The invention of cinema in colour

I. Colouring
 
Colour before the invention of cinema
Even before cinema was invented, the public was able to see projected images in colour in Magic Lantern shows. This procedure consisted in projecting images hand-painted onto glass plates onto a white surface.
 
Brochure for Mazo screenings, towards 1900
Magic lantern plates, towards 1850
The painting of these plates, which had to respect the transparency of colours and contain highly accurate drawings, required incredible meticulousness and genuine artistic talent.

 
Farfale, 1907
Hand-coloured
 
Hand-colouring
With the public success of Cinématographe, workshops that specialised in colouring magic lantern plates and photographic prints were converted to hand-colouring the film. The work was extremely detailed, the images to colour not exceeding 3 cm. The colours were applied by brush, image by image.  Variations in diluting the colorants or in carrying out the work made each hand-coloured film a unique work of art.

 
Mode de Paris, 1926
Stencil colouring
 
Stencil colouring
From 1905 a mechanical colouring procedure replaced traditional brush colouring that was too costly and too slow. Stencil colouring finally allowed an unlimited number of prints to be coloured with the same regularity.
To do this, as many prints of the film as there were colours were chosen. With the help of small sharp tools, expert hands cut in each of these prints that would be used as stencils the parts of the image corresponding to the chosen colour.  When you overlay the stencil obtained in this way on the print to be coloured, only the part that receives the colour appears. The colour is simply applied on the film to be coloured through the openings of the stencil with the help of a brush.
Cutting out stencils
And for each of the chosen colours the same operation is repeated.
Subsequently, technical evolutions allowed the procedure to be automated and made the colouring more precise.
Despite a perfectly mastered manufacturing technique, stencil coloured films remained rare. Only a few genres benefited from this special treatment; trick films, extravaganzas, historic films or documentaries introducing faraway, unknown lands to a large public, always keen on something new.
Two other procedures following on from the photographic techniques made an appearance at the same time.

 
Jön az öcsém, 1919
Tinted film
 
Tinting and toning
Due to a lack of complex colouring, certain techniques were applied to give a single tint to the whole film. With tinting, the print to be projected is steeped in a colour bath. It's therefore the film support itself that is coloured. The light parts of the image no longer appear white but in the chosen colour.
Taking this principle, chemists quickly developed a second technique, toning, which is realised when the film is being developed and affects the recorded image. In toning the whites remain intact, the colour only being fixed to the dark parts.
But these film colouring techniques all disappeared towards the end of the 1920's as in the end they were just a stopgap measure to the goal that researchers had set themselves a long time before: recording and producing life's natural colours.
 

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