The Early Film Colorists Speak

This section reprints two rare early texts about the craft of film coloring, dating from 1898 and 1908, by Duncan Mitchell in Britain and Elizabeth Martine in the United States. Mitchell and Martine each describe the meticulous nature of their work as colorists and discuss specific techniques and aesthetic issues that they believe are important in the process of coloring films by hand. The accompanying overview article by Stephen Bottomore summarizes and analyzes the points made by this pair of colorists and compares their accounts with what existing sources tell us about early film coloring. Brief biographies of Mitchell and Martine are also included.