Élisabeth And Berthe Thuillier
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Élisabeth Thuillier ( Aléné; 1841 – 7 July 1907) and Marie-Berthe Thuillier (1867 – 1947) were a mother-daughter team of French colourists. They ran a workshop in Paris, where their employees hand-coloured early films and photographic slides using their plans and colour choices. They are remembered especially for the work they did for the director
Georges Méliès Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès ( , ; 8 December 1861 – 21 January 1938) was a French magic (illusion), magician, toymaker, actor, and filmmaker. He led many technical and narrative developments in the early days of film, cinema, primarily in th ...
.


Early lives

Élisabeth Aléné was born in Guénange in 1841. She was one of seven children of a Catholic farming family. She and three older siblings moved to Paris around 1848–50, during a period of mass migrations to cities spurred on by the
Revolutions of 1848 The revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the springtime of the peoples or the springtime of nations, were a series of revolutions throughout Europe over the course of more than one year, from 1848 to 1849. It remains the most widespre ...
and the
1846–1860 cholera pandemic The third cholera pandemic (1846–1860) was the third major outbreak of cholera originating in India in the 19th century that reached far beyond its borders, which researchers at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) believe may have st ...
. She worked variously as a cook and house servant before being hired to work for A. Binant, an
art dealer An art dealer is a person or company that buys and sells works of art, or acts as the intermediary between the buyers and sellers of art. An art dealer in contemporary art typically seeks out various artists to represent, and builds relationsh ...
and art supply merchant. Aléné gave birth to two children in 1864 and 1865; both died soon after and the father or fathers went unlisted in official records. In 1867, she had a third child, Marie-Berthe (known as Berthe), with Jules Arthur Thuillier of Forceville-en-Vimeu (1846-1875). He legally recognized the child at the time of birth, and he and Élisabeth Aléné were married in 1874. He died the following year, leaving no funds for his wife; it was probably at this time that Élisabeth Thuillier went into business for herself as a photograph colourist. In 1888, when Berthe Thuillier was about twenty-one, she married a sculpture student, Eugène Boutier. (Boutier had displayed a bust of "Mlle B.T.", likely his future wife, at the
Académie des Beaux-Arts The (; ) is a French learned society based in Paris. It is one of the five academies of the . The current president of the academy (2021) is Alain-Charles Perrot, a French architect. Background The academy was created in 1816 in Paris as a me ...
'
Salon Salon may refer to: Common meanings * Beauty salon A beauty salon or beauty parlor is an establishment that provides Cosmetics, cosmetic treatments for people. Other variations of this type of business include hair salons, spas, day spas, ...
the year before.) The couple lived among the Parisian art community in
Montmartre Montmartre ( , , ) is a large hill in Paris's northern 18th arrondissement of Paris, 18th arrondissement. It is high and gives its name to the surrounding district, part of the Rive Droite, Right Bank. Montmartre is primarily known for its a ...
; Berthe Thuillier worked as a photographer around this time, very unusually for a woman in nineteenth-century France. She gave birth to a daughter, Georgette, in 1889. She separated from her husband in 1902, and obtained a divorce from him in 1906.


Colourist work

Élisabeth Thuillier had experience in colouring slides for
magic lantern The magic lantern, also known by its Latin name , is an early type of image projector that uses pictures—paintings, prints, or photographs—on transparent plates (usually made of glass), one or more lens (optics), lenses, and a light source. ...
s, and in other kinds of photographic and colour work. Berthe Thuillier may have joined the work in 1887, when she was nineteen; she continued it as the head of the workforce after her mother's death. The Thuilliers had started colouring film by 1897. This cinematic work was still new and it was given last place in the printed description of Élisabeth Thuillier's exhibit for the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. Its length reflects the wide scope of Thuillier's business:
''Colours and colouring. Raw materials for tinting. Negative and positive photographs, on paper, on glass, on silk, on leather, on celluloid parchment. Stereoscopic prints on glass, coloured slides. Photochromy and artistic colour photographs. Film colouring for cinematography.''
The Exposition jury awarded her a bronze medal. The Thuillier studio kept on more than 200 employees, all women, to handle the film commissions they undertook. In a 1929 interview, Berthe Thuillier recollected spending her nights selecting colours and trying out samples. She described her colours for film as "fine"
aniline dye Aniline (From , meaning ' indigo shrub', and ''-ine'' indicating a derived substance) is an organic compound with the formula . Consisting of a phenyl group () attached to an amino group (), aniline is the simplest aromatic amine. It is an ind ...
s, creating transparent and luminous tones. These dyes were dissolved first in water and then in alcohol. Each colourist was assigned a single tone, tinting specific parts of each frame before passing the film on to the next worker, in
assembly line An assembly line, often called ''progressive assembly'', is a manufacturing process where the unfinished product moves in a direct line from workstation to workstation, with parts added in sequence until the final product is completed. By mechan ...
fashion. Some areas to be coloured were so small that a paintbrush containing only a single horsehair was used. The Thuilliers and their workers probably used four basic dyes: orange, a cyan-like blue-green, magenta, and bright yellow. These could be mixed to create other colours. The tones produced also changed depending the shade of grey of the film underneath. Some films used more than twenty distinct colours, and all the work was done by hand.. Quoted in . The workshop was in the
7th arrondissement of Paris The 7th arrondissement of Paris (''VIIe arrondissement'') is one of the 20 Arrondissements of Paris, arrondissements of the capital city of France. It is known for being, along with the 16th arrondissement and the ''commune'' of Neuilly-sur-Sein ...
at 40 Rue de Varenne; around 1908 it moved to another building nearby, 87 Rue du Bac. According to Berthe Thuillier's recollections, her studio typically produced about 60 coloured copies of each film they took on. For 300 metres of hand-coloured film, the cost was about 6 or 7 thousand francs per copy.


