I don’t know how tongue in check you’re being here, but there was someone else on these board who believed that 90% of American features from the 1930s were gone now (actually, 94% exist), so it’s not impossible that you are thinking along the same lines for 1960s movies. For the record, virtually all American features from the 1960s exist today — more than 99%.
This is incorrect is almost every way.
Normal color film uses a “layered” approach to capturing colors. There is no spatial trade-off necessary.
Technicolor used three strips of B&W film running simultaneously, each being exposed through a different color filter. Once again, no spatial tradeoff.
Digital sensors (using the standard Bayer pattern) do have R-G-B sites on a single layer, but most of the Luminance information can be obtained from each sensor regardless of it’s color. Foveon sensors use the Layered approach.
Exist, I’d be willing to believe, on film or digital in archives somewhere. But are readily available at your local Blockbuster or Netflix? Not unless things have changed a lot since I worked there (BBV). There were lots of 60’s movies we just couldn’t get, no matter how much you want to spend.
Thanks for the Movies on TV education, everyone!
The same projectors are used for color and black and white movies.
Roughly twice as many American movies from the 1960s are available for television than are available on home video.
Sin City kinda sorta fits in there as well, where the colour is rare and used for dramatic effect.
Anyway, what hurt Sky Captain more; the sepia-tone or the lousy writing?
Believe it or not, the Lon Chaney version of The Phantom of the Opera, a silent film, ALSO had one particular scene in color. This was done in 1925.
Here’s at least one point. Color is about spectacle. When you view a color image, your mind mainly picks up the colors. A black-and-white image is about form and shade. You’re emphasizing something completely different. It’s no different than choosing tools for other media, whether drawing, painting, sculpture. Is the statue of David "less real"c than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel because the latter is in color? No, it’s not. Neither of them are meant to be “real,” but the details are chosen by the artist to have a certain impact on the viewer. David is all about form. The Sistine isn’t.
I disagree totally. Three-strip Technicolor (1932-1955) was capable of giving extremely accurate color rendition.
Gone With the Wind (1939)
Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
Restoring Gone With the Wind
Any “exaggeration” was not from the color process, it was a conscious choice of the director, art director, cinematographer, and costume designer of what they put in front of the camera.
An American in Paris (1951).
Edison was hand painting color on his films back in 1895.
Technicolor was first tried in 1916, and refined so that by 1922 it was used in a feature. Once the three-strip process was developed in the early 30s, it was ready, though the Depression made studios reluctant to spend the extra money.
Maybe he’s thinking of 2-strip Technicolor.
But you have to admit, that 3-strip was usually employed in films that were highly stylized to begin with, so “accuracy” in a “realistic” sense often has little to do with it. But when you got a blue in Technicolor, it was BLUE. The colors in Eastman could hardly compare in contrast and vibrancy (and the fact that Eastman fades & Technicolor won’t doesn’t help much either).
I disagree strongly. Once again, no one ever considered equating, much less conflating, as the OP does, films and real life. People went to movies to *escape *real life. Audience members before the revolution in film style that happened in Italy after WWII, in France in the 1960s, and whose influence finally began to take hold in American films in the 70s, would never have lifted an eyebrow at the “garish and exaggerated” colors of “Golden Age Hollywood” Technicolor. You don’t eat out to get Hamburger Helper; in postwar America you didn’t go to the movies for kitchen-sink realism.
It’s my understanding that any film that had the Technicolor trademark in its opening credits had a Technicolor advisor on set at all times, making sure that color wasn’t color; it was Technicolor. In other words, that exaggerated garishness you refer to was 113% intentional; its “inaccuracy” was not a failure of verisimilitude, it was exactly what everyone involved, filmmakers and filmgoers alike, wanted to see on the screen.
It should be pointed out, perhaps, that “sensation” was *all *it was. It’s a terrible movie, and the only reason to see it–then or now–was the novelty of the few lines of synchronized dialog.
Absolutely not. It was not seen as an “absence” of anything.
It helps to try to imagine the mindset of the day: no one saw a silent film as a Will Ferrell movie with the sound turned off; it wasn’t *missing *anything. The historical context, obviously, is what came before, not after; they weren’t looking backward at an earlier technology, as many people in this thread are doing. Rather, in the context of the day, film–yes, even silent film–was seen as a great leap forward, not a half-step somewhere on the way to Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. Think of what films were called: moving pictures. If your paradigm included no such phenomenon–a picture was by definition something static; still and flat. But suddenly a photograph could move, could tell stories! Think of the possibilities! No one looked at this astonishing miracle of visual storytelling and thought, “Hmm, get back to me when they can talk.”
Silent film was an incredible sensation, a worldwide phenomenon, an artistic medium that utterly perfected the art of visual storytelling: some of the greatest masterpieces of human creation are silent films. And none of them *lacked *sound, any more than Monet’s Waterlilies lacks a soundtrack or *Guernica *lacks dialog.
Don’t blame Technicolor, Inc. or the Technicolor advisor. Natalie Kalmus, the color advisor on all Technicolor features made 1934–1949, fought the studios to discourage garish use of color, and to encourage moderation. She wrote: “A super-abundance of color is unnatural, and has a most unpleasant effect not only upon the eye itself, but upon the mind as well.” She recommended “the judicious use of neutrals” as a “foil for color” in order to lend “power and interest to the touches of color in a scene.”
This so riled producer David O. Selznick during the production of Gone With the Wind in 1939, that he wrote in a studio memo,
Tracing Lissener’s quote back whence it came, I took it to mean that there exists a great deal of color stock footage from WWII.
Hmm, to each his own. I’ve seen The Jazz Singer several times, and I enjoyed it, the whole sentimental, sock-it-home thing.
Doesn’t The Jazz Singer feature the main actor in black-face?
I know, but how much from D-Day itself?
That’s funny, I actually prefer movies in black & white. It’s easier for me to suspend belief. I also prefer movies where all the actors/actresses have died long ago.