Colour

In the early days, people tried to add colour to cinema’s black-and-white images by tinting or colouring the film stock. Then, beginning in the 1910s, experiments were carried out in embedding so-called “natural” colours into the film stock. The use of colour did not become widespread until the marketing of multi-layer film stock (blue-green-red or yellow-magenta-cyan), which made it possible to recreate colour by superimposing three images on the film. The various colour process, with the exception of reversible film stock, all use a negative-positive technique. Reversible film—the most famous of which is Kodachrome—is used mostly in 16mm amateur or non-professional cinema. This explains why a good many films shot in Quebec in 16mm are in colour. The same is true of films made at the National Film Board. The first, and before the arrival of television only film made in colour in Quebec, Étienne Brûlé, gibier de potence (Melburn Turner, 1952), was shot on reversible 16mm film stock and blown up to 35mm for commercial release.

To learn more

• Coup d’œil au studio. Dir. : Henri Michaud [Renaissance Films Productions, 1949]
• La dame aux camélias, la vraie. Dir. : Gratien Gélinas [1942]
• Parade de barques. [Service de ciné-photographie, 1947]
• Sainte-Anne-de-Roquemaure : un épilogue à En pays neufs. Dir. : Maurice Proulx [1942]
• Ski in the Valley of the Saints. [National Film Board of canada, 1944]
• [Trans Canada Summer (1)]. [stockshot, National Film Board of Canada, 1952]
• [Trans Canada Summer (2)]. [stockshot, National Film Board of Canada, 1952]
• [Trans Canada Summer (3)]. [stockshot, National Film Board of Canada, 1952]