Siskel and Ebert hail black-and-white filmmaking

[Gaith]

Just had to post this awesome video from back in the day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTRANIIntKo


While I too am totally opposed to colorization, appreciate (some) old black-and-white movies and think that a very few contemporary ones (The Good German, The Mist) should definitely be in grayscale, I can't say I'm as big a fan of b&w as these fine critics are. But their arguments concerning The Lady Vanishes, Notorious and the Marx Brothers movies are surely unanswerable.

In short, a fun and illuminating clip.

 

[Skywalker]

Siskel and Ebert hail silent-era filmmaking, receive no response.

 

[Gaith]

^^ I doubt they'll lose much sleep over it...

... What? Too soon? :-P

 

[Ryan]

Black and white is important but so is color and muted color and color filters. It certainly doesn't make a film de facto better. Just imagine the Wizard of Oz without its yellow brick road or The Sound of Music without its picturesque mountains.

 

[Cyke101]

Black and white is important but so is color and muted color and color filters. It certainly doesn't make a film de facto better. Just imagine the Wizard of Oz without its yellow brick road or The Sound of Music without its picturesque mountains.

I don't think they would ever argue that B&W is superior to color, just that there's an inherent beauty to B&W that shouldn't be discounted or overlooked in an age of color, and that should a modern film be made in B&W, that it serves a damn good purpose to the feel of the movie. Ebert gave four stars to a number of Pixar films and Avatar because of their vibrant, imaginative, and colorful visuals, but he was also one of the biggest cheerleaders of the 2005 B&W film Good Night and Good Luck with George Clooney.

 

[Jetfire]

I don't think Gilda would have been the same in color. Ofcourse I love seeing Rita in color...enjoy both types of film making.

 

[Mr. B]

I wouldn't disagree with any of the points they made. I didn't get the impression they were making a case for absolute superiority of black and white, but all of the advantages they mentioned make perfect sense such as increased contrast and focus on relevant on-screen subjects.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Black and white is important but so is color and muted color and color filters. It certainly doesn't make a film de facto better. Just imagine the Wizard of Oz without its yellow brick road or The Sound of Music without its picturesque mountains.

I don't think they would ever argue that B&W is superior to color, just that there's an inherent beauty to B&W that shouldn't be discounted or overlooked in an age of color, and that should a modern film be made in B&W, that it serves a damn good purpose to the feel of the movie. Ebert gave four stars to a number of Pixar films and Avatar because of their vibrant, imaginative, and colorful visuals, but he was also one of the biggest cheerleaders of the 2005 B&W film Good Night and Good Luck with George Clooney.

Exactly so.

 

[Dar70]

Just had to post this awesome video from back in the day:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTRANIIntKo


While I too am totally opposed to colorization, appreciate (some) old black-and-white movies and think that a very few contemporary ones (The Good German, The Mist) should definitely be in grayscale, I can't say I'm as big a fan of b&w as these fine critics are. But their arguments concerning The Lady Vanishes, Notorious and the Marx Brothers movies are surely unanswerable.

In short, a fun and illuminating clip.

I like B&W film. Even though many producers of the time would have chosen color if it was available or affordable, its still puts you in the mood of when the film was made. I dont think much colorization goes on today. Maybe a few tv series releases like Bewitched and Jeannie B&W seasons, but I think most people really dont care about colorization any longer.

 

[USS Mariner]

The only problem I have with doing films in B&W today is that the digital process doesn't give you the same dynamic range that traditional B&W does, at least for consumer-grade cameras and videocameras. It just feels like a cheap effect.

 

[Chloe_Trek]

If you think about it, the old hollywood black and white films were shot by people who spent their whole lives making those kind of the films. The best were well-paid artists, often brought from other countries. To think anyone who only has experience in color could compete with the look of films like Citizen Kane is unrealistic. It may be that those days are gone forever, which is very sad. The good part is that we still have those old films, and many are being preserved.

Colorizing still has the look of an old black and white film colored with watercolors. When you think of what is required to make it look credible, it's almost too much. Ask any oil painter how many colors go into a painting, and that's just a painting. Not a photograph.

Black and white is great. Black and white films should remain howthey were made, IMO. Sin City had an interesting style, but the old artistry of the black and white hollywood days is so far in the past that it may be a lost art because the artists who did those movie are mostly gone, now. But any new approach, or attempt to recapture that lost art, is a good thing.

 

[Kegg]

There are definitely black and white films that are so intentionally. A good example of this would be The Longest Day, which was made in black and white so it would feel more like a documentary (the same logic used for shakycam today). Regardless, this film has been colourised. And there were directors who with the rise of colour film refused to switch over, and I believe Orson Welles has called black and white the preferred medium for an actor, so there is more too it than the cheapness (though had we been able to use colour cheaply from the advent of cinema one wonders how things may have evolved).

