Cyrano de Bergerac (1925 film)


Cyrano de Bergerac is a Franco-Italian silent film directed by Augusto Genina in 1922 based on the play of the same name by Edmond Rostand.
Genina began filming in 1922, at age 30, with the help of his cousin Mario Camerini.
Nearly the entire film was colorized using the Pathé Stencil Color process, which took three years to complete, delaying the film's release until 1925. This involved cutting stencils for each frame of the film, one for each of up to four colors. This was done in Paris by Mme. Thullier, the most famous stencil-color artist, by projecting each frame onto a ground glass screen, and tracing with a Pantograph. These stencils were then used to apply colors to black-and-white prints in a process similar to silk-screening. Each shot was processed separately, so different color palettes could be used for each shot.