In this millennium, the black and white film is as rare as a likeable Tom Cruise starrer. I thought it would have a revival with Schindler’s List sweeping the Oscars in 1994. That didn't happen. Is it because the B&W style doesn’t attract huge audiences?
Maybe Schindler’s made a modest profit. But the colorless ones that came before it, in the age of Kodachrome, didn’t. Raging Bull (1980), which most critics hail as the best film of the 80s, was one. Young Frankenstein (1974), the Mel Brooks comedy classic, is almost forgotten. Viewers seem to not find excitement in the absence of color, and thus, avoid it more vehemently than subtitled films.
I personally like watching B&W. It takes a lot more skill to film scenes in B&W. It also has a storybook quality because it’s not all too real. Would Hitchcock’s Psycho have been as chilling if it were in color? The blood in the shower was more dramatic in black. Gus Van Sant, whose Psycho shot-by-shot remake bombed, would agree.
Last year, the American Society of Cinematographers gave its top prize to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009). The film also won the Palme d’Or in the same year when Brillante Mendoza scooped the Best Director’s prize for Kinatay. It’s shot entirely in black and white, and it’s the only one of its kind I’ve seen in this century.
You could grab most of the frames and post them on your wall. The images are luminous. But the story is about the ugliness that’s latent in men, even kids. Beneath the beauty of a small German village that’s about to experience the horrors of World War I, is hatred against societal norms, the ways of puritanical elders that choose to see things in black and white.
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