Perhaps the first job women could find in the earliest days of the film industry was coloring, in other words, hand-coloring film prints by painting them frame by frame. At least initially, because they could be exploited by being paid less than men to carry out repetitive and detailed tasks, women colorists were widely employed in the lantern slide and postcard industries in the nineteenth century. By the mid-1890s, the film industry had adopted similar labor strategies for coloring prints. Aesthetic assumptions also underpinned this practice: a persistent motif of Western color theory is the gendering of color, and in this sense women have long been assumed to be more sensitive to color. Besides being generally cheaper to employ, women were thought to be naturally better suited to the detailed work of coloring thanks to their presumed sensitivity and nimble fingers.

Sources indicate that in the mid-1890s the Edison Company employed Edmund Kuhn’s wife to hand-color prints such as the popular serpentine dance films (Yumibe, 45). According to Charles Edward Hastings, writing for Moving Picture World in 1927, there were other well-known women colorists in the US film industry at the turn of the century: “the early colorists were Mrs. Martini of West Orange, N.J., Mrs. Sarah Levy of New York City, and Mrs. Tompkins of Brooklyn, N.Y. These famous hand-coloring artists raised their art to a degree of perfection and showed admirable patience in bringing out the results of their labors” (346). However, little documentation of these women’s work has been found.

Madame Thuillier’s Company and Méliès
Fortunately, the recorded history of women colorists in France is somewhat better. Georges Méliès, for example, had his hand-coloring done from 1897 to 1912 by a firm in Vincennes run first by Élisabeth Thuillier and later by her daughter, Marie-Berthe Thuillier, who managed a workforce of more than 200 women colorists (Mazeline 74n1; Fossati 122-123; Malthête, 6-9; Yumibe 48). An earlier version of this essay credited this achievement solely to Élisabeth Thuillier; however, thanks to a wonderful discovery by Stéphanie Salmon and Jacques Malthête in the Women Film Pioneers Project, which you can find here, it has come to light that it was Berthe Thuillier who oversaw much of the film coloring previously attributed to her mother, who died in either 1904 or 1907 (Salmon and Malthête). Originally a lantern slide laboratory, the Thuillier firm began coloring films in the late 1890s and working with other companies and filmmakers such as Pathé and Raoul Grimoin-Sanson. In a 1929 interview, Berthe Thuillier described that period as follows: “I did all the coloring of Méliès’s films, and this work was done 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 colors according to my instructions. Each specialized worker applied only one color, and we often used more than twenty colors in a single film” (Mazeline 74n1, author’s translation). From Thuillier’s account, one can imagine how complex the firm’s coloring work was. The Thuillier firm organized its workforce along assembly-line lines and divided it by color tone to increase efficiency. Judging by the prints and print fragments surviving from the turn of the century, the colored results are magnificent.

Méliès continued to use hand-coloring in the early 1900s; the Pathé company, by contrast, began in 1903 to shift its coloring work from hand-coloring to stenciling as part of a broader project to industrialize its production methods. Although it was still a labor-intensive process, stenciling made it easier to apply dyes to positive prints. Each color in a print had its own stencil, cut by hand frame by frame according to the length of the colored sequence. Once made, the stencils could be used on multiple prints, saving time and labor on long print runs. As with hand-coloring, Pathé employed women to prepare the stencils. In 1906, the rapidly growing company tried to reach an agreement with the Thuillier firm to do this work exclusively for Pathé at its factory in Vincennes. Élisabeth and/or (more likely) Berthe Thuillier initially agreed to work with Pathé, but canceled the agreement a few weeks later upon realizing that she would have to share her authority with Madame Florimond, one of Pathé’s head colorists. Despite this setback, Pathé continued to expand its coloring workforce in 1906, more than doubling the number of its women colorists from 80 to over 200 (Yumibe 78-90).

Women Colorists as “Pathé’s Hens”
One of the more striking stories about Pathé’s colorists is Jorge Dana’s 1984 interview with Germaine Berger, published in Positif in 1992. Berger began cutting stencils for Pathé in 1911, at the age of 15, together with her sister Lucie. She had been raised strictly and, before Pathé, had worked for several years for her father (a furniture designer). Oddly enough, although she worked in the film industry, Berger was not allowed to go to the movies. As a young woman, her only experience of films was cutting stencils. Mirroring her home life, the workday at Pathé was also highly regimented. The Pathé colorists, who worked side by side, were not allowed to chat or socialize during the day. Even so, Berger loved her work, and as she and the other colorists became considerably more skilled at stenciling over time, she earned a good wage from Pathé, making 21 francs a week rather than the 15 francs a week that less-skilled male factory workers earned on average. In this way, the belief that women were naturally more sensitive to color gave Pathé’s skilled colorists an economic advantage. Yet the job also came with its own belittling epithets: because of the nest eggs they built up from their hard-earned wages, Berger and the other colorists became known around Vincennes as “poules de chez Pathé [Pathé’s hens].”

Joshua Yumibe
Translation: Nahit Evre Uçarcı

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