Hand coloring was the original method for applying color to film. At times, such coloring added a naturalistic element to the image – for instance, adding blue to skies and rivers, greens to vegetation, or browns to outfits. In other instances, it was added to create dazzling effects, particularly in trick and fairy films – where hand-colored reds and oranges were often keyed to flames and explosions – and an array of vivid hues might be applied to resplendent costumes. Beginning in the mid-1890s, the meticulous hand-coloring work was most often carried out by teams of highly skilled, female colorists – the process was extraordinarily labor intensive, as colors had to be applied frame-by-frame on each and every projection print. One film-coloring workshop in Paris, founded by Élisabeth Thuillier (1841–1907) and carried on by her daughter Berthe Thuillier (1867–1947), reportedly employed upwards of 220 female colorists at its height (Salmon & Malthête, 2013). Bertha Thuillier recalled in a 1929 interview that: “I colored all of Méliès’ films, and this work was carried out entirely by hand. I employed two hundred and twenty workers in my workshop. I spent my nights selecting and sampling the colors, and during the day; the workers applied the color according to my instructions. Each specialized worker applied only one color, and we often exceeded twenty colors on a film” (quoted in Yumibe, 2013).

The first hand-colored pictures were dance films. At the time, female dance routines by popular vaudeville performers such as Loïe Fuller (1862–1928) and Annabelle Moore (née Whitford) (1878–1961). Theater technicians often projected shifting, colored lighting effects onto the performers as they moved about the stage – early filmmakers aimed to replicate these effects using hand coloring. Early cinema pioneer C. Francis Jenkins reportedly first exhibited a hand-colored print in Richmond, Indiana, on June 6, 1894, on his Phantoscope device. According to author and screenwriter Homer Croy, writing in 1918, the screening featured a butterfly dance by Annabelle Moore that had been colored by a Mrs. Boyce of Washington, DC, who was also a lantern-slide colorist (Croy, 1918: p. 42). From around 1895, Edison Kinetoscope films were also being colored, notably those featuring Moore performing serpentine dances, such as Annabelle Serpentine Dance [No. 2] (1895), as preserved at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Selective hand coloring is used on the print for specific objects: Annabelle’s orange hair; the pink of her arms and upper chest; and her prismatic dress, which changes in hue from yellow to purple to peach, as she swirls her billowing skirts about her. Such coloring provided a sensual quality, rendering moving images almost tactile – nearly stereoscopic, according to reports from the time. A 1896 brochure for Edison films, from the early cinema distributors Raff and Gammon boasted: “With the life tint upon face, hands, arms and other features, and with vivid coloring of costume and accessory, the subjects stand out from the canvas like living men and women, and the effect is so vivid and so remarkably life-like as to excite the wonder and enthusiastic comment of all beholders.” (Raff & Gammon, 1896: p. a–021). Given the swirling, diaphanous subjects of many of these early dance films, the frame-to-frame precision of hand coloring was relatively less critical. When these films were projected, the hues would pulse over and around the selected objects, adding to the abstract attraction of these works. 

Early non-fiction works were also quite often hand colored, such as a print of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s Les Forgerons (1895), preserved by Lobster Films, in which two laborers work a forge and anvil, with blue hand coloring used for sections of their outfits, and orange used for the fire in the forge and the red-hot iron rod being worked. Another example is the British Mutoscope and Biograph Syndicate 68mm film, Conway Castle – Panoramic View of Conway on the L. & N.W. Railway (1898), which provides a spectacular phantom ride shot in northern Wales, with the landscape colored green, the bricks of the castle and various walls in a brownish-tan, and a few items in red and blue – a railway sign, a roof, a poster. For works such as these, precision in coloring was important, though difficult to achieve, as variation in the application of color from frame to frame would result in fringing effects when projected. As with many hand-colored films, it is uncertain who actually applied the color to this film. Mutoscope and Biograph could have had the print colored, though often with silent films from this era, exhibitors, rather than producers, often commissioned the coloring work for the prints that they owned. 

Hand coloring also contributed immensely to the popularity of trick and fairy films towards the late 1800s. These genres derived from nineteenth-century stage traditions and emphasized spectacular displays of wonder: appearances and disappearances, inanimate objects brought to life, crashes, explosions, diabolical tricks and fairy magic. Vivid applied hues heightened these wonders. For instance, in George Méliès’s Le dirigeable fantastique (1906), which was probably colored in Thuillier’s lab, a zeppelin airship ignites in orange-red flames, tinged with pink and yellow, as it floats across a night-blue sky.

Due to the intensive labor required, hand coloring became an increasingly artisanal procedure, only used for selected films, and selected scenes, from the middle of the first decade of the 1900s on. Other, more industrially scalable coloring techniques, such as tinting, toning and stenciling, increasingly supplanted hand coloring, without quite eliminating it entirely. Hand coloring persisted well into the twentieth century as a small, but dazzling, part of moving-image culture: from Gustav Brock’s work on silent and sound films in the 1920s and 1930s, such as The Death Kiss (1932), to Jacques Tati’s addition of hand-colored elements to the 1964 re-edit of Jour de fête (1949). But, perhaps more significantly, hand coloring played an important role in the work of various experimental filmmakers, such as Len Lye, Margaret Tait, Stan Brakhage and, more recently, Jodie Mack – often in tandem with abstract animation and reversal and optical printing effects.