Élisabeth Thuillier ( née 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.
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 and the 1846–1860 cholera pandemic. [1] She worked variously as a cook and house servant before being hired to work for A. Binant, an art dealer 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. [1]
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' Salon the year before.) The couple lived among the Parisian art community in Montmartre; 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. [1]
Élisabeth Thuillier had experience in colouring slides for magic lanterns, and in other kinds of photographic and colour work. [2] 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. [1] The Thuilliers had started colouring film by 1897. [2] 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: [3]
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. [3]
The Exposition jury awarded her a bronze medal. [3]
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. [4] She 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. [4] Some areas to be coloured were so small that a paintbrush containing only a single horsehair was used. [5]
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. [6] Some films used more than twenty distinct colours, and all the work was done by hand. [4] The workshop was in the 7th arrondissement of Paris at 40 Rue de Varenne; around 1908 it moved to another building nearby, 87 Rue du Bac. [1]
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. [4]
The Thuilliers handled all colouring work on Méliès' films from 1897 to 1912. [7] The studio'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 the Thuilliers' workers. [5]
The Thuillier studio was also employed by the major French film studio Pathé, from 1898 or earlier through around 1912. [1] 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. [7] Another customer was experimental film-maker Raoul Grimoin-Sanson, according to his memoirs, [2] although these are known to be undependable. [1]
The pioneering director Segundo de Chomón was not a client but was introduced to the Thuilliers' techniques of hand-colouring through his wife Julienne Mathieu. Mathieu (Mme. Chaumont or Chomón) had worked in the Thuillier workshop, as a supervisor according to some sources, [8] as well as acting in silent movies. Chomón soon moved on to adding colour with stencils. [2]
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. [1]
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. [2] The last known Thuillier client was Georges Dufayel, [4] 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. [4]
In December 1929, she was invited to a gala given in Méliès' honour at Salle Pleyel. [9] Several films were shown, including A Trip to the Moon . For this event, "extremely delicate" colour restoration work was undertaken by two Thuillier "pupils", according to Cinéa magazine. [10] (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.) [1] 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. [10] (Thuillier remarked to the press that if she had had sufficient time, she would have done the work herself.) [4] Méliès introduced her in his speech at the gala as an "eminent artist" who did her work with a "remarkable talent". [9] The audience applauded and called "bravo". [11]
Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a French painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists.
Orange is the colour between yellow and red on the spectrum of visible light. Human eyes perceive orange when observing light with a dominant wavelength between roughly 585 and 620 nanometres. In traditional colour theory, it is a secondary colour of pigments, produced by mixing yellow and red. In the RGB colour model, it is a tertiary colour. It is named after the fruit of the same name.
Michel Eugène Chevreul was a French chemist whose work contributed to significant developments in science, medicine, and art. Chevreul's early work with animal fats revolutionized soap and candle manufacturing and led to his isolation of the heptadecanoic (margaric), stearic, and oleic fatty acids. In the process, Chevreul became the first scientist to define the concept of a chemical compound and the first to formally characterize the nature of organic compounds; he is consequently considered a founder of modern organic chemistry.
A Trip to the Moon is a 1902 French science-fiction adventure film directed by Georges Méliès. Inspired by a wide variety of sources, including Jules Verne's 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon and its 1870 sequel Around the Moon, the film follows a group of astronomers who travel to the Moon in a cannon-propelled capsule, explore the Moon's surface, escape from an underground group of Selenites, and return to Earth with a captive Selenite. Méliès leads an ensemble cast of French theatrical performers as the main character Professor Barbenfouillis, in the overtly theatrical style for which he became famous.
Hand-colouring refers to any method of manually adding colour to a monochrome photograph, generally either to heighten the realism of the image or for artistic purposes. Hand-colouring is also known as hand painting or overpainting.
Le Voyage de Gulliver à Lilliput et chez les Géants, released in the United States as Gulliver's Travels Among the Lilliputians and the Giants and in the United Kingdom as Gulliver's Travels—In the land of the Lilliputians and the Giants, is a 1902 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès, based on Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels.
