Early cinema was not just in black and white and silent. The films were almost always shown accompanied by music, and at Pathé it was not unusual that they were manually colored.

This was a meticulous and time-consuming work, often carried out by women. The photo to the left is from the coloring department at Pathé round 1910. The work, coloring the celluloid strips, often resulted in realistic and astonishingly beautiful films.

The film to the left, Trois phases de la Lune [The three phases of the Moon] were shot by Pathé around 1905. It is a colored romantic scene with a man in the moon making faces. It bears significant resemblance to the work of the film magician George Méliès, and his film about a trip to the moon, Voyage dans la Lune, made three years earlier, in 1902.