which were moved by rods in time to the music. Thus the first film colours imitated Fuller’s pioneering use of stage lightning. In other early examples colouring is used to render older types of spectacular displays and light shows such as Feu d’Artifice (1905) and illuminated fountains like Les Grandes Eaux à Versailles (1904).

The most important genres in the early days of colour were the “scènes à trucs et transformations”. In these a bright yellow-or orange-coloured flame heralds the diabolical magic of an appearance or transformation. In contrast to these, the scènes en plein air and the comedy pictures remained black-and-white genres (coloured prints do exist, but they are so rare as to seem almost accidental). For colour would only detract from the thrilling movement of the phantom ride (Norwegische Eisenbahnfahrt / Norwegian Railway Ride, 1909), with its play of light and dark in the tunnel, or from the dynamic of destruction (wrought by the boys) and beatings (Two Naughty Boys, 1909). History pictures, with their magnificent sets and costumes, are mostly polychrome and it is primarily in this genre that hand-colouring developed into stencil-colouring around 1905-1907. Information such as “only available in colour” appears for the first time in the Pathé catalogues of 1905 (Le Langage des fleurs); and the decade from 1905 to 1915 is the richest in the whole of cinema history in terms of colours and colour systems.

The Colours of 1909

In 1909 cinema films came on to the market in one of the following six colour types: black-and-white (“noir”), polychrome stencil-colour- ing (“coloris”), single-colour tinting, single-colour toning, multi-colour tinting or multi-colour toning, with these last four all offered in the sales catalogues as “virage”, toning. We also discover from these catalogues the additional charges for coloured prints. In 1907-1908 a “black” film cost 1.5 Lira per metre in Italy (1 Mark in Germany). For “toning” (i.e. tinting or toning, single- or multi-colour) the supplement was 10% and for stencil-colouring 50%.

By 1909 the oldest colouring system, hand colouring, had very nearly disappeared and is encountered only in somewhat amateur productions. But the combination of toning and tinting, so popular after 1910 for its delightful multi-colour effect, was not yet to be seen, or at least was not to be seen in the 400 films we were able to view when preparing the festival.

In 1909, stencil-colouring was de rigueur for the last magnificent féeries – it was one of the raisons d’être for this genre. The féerie was soon to be superseded by the equally stencil-colour-prone costume drama with its magnificent sets and historical costumes (Voyage sur Jupiter; Visite historique à Versailles). This sumptuous polychrome colour system is also the preferred method for films about exotic lands (Trois amis/Three Friends). In some of Pathé’s particularly well-produced and fairly long films with stencil-colouring, alternate scenes would use a black-and-white and a brown-toned neutral image. (An example of this was to be seen in last year’s 1908 programme in the spectacular print of Samson from the Komiya Collection in Tokyo). A consistent monochrome blue toning was used for night-time and for water environments or snowscapes, while films set in forests might be toned in monochrome green. Contemporary critics noted that toned films felt somehow “skimpy”.

Monochrome tinting emphasises the unities of time and space and thus the artistry of the acrobat (L’Homme qui marche sur sa tête/ The Man Who Walks on His Head); the gold tone of the tinting in this film corresponds to the artificial light from the splendid chandeliers. A change of colour from scene to scene, however, as in Les surprises d’amour, helps the viewer to navigate with ease between the film’s different locations. The way film colours are used in 1909 is not governed by a fixed coding, yet it is anything but arbitrary.

Mariann Lewinsky