Elisabeth Thuillier

Elisabeth Thuillier (fl. 1890s-1920s) was a French colourist who ran a workshop in Paris where her employees hand-coloured early films and photographic slides using her plans and colour choices. She is remembered especially for the work she did for the director Georges Méliès.

Thuillier had experience in colouring slides for magic lanterns, and in other kinds of photographic and colour work. Her workforce had started colouring film by 1897. This cinematic work was still new and it was given last place in the following description of her exhibit for the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. Its length reflects the importance 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.

Thuillier hired more than 200 employees, all women, to handle the film commissions her workshop undertook. In a 1929 interview, she recollected spending her nights selecting colours and trying out samples. Thuillier described her colours for film as "fine" aniline dyes, 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 fashion. Some areas to be coloured were so small that a paintbrush containing only a single horsehair was used.

Thuillier and her 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. The workshop was at 87 Rue du Bac, Paris.

According to 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.

Thuillier handled all colouring work on Méliès' films from 1897 to 1912. Thuillier's work on Méliès's films was international; for example, the American distribution company Selig Polyscope negotiated with Méliès to have its prints shipped to France to be coloured by Thuillier's workers.

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