Stencil colouring

When Alexandre Volkoff brought the story of history’s greatest lover to the screen in Casanova (1927), he definitely needed colour. While Technicolor was decades away, the French production company Pathé Frères had developed a technique of stencil-colouring films around 1908. This process used a template for each colour – usually between three and six – and applied it frame by frame. Pathé continued innovating, developing mechanical devices to make the process faster and easier for the more than 400 women colourists working at the company. Thanks to Pathé’s stencil method, Casanova’s costumes shimmered in pink, orange and yellow, and rosy blushes graced his lovers’ cheeks.