Object of the week: A hand-painted still for Michael Powell’s Hebridean romance The Edge of the World
This promotional still for a Michael Powell classic demonstrates the once common practice of applying paints and dyes to black-and-white images.
The Edge of the World (1937) was director Michael Powell’s first independent production and one which he would later describe as “a turning point of [his] life in art”.
Set on a remote Hebridean island, the film depicts a powerful story of love, rivalry and survival against the harsh elemental realities of island life and an ever-encroaching modernity.
Released in the summer of 1937, the film opened at the New Gallery Cinema in Regent Street, London and received strong reviews, including from The Observer’s C.A. Lejeune who predicted that The Edge of the World would, at some point in the future, be positioned “near the top of the English classics”.
The film so impressed movie mogul Alexander Korda that he moved quickly to add Powell to his roster of directors at London Films – a move that ultimately set Powell on a path towards his esteemed partnership with Emeric Pressburger.
The BFI National Archive contains numerous stills for The Edge of the World, which would have been used to help promote the title. As photographer Gerald McLean discovered when researching the film for our 2010 Blu-ray, these include a small number of black-and-white 10” x 8” bromide prints which have been hand-coloured – including this one, which features actors Belle Chrystall and Eric Berry (who play brother and sister in the film) reclining on a grassy cliff-edge.
Before the widespread use of colour photography, the hand-colouring of stills was a standard practice, with translucent dyes or paint added directly to the print surface.
Unusually, though, on these examples for The Edge of the World the colourant has been applied to the reverse, meaning the effect of the hand-colouring only becomes visible when the photograph is backlit.
Looking at the reverse of the image, it would seem that the colourant has been applied poorly and hastily. When viewed over a light box, however, the technique produces a result which is, arguably, more subtle and effective than examples that use the more traditional colouring method.
The importance of backlighting in this process suggests that these stills acted as the source from which further copies could be produced. This would be achieved by photographing the print using colour film.
Images like these could frequently be found alongside cinema listings in magazines, which were printed partly or fully in colour. Although slightly misleading to audiences, the availability of colour promotional materials (even for black-and-white films) would have greatly improved a film’s chance of prominent positioning in these popular publications.
Produced with the support of the BFI Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery funding.