I tend to negatively prejudge movies that are in black and white, especially from the era where color technology was available. I understand that in the 1930’s, movies like “Gone with the Wind” were in beautiful (techni?)color, but it was expensive.
But what about the 1950’s, and even 1960’s? There are still a significant number of movies filmed in Black and white. Now, a rare arthouse-style film that is in black and white, I can understand. But my guess is that the average audience strongly prefers to see their hunky heroes, Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Gregory Peck, in living color.
Yet why didn’t they move towards color earlier? Seeing post 1950 classics like “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance” and “High Noon” why didn’t audiences demand black and white earlier, and force the studios to move to 100% color earlier?
Because the movies were just as good – if not better – in black and white.
You have to remember that audiences in the 50s and 60s didn’t think like you, and your question is <pun alert> colored by your own assumptions and misperceptions. Audiences didn’t prefer to see the movies in color (another false assumption on your part) and, until TV came along, Hollywood saw no reason to spend the extra money for anything but top productions.
But you question clearly is based on the false assumption that audiences in the 50s thought about color the same way you did.
Because maybe audiences were willing to put up with the agonizing ordeal of slaving their way through the torturous experience of a monochrome movie when it was beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, and smartly written. :rolleyes:
Color cost more money back then–maybe not as much in the 50s with Eastman color as in the 30s with 3-strip technicolor, but still more. TVs were almost universally B&W. So while you may consider the aesthetic experience of suffering through a B&W movie unbearable, people back then were perfectly fine with monochrome if it was a good movie (and yes, there actually were some, perish the thought :eek:). Color could, of course, be a huge B.O. draw, but the studios made a lot more movies back then, so something that didn’t involve huge production values, lavish travel photography, or epic picturesque sweep could “settle” for B&W (that is, when artists like Hitchcock weren’t intentionally using it for artistic purposes).
And what were audiences supposed to do–boycott all B&W films? How exactly were they to “demand” this transition be accelerated? By 1967, B&W films were largely an endangered species, so while it may not have happened as quickly as the OP might expect, they also weren’t as impatient as you’re projecting they should have been–many of people’s favorite movies back then were B&W, so they didn’t associate it as a visual Kiss of Death you apparently do.
As you say, movies were made in cblack and white well into the 1960s
**The Train
Psycho
King Rat
Sink the Bismark!
The Longest Day
The Bedford Incident**
Television was largely in black and white, too. They were surprisingly artful about it. they very creatively used grays – it wasn’t just shooting with a black and white camera the same way you’d shoot a color film. The movies, of course, did the same.
That’s right. Every single movie shot in black and white is a cinematic masterpiece. With the advent of color film came the dawn of crappy cinema. Except in France. :rolleyes:
Similarly, why do so many people still make B&W photographs? I frequent a couple photography forums and there are always some threads up for commenting on users’ B&W photos. In the VAST majority of cases the black and white conversion lessens the original image. It’s very rare that it makes an improvement. That said, everything doesn’t have to be in really saturated colors, but as soon as it goes black and white I instantly feel that something is missing when I look at a photograph.
I hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, it’s just a related question.
There was a famous photo in LIFE Magazine in the 60s of a patient in a burn ward. They had a good color print of it, but decided to go with black and white because it shifted the focus away from the blood and gore and onto the emotions of the patient and his medical team.
Some B&W movies are sumptuously beautiful, and some color movies from the 50s were godawful garish and ugly. Do you really believe Citizen Kane would be improved by colorization? or Dr. Strangelove? The Pawnbroker?
Some of Woody Allen’s best movies were in B&W. And Fellini, Kurosawa and the whole French New Wave. So were Schindler’s List and She’s Gotta Have it (with some limited color splashes). Clerks, Kevin Smith’s only truly great film, was B&W.
How can modern audiences tolerate films that aren’t IMAX, Pixar or 3D? Simple: A great story and terrific cinematography trump all other considerations.
All due respect, the OP says worlds more about your own limited view than about anything to do with movies, art, or audiences.
Do you “tolerate” black and white photos? Do you “tolerate” the charcoal sketches of Leonardo DaVinci?
Art has been around as long as humans have. I’d estimate that if you take the entire history of art and turn it into oh say a 12 foot tall banana, then gold plate the banana, then make a lengthwise cross-section of the banana, the top layer of gold molecules, as compared to the rest of the banana, would represent the fraction of art history during which anyone gave a screaming hairy fuck if the art perfectly reproduced “real life.” In fact, when I’m in my cups and feeling argumentative, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear myself state, unequivocally, that to the extent to which a work of art is different from real life, only to that extent is it art at all.
So give yourself a gift, sassyfras, and educate yourself on the history of visual storytelling: you have some real treats in store.
I have a series of short scripts that I’m working on from time to time. I plan to link them together into a feature-length film. I could shoot it on DV with excellent colour. But I’m planning to shoot it in B&W on 16mm film. Why B&W? Because it’s the ‘look’ I’m after. I could save a lot of money by shooting on DV, but it’s not what I’m after. I like the subtle grain of a slow stock. And my ‘vision’ (if you’ll excuse the conceit) is that it should be B&W.
A black and white photograph is not simply a color photograph that’s been “converted” to black and white.
The aesthetic approaches of black and white photography and color photography are VASTLY, vastly different. I would imagine that it would be about the rarest thing in the world to find an image that’s equally powerful in both approaches.
In Sylvia Plath’s more-or-less autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, the protagonist mentions that she hates color movies because they always seem to have a bunch of scenes that exist just to show off the garish colors – a girl in a red dress standing in front of a yellow corn field under a blue sky. I wouldn’t take Plath as being typical of her generation, but I imagine there must have been a fair number of people who were not all that impressed by color in and of itself.
Are you talking about color photos that have been digitally changed to black and white? If so, they often look bad because people don’t know what they’re doing. People who are used to taking color photos don’t think about how it will look in black and white (that red flower might turn out the same shade of gray as the green leaves), and then they go and convert the color photo to grayscale without doing anything to adjust the contrast. The result is usually ugly, murky photos.
Any photographer will tell you that black & white photography contains subtleties that are lost in color photography. That’s why so much art photography is still done in black & white today.
[sarcasm]People always embrace the latest technology immediately. Look at the widespread acceptance of Hi Def TV broadcast in 16:9 and the way folks in trailer parks have been flocking to get their digital converter boxes. And thank goodness DVDs died a swift death prior to the BluRay hegemony. [/sarcasm]
