Unnatural Colour looks at processes for tinting and toning photo-chemical film using organic materials to explore, both conceptually and materially, the relation between representing a landscape and directly using its natural elements in the process of creating an image while conveying elements of its historical and material context.
Examples of film colouring from pre and early cinematic forms were the starting point to this project. Both light projection using tinted materials and photographic colorisation largely preceded cinema, while tinted and toned films were extremely common and widely popular with early film audiences. This trait of pre 1900’s “fairground” cinema was long disregarded until the renewed interest for early film techniques and media archaeology in the 1990’s allowed for the rediscovery, acknowledgement, and better preservation of these archival materials and technical knowledge.
Strong connections with the textile industry have informed my research, through historical examples of fabric dyeing with mineral, animal, and plant based pigments. The wider histories of textile dyeing and production of pictorial pigments whose technical origins date back to the Neolithic are subsequently indissociable from the exploitation of natural resources, global trade routes, and colonialism. In particular, the history of the violet orcein dyes relates to Portuguese colonialism through the exploitation of the rosella tinctorial lichen (urzela) in Cabo Verde and its international trade as a source material for the textile industry.
The beginning of film tinting coincided with the development of synthetic aniline dyes that radically transformed the production of pigments formerly fabricated from organic materials such as indigo, cochineal, or logwood, as luxury products to be exploited, transformed, and commercialised in the West. The industrialisation of colour saw entire commercial routes and the subsistence of local communities disappear while the toxicity and environmental cost of many new synthetic materials also produced major damages to ecosystems, consumers, factory workers and local populations.
Ongoing research & technical training with:
Teresa Castro https://www.culturgest.pt/en/media/cinema-razao-ecologia-microsite/
Esther Urlus & Filmwerplaats Lab https://filmwerkplaats.hotglue.me/
Jeniffer Lienhard https://appleoakfibreworks.com/
Project Supported by The Arts Council of Ireland (2024-2025) and Culture Moves Europe 2025
“In 1918, William van Doren Kelley, the inventor of several commercial natural colour processes, (…) complained that he had several times been attracted to a ‘theatre’ where ‘color films’ were advertised only to find that the subjects were merely ‘black and white hand-colored films’. Kelley proposed that only films ‘photographed so that the colors are selected entirely by optical and mechanical means and reproduced again in a like manner’ be called ‘natural color motion pictures’. ‘Color motion pictures’ he described with his accustomed sarcasm as ‘films arbitrarily colored with dyes … to suit the individual taste’. He clearly implied that tinting or toning was not natural. He was not the first to want to distinguish between ‘real’ colour films that reproduced the original colours in a scene and ‘arbitrarily’ tinted, toned or stencilled black-and-white films.” (P. Read, 2009).
“Color in early film, especially the multi-chromatic coloring, occupied a somewhat paradoxical role in this gradual transformation of cinema into a modern industry. The labor-intensive process of coloring film frame by frame recalled artisanal handicrafts that preceded mass industrialization. Like the photographic studio, most of cinema’s first decade reflects an unstable adaptation of artisan processes to new technologies.” (T.Gunning, 2015).
Thanks to Paul Read, Barbara Flückiger filmcolors.org, and Eye Film Museum
International Conference: The Colour Fantastic Revisited: Across Global Histories, Theories, Aesthetics, and Archives https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/programme/this-is-film-2025/1390550