One that hasn’t been mentioned yet is the very good Rumble fish by Francis Ford Coppola (1983).
Another B&W Jarmusch film is Coffee and Cigarettes. A good idea with lots of wasted potential, IMO. Conversations between Steven Wright and Roberto Begnini or Iggy Pop and Tom Waits should not have me looking at my watch.
Samurai Fiction by Hiroyuki Nakano. Uses color in a couple of places to good effect. Watch it and you’ll see a couple of scenes that Tarantino borrowed for Kill Bill, along with the use of Tomoyasu Hotei for the soundtrack.
A French/Belgian movie :
Les convoyeurs attendent by Benoît Mariage, with Benoît Poelvoorde.
Nice movie by the way.
John Boorman’s “The General”
I would dispute the claim that cinematographers dont’ know how to “shoot in black and white any more”.
I’m a cinematographer. I started in black and white and I’m only 44. Most if not all competant cinematographers can light and shoot black and white just fine.
The major differences? Well, tons. How the skin and other surfaces takes and reflects the light, how b&w film “reads” the color spectrum, how that read( or sensitivity, if you will ) affects costume, art department, and make-up, and so on.
In general, you really have to be on your shit in terms of ratios and exposures in black and white much moreso than color. Until T-Grain stocks came out, I routinely overexposed every shot by exactly one stop. It tightened up the grain by delivering a slightly fatter negative and unless grain was a creative goal, the inherent grain tended to be really annoying to have to deal with. Hardly a revolutionary idea, I learned it from my colleagues.
In black and white, the latitude ain’t there.
Additionally, many labs are not set up with, or have the personnel, to print b&w. Similarly, a DP who wants to shoot a feature on b&w has advanced discussions with stock suppliers ( Kodak, Fuji, etc. ) to insure that enough batches of b&w stock are available when they want to shoot.
Lighting for b&w stills is the same as b&w films, as in both cases you are shooting a b&w negative.
At any rate, it may be that some younger cinematographres ( ages 25 and under perhaps ) have come up without touching film and have only shot videotape but anyone who has shot enough film at some point has either shot b&w stills, or some b&w moving film.
I shoot all of my stills for pleasure in b&w, frequently in 3200 ASA stock. Now THAT’D be a hell of a stock to shoot a movie in. Hmmmm…
The Man Who Wasn’t There was to my eye one of the most beautifully shot b&w films of recent memory. IMDB doesn’t give the stock used, just that it was Kodak stock. Harrumph.
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IMDB states that:
I had no idea !!! Gorgeous work, I now gotta look into what they did to handle the contrast ratios while shooting if they knew they were printing in b&w. Very cool. I stand corrected.
Here’s a surprise: that B/W movie was shot in color! The distribrutor insisted on the option of releasing it in color in foreign and video markets. A few reels in color accidentally made it out of the lab and into movie theaters in Canada; Roger Ebert wrote about it in three “Answer Man” answers.
Say, no one’s mentioned The Lost Skeleton of Cadavera yet.
Vlearly done to imitate the incredibly low-budget badfilms of the 1950s and 1960s. Having grown up on them, I can relate.
Hell, I’m only 27 and I learned how to shoot black and white in film school. We had two labs shut down on us (stop processing B&W) during a project.
Roger Deakins is always doing funky things with his film and processing. I believe there was an article in American Cinematographer around the time the film came out with all the specifics. You might also look at the archives at www.cinematography.com (especially the forums). I remember a lively discussion at the time.
I’m actually taking a B&W photog class at my college right now. It can be tricky if you’re used to working in color, since you have to pay attention to different things. Not necessarily inherently more difficult, but you have to keep your head in it to do it right.
Also, if you have access to a do-it-yourself lab (like my college does, and like the Army base nearby does as well), you can save LOTS of money shooting B&W, since the film is cheaper to buy in bulk than color film (but if you send it out to get processed by a lab, it can sometimes be an experience that is basically the financial equivilant of a Chemistry midterm exam).
That said, I just got my color film processed by a professional lab for the first time.
HOLY CRAP, I didn’t know I could take pictures that looked this good! :eek:
I loved Dead Man. But my very most favoritist movie of all right now is The American Astronaut .
Gee. That’d have been a whole lot more educational and less insulting, had you read my POST UP THERE which says the same thing. 
You posted your “surprise” an hour after I posted my fact, including cite.
In fact, if you had read my second post you’d see that… it comes as no surprise to anybody but you, since I already said it.
Apology accepted !!
Gee. That’d have been a whole lot more educational and less insulting, had you read my POST UP THERE which says the same thing. You posted your “surprise” an hour after I posted my fact, including cite.
In fact, if you had read my second post you’d see that… it comes as no surprise to anybody but you, since I already said it.
Apology accepted !!
As far as Deakins goes, he’s always struck me as one of those DP’s who is as involved in lab process as he is in on-set process. I admire that, because there’s a hell of a lot to be learned from using and manipulating the negative processing and printing procedures that cannot be accomplished on set with lighting or filters. Bleach-Bypass, for example.
–wince-- Well, that was exactly twice as snippy as it should have been. Damned Squirrels. If some nice Mod will delete the first of the double-posts, I will be most appreciative.
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My browser (or Internet connectio) was giving me trouble when I tried to post that, and I could not get any response for some time. How my spending about fifteen minutes trying to find some articles for you about The Man Who Wasn’t There being shot in color was “insulting” is beyond me. I thought you would enjoy them. I guess no good deed goes unpunished around here.
I, for onr, didn’t find it insulting. I noted an hours difference in time, but no more than that.
Well, then please accept my apologies. The comment did not come out of a vacuum, he/she and I routinely spar in movie/movie making threads. However, the squirrels who run the Internet mess with your posts just like mine, and I apologize for jumping to a conclusion that was completely inaccurate.
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