Silent Film Color Processes
International · Tinting & Toning 1895–1930
The common belief that silent film was black and white is wrong. By the 1920s the great majority of released prints were coloured, by dyeing the film itself, and a feature might change colour every few minutes.
Origin
Colour was applied to prints almost from the beginning, initially by hand-painting each frame — Méliès employed workshops of women doing exactly that — and then by stencil processes such as Pathécolor, which cut a stencil per colour and applied dye mechanically. Tinting and toning were the industrial solutions, cheap enough to apply to every print, and by the mid-1920s something like eighty to ninety percent of releases used them. The practice collapsed with the arrival of sound, because the dyes interfered with the optical soundtrack read off the edge of the film.
Technique
Two distinct chemical operations, often combined. Tinting dyes the entire film base, so the light areas take the colour and the blacks stay black — the image sits in a coloured atmosphere. Toning replaces the silver of the image itself with a coloured metallic compound, so the dark areas take the colour and the highlights stay white. Tinting and toning the same print produces two colours at once: a blue-toned image on amber-tinted stock, for instance, which is why some surviving prints have a duotone appearance that no single process explains.
The palette
Codified and conventional. Amber or straw for interiors and lamplight, blue for night and moonlight, green for landscape and countryside, red for fire, battle and passion, lavender or pink for romance and for daytime interiors with women. Eastman Kodak sold pre-tinted stock in a named range — Sunshine, Firelight, Peachblow, Nocturne, Verdante — with the intended dramatic use printed in the catalogue. The audience read these conventions instantly, the way they read an intertitle.
Legacy
Most surviving silent films were preserved in the mid-twentieth century on black-and-white safety stock, which destroyed the colour information and created the false memory of a monochrome era. Restoration since the 1990s has reconstructed original tinting from surviving nitrate prints and from studio records, and seeing a properly tinted print is a substantially different experience from the black-and-white version most people know.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.