Must be one of the 'assembly' methods. Assembly because the primary colour images each lie in one thin layer; the aluminium foil was probably used as the base to provide maximum reflectivity and allow the coloured layers to be seen through. One guess is that each separation negative was printed on a positive material where the positive image is either replaced with a dye or else toned, to produce the CMY primaries. E.g, the red negative is printed to form a cyan positive, the green, a magenta positive, and the blue, a yellow positive.
I think I've seen something similar in the colour section of very old recipe books- the thin gels are all bound on a page, and when separated, they are actually individual positives coloured in one of the dye primaries.