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Additive Color
Expression and Spectacle
Despite the widespread belief that silent cinema was entirely in black-and-white, the desire for color was present from the very beginning. Before 1922, all film stocks were orthochromatic (sensitive to blue and green, but not to red light), facilitating a tinting process in which the emulsion could be soaked in dye to produce colored light effects. The Edison company was already experimenting with this in the 1890s (left).
The other common way to add color in early cinema was with frame-by-frame stenciling work, usually considered a successor to traditional craft and almost exclusively done by women. In this early period, there was not yet a fully established system of film rentals and exchanges, so the addition of color effects would make it possible for producers to sell prints at a higher price and for exhibitors to draw in new audiences. These early additive color processes were both expressive and spectacular, as the two 1905 films below demonstrate.
In the late 1910s and especially in the early 1920s, the most common and visually striking form of additive color was toning, a chemical process in which colored silver salts replaced the particles in the emulsion transforming darker background areas into a particular color. Filmmakers like Fritz Lang quickly became adept at using toning as a way of accentuating elements of design and establishing mood changes between sequences, as in the extract from Destiny (1921) below.
In the early 1920s, directors like Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, and Viking Eggeling used variations of these techniques in their pioneering experiments in cinematic abstraction.
Highlighting Red
In The Adventurous Automobile Trip (1905, left), Georges Méliès used hand-stenciling to highlight the red car central to the film's narrative and distinguish it from the surrounding background environments. Such techniques may seem antiquated, but contemporary directors pursue similar strategies.
As Ryūsuke Hamaguchi explains in our interview, one of the major changes he made to the Haruki Murakami story he adapted into Drive My Car (2021) was to make the car red, so that it would stand out more distinctly from the landscape.
