Les parisiennes (1897) Online

Although we think of old movies as silent and in black and white, this was rarely the case. When Edison conceived of the movies, he thought they would be synchronized with sound and there were frequent experiments, including a burst of them in 1906-1907. The technical problems were too much until the late 1920s. Likewise, although popular real color had to wait for the invention of the Technicolor monopack in the 1930s, there were frequent attempts to bring color to the movies, both through color photography and through tinting the film -- a laborious process given the number of frames in even a short film, but essayed through techniques including stencils and chemical salts.

This early peep-show picture shows four girls doing a racy dance -- you can see their ankles -- and is in color. They are wearing voluminous, pink outfits. For 1897 it must have been a major production tinting these frames -- they probably hired girls from Currier & Ives.

This is a relatively rare example of a hand-coloured Mutoscope film. Hand-colouring was used from the earliest days particularly for films of dancing (the ubiquitous Annabelle doing the "Serpentine dance") but it was an expensive and laborious process (considered injurious to the health of the women who were set to do the work) and most of the US companies almost entirely abandoned the practice. Tinting (in different shades) was of course still common, although again rather commoner in European films than in their US counterparts). In France, Pathé succeeded in partly automating the hand-colouring system, using a system of stencils, so that French films (trick films, fairy tales, fantasy-films, hunting films) still frequently used hand-colour and developed an impressive expertise in the field. For fantasy films, deliberately "unreal" pastel shades were used but, in some of the hunting films, for instance, the hand-colouring is so good that it could easily be mistaken for "natural colour" (which is not after all as "natural" as all that itself).

By the late 1900s Gaumont in France and Charles Urban and G. A. Smith in Britain (Kinemacolor) had developed very fine "natural colour" systems (although Gaumont's very beautiful process unfortunately required cinemas to have specialised equipment for projection). The first two-colour Technicolor film was made in 1917 and, although there were still several alternative systems, the US company rapidly established a dominance in the market.

Nevertheless hand-colouring of a superb quality continued to be used in the 1920s (in some scenes in Erich von Stroheim's Foolish Wives, for instance) and the Handschiegl Color Process (used for certain scenes in several Paramount Films and in Von Stroheim's 1924 Greed) and Pathéchrome (French, Italian and British films) were both essentially still semi-mechanised hand-colour processes. One can still find hand-colouring even in some films of the thirties (The Death Kiss 1932 or Adventure Girl 1934).