Segundo Víctor Aurelio Chomón y Ruiz was a pioneering Spanish film director, cinematographer and screenwriter. He produced many short films in France while working for Pathé Frères and has been compared to Georges Méliès, due to his frequent camera tricks and optical illusions. He is regarded as the most significant Spanish silent film director in an international context.
Georges Méliès (1861–1938) was a French filmmaker and magician generally regarded as the first person to recognize the potential of narrative film. He made about 520 films between 1896 and 1912, covering a range of genres including trick films, fantasies, comedies, advertisements, satires, costume dramas, literary adaptations, erotic films, melodramas, and imaginary voyages. His works are often considered as important precursors to modern narrative cinema, though some recent scholars have argued that Méliès's films are better understood as spectacular theatrical creations rooted in the 19th-century féerie tradition.
Mary Gartside was an English water colourist and colour theorist. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Mary Gartside can be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published his short but important Natural System of Colours around 1766, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s highly influential theory Zur Farbenlehre, first published in 1810. Gartside's colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual. She is the first recorded woman known to have published a theory of colour.
Le Château hanté, released in the United States as The Devil's Castle and in Britain as The Haunted Castle, is an 1897 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès. It is a remake of a previous film by Méliès, The House of the Devil. The 1896 original, which was released in the United States as The Haunted Castle and in Britain as The Devil's Castle, is sometimes confused for the 1897 version.
The Pillar of Fire, initially released in America and Britain as Haggard's "She"—The Pillar of Fire and also known as La Colonne de feu, is an 1899 short silent trick film directed by Georges Méliès based on H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel She: A History of Adventure.
À la poupée is a largely historic intaglio printmaking technique for making colour prints by applying different ink colours to a single printing plate using ball-shaped wads of cloth, one for each colour. The paper has just one run through the press, but the inking needs to be carefully re-done after each impression is printed. Each impression will usually vary at least slightly, and sometimes very significantly.
L'Alchimiste Parafaragaramus ou la Cornue infernale, released in the United States as The Mysterious Retort and in Britain as The Alchemist and the Demon, is a 1906 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 874–876 in its catalogues.
Détresse et Charité, released in the United States as The Christmas Angel and in Britain as The Beggar Maiden, is a 1904 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès. It was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 669–677 in its catalogues.
Whimsical Illusions is a 1909 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès.
The Spider and the Butterfly is a 1909 French silent film directed by Georges Méliès.
The Brahmin and the Butterfly is a 1901 French short silent fantasy film, directed by Georges Méliès.
Thuillier Paris, formerly known as Thuillier Chemisier, is a French fashion house created by the master shirtmaker Robert Thuillier in 1930. Also dubbed the "shirtmaker of Presidents", thanks to its several years serving at the Elysee Palace, this house has been fully active for two generations before being temporarily closed for a period of 13 years. In 2011, the heirs decided to relaunch the fashion house.
Red Riding Hood was a 1901 French silent film by Georges Méliès, based on the folktale "Little Red Riding Hood". Méliès's adaptation expanded and altered the Charles Perrault version of the story to allow for additional comedy and detail, as well as a happier ending than Perrault provided. In the film, Red Riding Hood is a high-spirited, adventurous daughter in a family of bakers in the French countryside, nearly eaten by a wolf during her journey to take a galette to her grandmother. Red Riding Hood is rescued by the bakery staff just in time, the wolf meets his end during a dramatic chase, and all return home victorious.
Le Dirigeable fantastique ou le Cauchemar d'un inventeur, released in the US as The Inventor Crazybrains and His Wonderful Airship and in the UK as Fantastical Air Ship, is a 1905 French short silent film directed by Georges Méliès. The film was released by Méliès's Star Film Company and is numbered 786–788 in its catalogues.
Couleurs et coloris. Matières premières colorantes. Photographies négatives et positives, sur papier, sur verre, sur soie, sur cuir, sur parchemin celluloïd. Épreuves stéréoscopiques sur verres, et vues à projections en couleurs. Photochromie et photographies artistiques en couleurs. Coloris de films pour cinématographe.