Tinting was the most prevalent, and affordable, applied coloring process used around the world during the silent era. The process was in use from the mid-1890s – with Lumière examples identified from 1896 – and it remained an ongoing (if minor) practice even beyond the advent of sound-on-film, in the 1920s, and well into the twentieth century. 

Tinting applies a uniform color across the full width of the filmstrip, encompassing the entire image. At times, it was used in combination with other coloring techniques – toning, hand coloring, stenciling – to create multicolored images. Initially, the technique was an outgrowth of nineteenth-century tinted theatrical lighting: colored gels, called “tinters”, were inserted in front of stage lights, to achieve both diegetic and mood effects. Gel tinters were also used on lantern slide projection lenses and subsequently on film projectors, to add changing color as a live element of exhibition. As film tinting became more standardized, it was applied onto the positive film strip itself, through the application of translucent, aniline dyes that are absorbed into the emulsion of B/W prints providing a uniform display of color across the frame for the duration of a shot, scene, or sequence, and occasionally for the duration of an entire film. It was deployed on most modes of film, from fiction to nonfiction to animation and even stag films.

The uses and “language” of film tinting were various. Worldwide, there exist culturally prescribed “meanings” assigned to colors – and these meanings vary widely, from culture to culture, for any given color. Sometimes, for the same film, the tints used on international distribution prints differed from those distributed domestically. While tinting guidelines, in the form of “frame slugs” inserted into printing negatives at the head of sequences, provided suggestions, printing and coloring labs had relative flexibility in the choice of tints for their particular region of distribution. Sometimes film tinting was used in coded ways to provide diegetic meanings to sequences; at other times tinting corresponded more literally, if loosely, to the presumed diegetic colors of a scene. Perhaps the most commonly recurring tints used in this way were blue (for night) and red (for fire). In an example from a scene in the Pathé film Le Contremaître incendiaire (1907), a disgruntled foreman at a film studio tries to disguise his theft of money from the company’s safe by burning down the studio. Under the cover of night – tinted blue – he sneaks outside of one of the buildings and douses some nearby straw with a flammable liquid. At the moment he throws a lighted lamp onto the pile, the blue tinting cuts to a deep red. Similar diegetic uses of color abound, particularly in association with illumination at night. In a Duskes film from 1910, Wildschützenrache (A Poacher’s Revenge), the poacher lights a candle inside his house, and as he does so, the film cuts from a blue to a yellow-amber tint – approximating the hue of candlelight. Brighter yellow tints could be used diagetically for sunny, outdoor scenes; green was used, with some frequency, for woodsy, bucolic settings.

Throughout the silent era, in more nuanced forms of codification, color tints were also used for sensational, mood-inducing effects. In one of the earliest published accounts of film tinting, Animated Pictures, author C. Francis Jenkins relates how “[c]olors for projection are washed upon blank strips suitable for reproduction”, in order to create effects for “the eye which music does through the ear” (Jenkins, 1898). Such abstracted conceptions of the uses of tinting were widespread and diverse, encompassing an appreciation of the synaesthetic interrelations between the senses of color and sound; abstract practices of color music; and generalized ideas about the mood-inducing effects of color, in which color tints were employed to underscore the emotional truth of a scene, much in the way of a musical score. Thus, a blue tint might convey not only the low lighting of a scene, but also connote the chill of night; a bright yellow tint might indicate sunlight, while also communicating warmth, both diagetic and emotional. Red tinting might be used to reinforce passionate themes and events. The most calibrated attempt to codify such nuanced meanings is seen with the Sonochrome line of film stocks, introduced by Eastman Kodak in 1928. These pre-tinted stocks were designed to be used with sound-on-film prints – the tints were specifically designed to preserve the fidelity of optical sound tracks. The promotional material also claimed that the colors of the tints were, further, “keyed to the moods on the screen… Sonochrome colors have definite affective values. Some excite, some tranquilize, some repress. Properly used, they enhance the moods of the screen and aid the powers of reproductive imagination in the observer, without making a distinct impression on the consciousness.” Although potentially subjective and, by-and-large, culturally determined, the affective power of film tinting was commonly promoted throughout the years of widespread use. 

The use of tinting had diminished greatly by the end of the 1920s, mostly as a result of technological changes that rendered the process both problematic and increasingly redundant. Developments such as: the widespread adoption of synchronous sound; the increasing availability of photographic color systems; and, finally, panchromatic emulsions that made tinting look as if it belonged to a bygone era. And yet, tinting has never fully disappeared from cinema. Its occasional use continued for several more decades in the mainstream and it has lived on through use in a variety of artisanal and experimental films – such as Joseph Cornell’s Rose Hobart (1936), which Cornell initially projected through blue-colored glass, to tint it during exhibition; Joyce Wieland’s Hand Tinting (1968); and Tacita Dean’s Film (2011), to cite just a few examples.