In the silent era, it was common practice to tint films to give the audience a better understanding of what was happening or how they should feel. I personally think that's quite ridiculous, and prefer the black & white. But here is something I dug up on the internet to explain:
Were any silents made in colour?
Yes. When you look at listings of VHS and DVD versions of silent films for sale and see that some of them are listed as being in colour, don't panic: Ted Turner isn't doing anything that the original artists didn't want. Many silent filmmakers used tinting, toning, and even early Technicolor to create moods and enhance the narrative. Blue film stock indicated night scenes; orange indicated heat. Some filmmakers even hired artists to paint each frame of each print by hand.
Here is some information from Bob Birchard:
Tinting colors the film stock, giving the overall image a color tint.
Toning replaces the silver image with a color dye.
It is possible to both tint and tone an image--a common combination in the silent era that I've seen in several original prints is a blue or purple tone combined with a pink tint. One can achieve a similar effect on a scanned B&W photo in Photoshop by shifting the color balance in the shadows only to the blue, and then shifting the color balance in the highlights only to the pink. The effect can be quite striking.
The Chaney Phantom scene [...] was accomplished with the Handschiegel (sp?) process, which was a stencil color process. This was used to color the coins in Greed, add color to the fire by the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments and to color the runaway canoe down the rapids in the forest fire scene in The Michigan Kid.
There were a wide range of colors available in the silent era, and mostly the work was done in the laboratory--adding color to B&W prints by dipping them in chemical solutions--rather than in the pre-tinted stock (although there were some pre-tinted stocks available).
Sound brought an end to hand dipping--because the variations in dyes wreaked havoc on sound reproduction. Kodak did develop about a half dozen pre-tinted print stocks in the early 1930's, but they didn't see wide use.
Several studios (notably M-G-M and 20th-Fox) resumed toning in the late 1930's for many of their "A" pictures. These were usually sepia tone effects.
|
