Coloring the Figures. Women’s Labor in the Early Italian Film Industry

The essay deals with the problem of women workers employed as hand colorists in Italy between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. It explores general issues such as the relation between the modern development of industrial coloring processes and the professions involved, the continuity between the coloring techniques in the film industry and those employed in other production fields (e.g. photography). The text subsequently investigates the situation of women workers and the gendered forms of labor division in the Roman laboratories of Cines between 1905 and 1910.