Some actors, for example, did not think they photographed as glamorously in Technicolor as in black and white.
The Golden Era: Color ClassicĮspecially 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.
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.Ĭontemporary filmmakers often decide that black and white is an appropriate medium to evoke a sense of the past, as in Mel Brooks's comic homage to an earlier horror era, Young Frankenstein. Some films are shot in black and white as a kind of homage to earlier cinema genres. 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. Black and White Todayĭirectors still sometimes opt for black and white to make a political and/or aesthetic point.
Typically, Americans only started appreciating noir films as anything other than low-budget, low-brow entertainment for 14-year-old boys after the French did. The French loved the existential angst of the antihero (Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, Glenn Ford), and the dark, gloomy atmosphere created by moody lighting. 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.Īnd, 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.įilm noir was named by the French who, finding themselves culturally and nationally humbled (for a moment) after World War II, discovered a love of all things American, including American movies. White has, if anything, even more variations, and gray is practically infinite.īlack and white is the color of glamour cinematography. When you walk into a paint store and ask for black the clerk (after laughing at your navet) will hand you 50 color chips: jet black, deep-space black, Frederick's of Hollywood black, midnight blue, and so on. First, black and white is never just that: It is also all the gradations of gray in between. 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. 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. Silver nitrate stock, on which much silent film was shot, produced a shimmering, other-worldly quality, seeming to set the screen on fire. 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. In the 1930s and 1940s cost was not the only factor determining which film stock a film project would employ. Black and White and Technicolor in Hollywood's Golden Era
But how do filmmakers choose what kinds of colors to use? And how are we supposed to respond to those colors as intelligent filmgoers? In this section we will talk a little about the aesthetics of color from both sides of the spectrum. So now you know about how we got to the color you see in today's films.