Black and White and Technicolor in Hollywood's Golden Era
In the 1930s and 1940s cost was not the only factor
determining which film stock a film project would employ. Hollywood
Technicolor tended to be used to make everything pretty, so that the
most serious dramas often tended to be black and white:
Citizen Kane (1941),
The Little Foxes (1941), the entire genre of film noir, and so on.
Black and White
It's extremely important to remember that black
and white can be just as subtle as color because
you can do so many things to it. First, black and
white is never just that: It is also all the gradations
of gray in between. And silver. And beiges. And so
on. When you walk into a paint store and ask for
black the clerk (after laughing at your naïveté) will
hand you 50 color chips: jet black, deep-space
black, Frederick's of Hollywood black, midnight
blue, and so on. White has, if anything, even more
variations, and gray is practically infinite.
Black and white is the color of glamour cinematography. The most glamorous icons of the screen,
those actors who only require last names—Garbo,
Bogart, Bacall, Gable, Dietrich—are most famously
photographed in black and white.
And, as its name suggests, at least one whole film
genre is defined in large part by the fact that it was
shot in black and white: film
noir.
Nitrate Stock
Silver nitrate stock, on which much silent film was shot, produced a
shimmering, other-worldly quality, seeming to set the screen on fire.
Unfortunately, because it was rather unstable, it could also set the
projector, the booth, and the theater on fire, so that its projection is
now illegal in all but a handful of theaters in the country specially
equipped to contain a blaze.
Black and White Today
Directors still sometimes opt for black and white to make a political and/or aesthetic point.
Street Scene (1989)—a film by an African American director—restages Charlie Chaplin's
The Kid
(1921) in the contemporary inner city, suggesting both that inner-city
denizens have at least the humanity we grant to the little tramp, and
that nostalgizing poverty is cruelly absurd.
Some films are shot in black and white as a kind of homage to earlier cinema genres. Steve Martin's
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982) pays tribute to film noir, while
Movie Movie (1978) and
Young Frankenstein (1974) fondly recall the 1930s backstage musical and the 1940s horror film.
The Golden Era: Color Classic
Especially for the Technicolor technicians, the principal
job was to figure out how to make color film acceptable to an audience
and an industry that was at first hesitant about the technology. Some
actors, for example, did not think they photographed as glamorously in
Technicolor as in black and white. Still, after the box office successes
of films like 1939's
Gone With the Wind and
The Wizard of Oz
(we wonder whether Shirley Temple is still kicking herself for not
taking on the role of Dorothy), studio execs came to realize that adding
color to a film would measurably increase its box-office appeal. So
this expensive technology was used for high-profile prestige pictures,
like the Errol Flynn vehicle,
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), which cost $2 million, an amazing price tag for the Great Depression years.
Black and Blue: Using All the Crayons in the Box
Some directors have been thinking outside the Crayola box,
mixing panchromatic and color stock in the same film. Early on the
decision was in part economic: Technicolor was incredibly expensive. But
even early on the decision to mix it up could be motivated by plot and
theme as much as by economics. The most famous example is of course
The Wizard of Oz
(1939). Monotonous Kansas is also monochromatic. But when, after her
tornado-driven house landed in Kansas, Dorothy opened the front door and
found herself in a Technicolor Oz, the 1939 audience shared her sense
of wonder at their introduction to a prismatically colorful new world.
Self-Reflexivity and Other Kinds of Color
Though we shall visit the notion of self-reflexivity in some
detail, it is worth noting that sometimes black-and-white clips appear
in color films in order to suggest that these films have a connection to
the history of film. Old horror films play on television in the
background while the new horror takes place in
Halloween's foreground (1978).
Gilda (1946) plays on the monitor of a video store while a disturbing love relationship takes place in the foreground of
The Fisher King
(1991). Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters desperately dance during the
Great Depression against the very ironic backdrop of Fred Astaire and
Ginger Rogers dancing on film, in
Pennies from Heaven (1981).
Sometimes black and white is used in a color film as a way
of establishing a biographical past for a principal character. This
technique is used in
Mishima (1985) and
Zelig (1983). Sometimes it establishes a point of view, as for a gay man looking down desiringly on a group of schoolboys in
If … (1969). Other older experiments with black and white and color include
Portrait of Jennie (1948) and Eisenstein's great experiment with ideologically mixing it up in
Ivan the Terrible (Ivan Grozny, Russia, 1944).
Read more:
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