The Classic Movie History Project Blogathon: Colour Design in «The Trail of the Lonesome Pine» (1936)
Of all God's gifts to the sighted man, colour is holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. (John Ruskin, English art critic and writer, 1819-1900) The efforts to join colour to the moving image are as old as cinema itself. At least since the release of Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895) by the Edison Manufacturing Company, filmmakers had been hand-painting frames to add colour to black-and-white prints. In this 45-second short, Broadway dancer Annabelle Moore is dressed in white veils that appear to change colours as she swirls them. Hand colouring was often used in early European trick and fantasy films, especially those produced by pioneer French filmmaker George Méliès, who amazed audiences with his astonishingly intricate visual effects. Méliès first experimented with colour in Jeanne d'Arc (1900), leading to a more spectacular use of the technique in Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) and Le Voyage à travers l'impossible (1904), which offers four hues in at least t...