In another thread, Charlie Wayne said:
A long list follows.
I didn’t want to hijack the other thread, so I’m starting this new one. I want to talk about B&W film as a medium for cinema, but I’m sure this will evolve into a ‘favourite B&W films’ thread.
We watch Turner Classic Movies a lot in this house, and many films shown there are B&W. Colour has been around for a very long time, but it was prohibitively expensive when studios were churning out film after film after film. Even when colour films were common, studios still shot films in B&W if they weren’t especially confident in them. We watched Roman Holiday last week. Paramount wanted to shoot it in Hollywood in Technicolor. William Wyler insisted it had to be shot on location. Paramount gave in, but cut the budget so that the movie had to be shot in B&W. Nowadays, the decision to use B&W film is usually an artistic one.
What really grabs my attention is when a film was shot on very fine-grained stock. This is especially true when the scenes are exteriors, and the story is set in a contemporary setting. I wish I could think of an example, because I’ve seen beautiful shots that I would like to share. Using an off-the-cuff example, I think of desert shots. Now, a desert is very colourful. You have the yellow sand, the extreme-blue sky, the muted green of the plants, bright spots of flowers, red or black or grey rocks, and so on. (Incidentally, we love seeing the Joshua trees from our old stompin’ grounds.) But compared to other settings, deserts can seem rather monochrome. They look good in B&W. Air Force flight lines do, too. Even shots in cities, when the lighting is bright and the stock is fine, look great in B&W; and small towns look even better.
I wonder if it’s nostalgia. When I was born in the '60s, everything was shiny and colourful. The first TV I remember was colour, and so were the shows I watched. But the '60s weren’t that far removed from the '50s, which weren’t that far removed from the '40s, which weren’t that far removed from the '40s in terms of everyday life. Consider today. I’m typing this on a laptop computer, there’s a 46" flat screen TV playing the news in the background, a mobile phone sits on the coffee table, the SO’s work computer is on her ottoman, and her personal computer is in another room. Remember the line from Pink Floyd’s The Wall? ‘I have thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.’ I don’t know how many channels I have available to me right now. I have the option of signing up for Netflix, Hulu, and others. It seems there have been many changes since even the early-'90s. Go back to the early-'80s, and the differences are even greater. Technological innovations in everyday life seem to be coming faster now than they did in the '50s and '60s. As a child, I’d pedal my bike in my safe suburban neighbourhood, play with my friends with toys that generally didn’t use electricity, let alone integrated circuits, and so on – pretty much like kids in earlier decades. I remember the smell of cars of that era, and the space inside of them (as opposed to the encapsulation we have now). Of course, I was much smaller then. Since most of the movies made in the '30s through '50s were B&W, and since everyday life was much more sedate than it is today – and not that much more sedate than in the '60s – B&W films may remind me of simpler times when I (personally) didn’t have a care in the world.
But they don’t all evoke nostalgia. What really does it for me is when they use the slow stock with its fine grain. When the shot is well composed, when the camera doesn’t pan too fast (or at all), when the lighting – usually natural – is right, B&W film just blows me away. I have a short script I wrote back in the '90s. It was conceived in B&W. It wouldn’t work (for me) if I were to shoot in in colour. I loves me some black-and-white!
