Hand-coloured film

Think the beginning of cinema was all black and white? Think again. Artists have been colouring films since films were invented. It’s estimated that about 80% of films made between the 1890s and the 1920s were coloured through tinting, toning, stencilling and hand-colouring. This work was done from the mid-1890s by colourists like Elisabeth Thuillier. Thuillier employed 200 women in her Paris workshop, where they worked on a production line and each painted one colour on a film. This process helped bring vibrancy and beauty to fluttering butterfly wings, hypnotic dances and much more.