Pathécolor, later renamed Pathéchrome, was an early mechanical

stencil Stencilling produces an image or pattern on a surface by applying pigment to a surface through an intermediate object, with designed holes in the intermediate object. The holes allow the pigment to reach only some parts of the surface creatin ...

-based

film tinting Film tinting is the process of adding color to black-and-white film, usually by means of soaking the film in dye and staining the film emulsion. The effect is that all of the light shining through is filtered, so that what would be white light beco ...

process for movies developed by

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 ...

for

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 ...

in the early 20th century. Among the last feature films to use this process were ''

Elstree Calling ''Elstree Calling'' is a 1930 British comedy musical film directed by Adrian Brunel and Alfred Hitchcock at Elstree Studios. Synopsis The film, referred to as "A Cine-Radio Revue" in its original publicity, is a lavish musical film revue and ...

'' (1930), a British revue film, and the Mexican film ''

Robinson Crusoe ''Robinson Crusoe'' ( ) is an English adventure novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. Written with a combination of Epistolary novel, epistolary, Confessional writing, confessional, and Didacticism, didactic forms, the ...

'' (1954) by Spanish

Surrealist Surrealism is an art movement, art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike s ...

Luis Buñuel Luis Buñuel Portolés (; 22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish and Mexican filmmaker who worked in France, Mexico and Spain. He has been widely considered by many film critics, historians and directors to be one of the greatest and ...

. However, the stencil process was not a

color photography Color photography (also spelled as colour photography in English in the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth English) is photography that uses media capable of capturing and reproducing colors. By contrast, black-and-white or gray-monochrome ...

process and did not use color

film stock Film stock is an analog medium that is used for recording motion pictures or animation. It is recorded on by a movie camera, developed, edited, and projected onto a screen using a movie projector. It is a strip or sheet of transparent pl ...

. Like computer-based

film colorization Film colorization (American English; or colourisation/colorisation [both British English], or colourization [Canadian English and Oxford English]) is any process that adds color to black-and-white, sepia tone, sepia, or other mo ...

processes, it was a way of arbitrarily adding selected colors to films originally photographed and

printed Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and Printmaking, images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabon ...

black-and-white Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white to produce a range of achromatic brightnesses of grey. It is also known as greyscale in technical settings. Media The history of various visual media began with black and white, ...

. Each

frame A frame is often a structural system that supports other components of a physical construction and/or steel frame that limits the construction's extent. Frame and FRAME may also refer to: Physical objects In building construction *Framing (con ...

of an extra print of the black-and-white film to be colored was rear-projected onto a sheet of

frosted glass Frosted glass is produced by the sandblasting or acid Glass etching, etching of clear sheet glass. This creates a pitted surface on one side of the glass pane and has the effect of rendering the glass translucent by scattering the light which ...

, as in

rotoscoping Rotoscoping is an animation technique that animators use to trace over motion picture footage, frame by frame, to produce realistic action. Originally, live-action film images were projected onto a glass panel and traced onto paper. This pr ...

. An operator used a blunt

stylus A stylus is a writing utensil or tool for scribing or marking into softer materials. Different styluses were used to write in cuneiform by pressing into wet clay, and to scribe or carve into a wax tablet. Very hard styluses are also used to En ...

to trace the outlines of areas of the projected image that were to be tinted one particular color. The stylus was connected to a reducing

pantograph A pantograph (, from their original use for copying writing) is a Linkage (mechanical), mechanical linkage connected in a manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a se ...

that caused a sharp blade to cut corresponding outlines through the actual film frame, creating the

for that color in that frame. This had to be done for each individual frame, and as many different stencil films had to be made as there were different colors to be added. Each of the final projection prints was matched up with one of the stencil films and run through a machine that applied the corresponding

dye Juan de Guillebon, better known by his stage name DyE, is a French musician. He is known for the music video of the single "Fantasy Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction that involves supernatural or Magic (supernatural), magical ele ...

through the stencil. This operation was repeated using each of the different stencils and dyes in turn. The Pathécolor stencil process should not be confused with the later Pathécolor, Pathé Color and Color by Pathé (sometimes without the

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...

) trade names seen in screen credits and advertising materials. Like Metrocolor, WarnerColor and Color by DeLuxe, these were simply rebrandings of

Eastman Kodak The Eastman Kodak Company, referred to simply as Kodak (), is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in film photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated i ...

Eastmancolor Eastmancolor is a trade name used by Eastman Kodak for a number of related film and processing technologies associated with color motion picture production and referring to George Eastman, founder of Kodak. Eastmancolor, introduced in 1950, was o ...

color negative film.

External links

Pathécolor on Timeline of Historical Film Colors
with many written resources and many photographs of Pathécolor prints.

Pathecolor at IMDB
Film and video technology Invention of the silent film era {{filmmaking-stub

See also

External links