The only problem I have with doing films in B&W today is that the digital process doesn't give you the same dynamic range that traditional B&W does,

Two words: Guy Maddin.

Actually whenever modern B&W comes up that's pretty much all I have to say, and then I titter like a schoolgirl.

 

[Harvey]

Even Orson Welles made a color documentary in the form of F For Fake. But for his fiction films he was definitely a black and white filmmaker. Which is fine. Hard to argue against the look of Citizen Kane.

 

[DevilEyes]

There are definitely black and white films that are so intentionally.

Well, pretty much every B&W film made today is B&W intentionally. They're used to provide either a "documentary" feel about a bygone era, or to add a film noir atmosphere, or just a certain feeling of darkness and gloom.

The latest example is Michael Haneke's excellent White Ribbon (Das weisse Band), where it's used to achieve both of the above goals (a dark 'mystery' story set before World War One). Then there was also Control (for obvious reasons - black and white photos of Joy Division are a part of band's iconic image, and director Anton Corbijn is primarily a renowned photographer who was one of those who shot those photos in the first place), and earlier, Good Night and Good Luck, Schindler's List, Lars Von Trier's Europa, Wenders' Himmel uber Berlin (Wings of Desire) etc.

 

[Harvey]

Plenty of black and white films today are made in that format because the director wanted to shoot on film, but couldn't afford color stock. Black and white stock can look good for half the cost of color. Witness Clerks.

 

[Kegg]

Well, pretty much every B&W film made today is B&W intentionally.

Obviously (well, aside from fare like Clerks, as Harvey observed).

But I wanted to challenge the notion that old movies did B&W because colour wasn't available and/or was too expensive. While that's certainly true in many, many cases, there are also many films from the period of black and white and colour cohabitating that easily could have been colour but chose not to. Another would be, say, Kurosawa's Red Beard, which was actually very expensive but was in B&W because the director was very recitent about making the change.

All that said, it's worth noting that in the silent era there was a very common practice of tinting films, color-coding them for the audience (dark blue for night, typically), and reproducing that today is actually more accurate in many cases than providing them in black and white (it varies, and many films don't have a universally codified tinting system - I've seen Nosferatu done a dozen ways, but simply B&W was not the intention of that picture). Though, conversely, Metropolis has been color tinted and that's wrong because that film was always intended to be shown B&W. This thing varies.

The latest example is Michael Haneke's excellent White Ribbon (Das weisse Band),

Right, so I'm not the only person on the forum who saw that. That's nice. Also, damn that was brilliant. If USS Mariner wants to see an excellently shot B&W film that isn't just a Canadian's ode to silent cinema, well, there's one - it's gorgeously done stuff.

 

[Harvey]

I have to say, when it comes to color tinting, I've never seen a good example of it. I saw a print of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari a couple months ago which used all kinds of color tinting, and all it did was eliminate a lot of the detail in the image. It looked awful.

 

[Broccoli]

I have no strong feelings one way or another, but one thing I don't fully understand about people who argue against colorizing (and digital cleanup for that matter in the case of blu ray), how come it is bad to do that, but it is okay to continually upgrade the audio to a perfect digital 5.1 surround sound quality?

On a completely other topic, is it me, or does the switch over from b&w to color mirror the current switch over from film to digital?

 

[Kegg]

I have to say, when it comes to color tinting, I've never seen a good example of it. I saw a print of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari a couple months ago which used all kinds of color tinting, and all it did was eliminate a lot of the detail in the image. It looked awful.

I've seen some very bad color tinting, definitely (including one of Caligari - could have been the same one, hell) but it's not something that's wrong per se as that's how the films were meant to be seen, is the rather belaboured point.

I have no strong feelings one way or another, but one thing I don't fully understand about people who argue against colorizing (and digital cleanup for that matter in the case of blu ray), how come it is bad to do that, but it is okay to continually upgrade the audio to a perfect digital 5.1 surround sound quality?

Because, those are fundamentally different things. I'd compare upgrading the audio quality to upgrading the image quality - it's something that comes with remastering and restoring a film. Colourising is adding a new element, like giving CGI effects, say, would be.

On a completely other topic, is it me, or does the switch over from b&w to color mirror the current switch over from film to digital?

I dunno, doesn't feel big enough.

 

[Ryan]

I don't think they would ever argue that B&W is superior to color.

Well, Siskel essentially said it ("Black and white is more interesting than color."). And they were certainly stacking the deck when they took classic B&W films shot by great directors and put them up against forgettable early color movies.

I don't fundamentally disagree with their argument though I believe they were really falling for the nostalgia trap and not recognizing the boatload of horrible black and white films (for instance, they're straight up wrong when they say b&w isn't harder to see; it absolutely can be).