Clients

The Thuilliers handled all colouring work on Méliès' films from 1897 to 1912. The studio's work on Méliès's films was international; for example, the American distribution company
Selig Polyscope The Selig Polyscope Company was an American motion picture company that was founded in 1896 by William Selig in Chicago, Illinois. The company produced hundreds of early, widely distributed commercial moving pictures, including the first films s ...
negotiated with Méliès to have its prints shipped to France to be coloured by the Thuilliers' workers. The Thuillier studio was also employed by the major French film studio
Pathé Pathé SAS (; styled as PATHÉ!) is a French major film production and distribution company, owning a number of cinema chains through its subsidiary Pathé Cinémas and television networks across Europe. It is the name of a network of Fren ...
, from 1898 or earlier through around 1912. In 1906 the Thuilliers were in negotiations to work exclusively for Pathé, but called off the agreement when it was made clear that they would have to share authority with a Mme. Florimond, whose husband was a key employee there. Another customer was experimental film-maker
Raoul Grimoin-Sanson Raoul Grimoin-Sanson (1860–1941) was an inventor in the field of early cinema. He was born in Elbeuf, as Raoul Grimoin; he added the surname Sanson later. He had an early interest in stage magic as well as photography. In the 1890s, Grimoin ...
, according to his memoirs, although these are known to be undependable. The pioneering director
Segundo de Chomón Segundo Víctor Aurelio Chomón y Ruiz (also Chomont or Chaumont ; 17 October 1871 – 2 May 1929) was a pioneering Spanish film director, cinematographer and screenwriter. He produced many short films in France while working for Pathé, Pat ...
was not a client but was introduced to the Thuilliers' techniques of hand-colouring through his wife
Julienne Mathieu Julienne Alexandrine Mathieu ( - ) was one of the earliest French silent film actresses who appeared mostly in French silents between 1905 and 1909. She appeared in the silent film '' Hôtel électrique'' released in 1908, one of the first film ...
. Mathieu (Mme. Chaumont or Chomón) had worked in the Thuillier workshop, as a supervisor according to some sources, as well as acting in silent movies. Chomón soon moved on to adding colour with stencils.


Later life

Élisabeth Thuillier's health declined at the end of her life, she died on 7 July 1907. (Her cemetery plaque cites the year as 1904, apparently an error.) During the peak period of her film colouring work, Berthe Thuillier married a second husband, the lawyer Eugène Beaupuy; she was widowed sometime before 1922–24. At that point, she moved to Forceville-en-Vimeu, where both her parents were buried, and lived there until her death in 1947. The Thuillier hand-painting method was a relatively slow, expensive way of colouring reels of film, and the world of cinema eventually moved towards using stencils instead of freehand colouring; this was more efficient for multiple copies. The last known Thuillier client was Georges Dufayel, whose impressive department store ''Grands Magasins Dufayel'' housed a cinema and other attractions. In her 1929 interview, Berthe Thuillier expressed regrets about the disappearance of her craft. In December 1929, she was invited to a gala given in Méliès' honour at
Salle Pleyel The Salle Pleyel (, meaning "Pleyel Hall") is a concert hall in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, France, designed by the acoustician Gustave Lyon together with the architect Jacques Marcel Auburtin, who died in 1926, and the work was completed i ...
. Several films were shown, including ''
A Trip to the Moon ''A Trip to the Moon'' ( , ) is a 1902 French science-fiction adventure trick film written, directed, and produced by Georges Méliès. Inspired by the Jules Verne novel ''From the Earth to the Moon'' (1865) and its sequel '' Around the Moon ...
''. For this event, "extremely delicate" colour restoration work was undertaken by two Thuillier "pupils", according to ''Cinéa'' magazine. (Records indicate that this colouring was handled by a Paris cinematographic laboratory, Ateliers Fantasia; the two women cited in the magazine may have worked for this studio and been trained by the Thuilliers, but they have not been identified.) Since the original negatives had been destroyed, the women removed the colour from old positive copies of the films, made new negatives, then new positives, and re-coloured those. (Thuillier remarked to the press that if she had had sufficient time, she would have done the work herself.) Méliès introduced her in his speech at the gala as an "eminent artist" who did her work with a "remarkable talent". The audience applauded and called "bravo".


References


External links


Demonstration of the Thuilliers' colouring process
at francetv.fr * http://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-forgotten-women-hand-painted-first-color-films: "With a growing demand for professional film-coloring, some female colorists even opened their own studios, where they employed their own legions of young painters. One such French colorist was Elisabeth Thuillier, who owned and operated a workshop that worked on films for renowned director Georges Méliès from 1897 to 1912. Obsessively meticulous, Thuillier spent her nights sampling colors and planning palettes. By day, her crew of some 220 female workers executed her templates, delicately coating films with water-soluble aniline dye. Each woman applied a single shade at a time, in a rainbow-like Ford assembly line—a film could contain more than 20 distinct hues. Coloring each print of Méliès’s most famous work, Trip to the Moon (1902), required painting a grand total of 13,375 film frames." {{DEFAULTSORT:Thuillier, Elisabeth 20th-century French women 19th-century French women 20th-century French artists 20th-century French women artists 19th-century French artists Women film pioneers