Per the link, “Ever since the advent of colour photography, the past has been depicted as in black and white, sepia tone or muted colors.”
I actually don’t think this is true. Thinking of film in particular, it’s interesting that one of the prime examples of switching black and white and color, The Wizard Of Oz, does NOT use B&W as referencing the past. Neither do Elvis’ The Trouble With Girls or Putney Swope. I would welcome other example that refute this particular trope.
I don’t really believe this was a thing when Color and B&W were regularly produced in parallel, say until 1965 or so. It must have only started when B&W itself started to be legitimately in the past, so some time after that I would guess.
The trope is more cringeworthy to me when the “past” represented is something like the 1980s, when B&W was no longer being used heavily. Like on sports broadcast, where a progression of record holders is shown, a B&W one will be chosen for someone from the 1980s when a color photo could easily be obtained, just to make it look more “past.”
Another irony of the trope is that of course before B&W photography, there were paintings… which were in color. I don’t recall George Washington, or Jesus for that matter, being rendered in B&W.
For my question, what’s the earliest anyone can remember this trope occurring?
I don’t know when it started but I’ve seen if very often when tribute/parodies of old B&W television shows were done. There have been many of those productions based on I Love Lucy and the Honeymooners. They weren’t using B&W to represent the past though, those shows were originally available only in B&W, that’s the way everyone would have seen them.
Now reading your link there is little evidence of this claim even provided. Silent movies are mentioned, and once again, they were actually shot and seen in B&W. How else should they be represented?
I don’t know off hand of a serious TV show or movie where the past is represented in B&W in contrast to future times in color. In comedies the past may be implied this way but usually without subtlety, odd frame rates like silent films, film scratches and dust marks, sub-titles, costumes, and music are needed to make it clear that the past is represented and add comic value.
I remember going to see Von Ryan’s Express with my dad and older brother in 1965. My brother said “I’m glad it’s in color!” This was just a year after we saw The Train, which was filmed in B&W. I think it may have been the last such major picture we ever saw in the cinema.
Twenty years ago, I was visiting a bookstore in Moscow with a Russian girlfriend. We were thumbing through a book on WWII published in the US,and she was astonished by how many photos were in color. She actually thought they had been colorized until I told her they did indeed have color photography in the 1940s. To this day, I’m not sure she believed me.
She was a graduate student at the time, so not at all uninformed. Just a little behind the times, I guess.
The film The Odessa File uses black and white film to indicate things happening in the past. I approve – it’s one of the features I had imagined using when I “filmed” the book in my head.
A classic, but obviously an earlier entry in the repertoire. Bill Watterson hated that he had to waste the top row with throwaway panels. Even today the Sunday comics are like that, since some papers clip off that row so they can cram more comics on a page. Those panels must therefore be independent such that the rest of the narrative works without them. Calvin & Hobbes gained enough popularity for Watterson to negotiate a fixed amount of space for the Sunday strip that wouldn’t be chopped up. Doonesbury was the only other comic that was popular enough to achieve this sort of control.
It should be remembered that until the late '60s, color TVs were very expensive and did not work all that well. The colors were usually off and had to be adjusted manually.
I first got to watch color TV at a friend’s home on 1966. (I remember it was the second “Bookworm” episode of Batman.) My household didn’t have one until a year or so later.
Even though all three networks went to full-color prime-time broadcasting in 1966, most TV sets in the US were still B&W much later, a statistic noted in The Making of Star Trek (1968). B&W reruns also continued in the mornings. I remember watching old episodes of Dick Van Dyke and The Beverly Hillbillies in the summer of 1968, long before colorization became a thing.
RCA was pushing the sale of color TV through NBC, which is why it became the first all-color network with shows like Bonanza and The Dean Martin Show. I watch these today and I’m struck by the level of color saturation.
How about Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? Starts out in grainy old style flickery sepia then as the sun rose and lighted up the horse’s hooves the whole movie turned into color. Also the middle montage of the characters sitting for daguerrotypes intercut with grainy B/W photo shots. It was a very effective use of the technique, lets the viewer in on “we’re telling an old timey story now” then goes through the old timeyness signals to set the action in normal color.
In Stairway to Heaven (1946), the inverse scheme is in play, color representing “reality” and B&W representing the “heavenly realm,” leading Conductor 71 (Marius Goring, playing a French dandy) to famously remark upon arriving on earth: “Ahh, one is starved for Technicolor up there.”
The grainy flickery stuff is supposed to newsreel style footage. It is dating the movie but the entire movie takes place in the same time period in both color and B&W. Really excellent filmmaking to give the impression of the characters jumping out of the newsreels into real life.
One TV star not enthusiastic about the switch to color in 1966 was Vic Morrow, who played Sgt Saunders in Combat! He much preferred the show in B&W, saying it better reflected the reality of WWII.
When the Goodies wanted to make a black and white silent movie it took them ages to paint their sets B&W and not to talk.
“Buster Keaton must have spent three weeks painting the whole town black and white. And then a ruddy great building falls on him, and he doesn’t make a sound.”
A bit off-topic, I have a real life example. I was born in 1968 in Western Germany and had an uncle who lived in West-Berlin, whom I visited with a friend for a week in 1987. As many will remember, West-Berlin was an island of capitalism in a socialist world. So one day, we visited East-Berlin, and stepping out from the train station Friedrichsstraße, going through customs and stepping into the Eastern block really felt like moving from a technicolor movie into a black and white world. Returning in 2005, long after reunification, to those same places (Alexanderplatz), everything had changed and looked equally colorful like the rest of Berlin.
Apropos of Berlin, Wim Wender’s film “Wings Of Desire” also is a mixture of black and white and color where it doesn’t signify the past, but the difference between the angelic and the human realm. The angelic realm is shown in black and white, but the moment one of the angels (played by Bruno Ganz) becomes human, it switches to color.
