Is this "anti-B&W" thing really true?

Color, it's a fad

 

This is the proof that not all B&W is hard to see

 

I work with a 33 year old man who said he has never watched a BW film, and never intends to. He also said he has never read a book "all the way through".

However, he cannot go five minutes without fondling his iphone.

 

Very sad you have to work with this person and spend any moment of you life in association with him. What a lazy sod!!

 

To me; there's nothing better than watching a well-restored black and white movie with a nice, clear picture.

 

That sounds like most of my co-workers as well!

I seriously would not be the least bit suprised if I found out that I was the only person in my entire workplace (300+ people) who has ever seen a Kurosawa epic, or a Chaplin film, or a Marx Bros. comedy... etc..... I feel like I'm surrounded at my job by a bunch of ignorant morons who won't watch anything that isn't modern mainstream Hollywood crap.

Yesterday I re-visited an old B&W favourite, Chaplin's City Lights... what a fantastic piece of cinema. It's a better film than most of the recent Hollywood films that I've seen, all put together.

 

When I turn on the t.v., the first channel I go to is Turner Classic Movies (TCM). They just don't make movies like that anymore. I really don't care if a movie is black & white. Takes a better director to make a black & white film.

 

There is a whole generation of people who probably would not "rate" a movie if it did not have computer generated graphics, sex and violence, and low brow humor. That's "entertainment" now. Forget anything with a "good message", or something that makes you "think" a little.

 

This is so right on !...I met a young woman (28 years old) the other day and we started talking about music and I mentioned The Cars and she said she never heard of them,that she listens to Linkin Park. That's cool ,but like I was telling my wife when I was 28 I knew and heard of a lot of different artists and films that were created waaaaaay before my birth into this world.
I listened to Buddy Holly even though he died a few years before I was born. I knew who Louis Armstrong was and I had seen Casablanca well before my 28th B-Day.

We had very limited technology in the early 70's unlike today and yet we were hip
to a lot more of culture that came before us.
Today you have this whole internet thing and people are on Facebook telling their friends they are having a bad day.....I don't get it.

 

I think it was more to save money than anything else. B&W films cost less than half as much for film stock and processing as color. There are plenty of neo-film noir films shot in color, and they work fine. (Look at Blade Runner as one example.)

Rachael brings up a good point. There's a weird tendency to use desaturation in contemporary films these days, to the point where some of them are almost B&W. But then you get a director like Tony Scott, who tend to go to the other extreme and punch the saturation up to 11 (like for the current video release Unstoppable). I have no problem with directors doing this for period pieces, like O Brother Where Art Thou, or a movie I worked on in the 1990s, Robert Altman's Kansas City (both set in the Depression era).

The reality is that B&W is much, much harder to light, because instead of using color to create a sense of depth between the foreground and background, you have to do it with light and shadow. I've lit B&W projects before, and it's very, very hard. I'd compare it to mixing sound for mono -- it's much, much harder to get all the details out in a mono mix than it is in stereo (as a general rule).

I think young audiences don't want to watch B&W movies for the same reason that they don't want to watch old color movies: because the films are old. It's very hard to force a young audience to widen their horizons and consider that maybe there were great movies made decades before they were born.

I have absolutely no problem with it. Hell, I just watched Casablanca again (probably for the 100th time) a few weeks ago, and I don't think I was ever even aware that it wasn't in color. All I see is the characters, the set, and I let the story wash over me. I might occasionally lean out of the experience and say, "wow, what a great shot!", but other than that, it's all about the characters and story over everything else, especially the technical details.

 

I agree with your points but some directors could have shot in color but chose B&W because they felt it had the more real feeling like the news reels. Yes, cost had to do with it as well but again there was also some artistic choice.

 

I think most of my friends (mid 20s) mainly have problems with old B/W movies, nobody minds B/W in movies like Sin City or Schindler's List... The reasons for that are probably that some people simply find old movies dated, unless they're the big classics like Casablanca, Dr.Strangelove, It's a Wonderful Life etc. The other reason is that we've always been exposed to bad TV prints of old movies; I remember when one of my friends saw a beautiful DVD version of The Bridge on the River Kwai, his jaw dropped and he couldn't believe it was a '50s movie...

But what is really ridiculous to me is how a lot of people only want to watch the newest movies, they will rent some new direct-to-video crap rather than some masterpiece they've missed a couple of years ago. It's like movies from 2007. or 2008. are already dated to them, I really can't understand the psychology behind that...

 

I remember growing up in the '50s and '60s and being young and stupid, and not having a desire to watch anything that theTV Guide listed as 1949 or before. There was a bit of a stigma attached to anything made before 1950. I was born in '51, but '50 sounded OK to me.

1949 or earlier - just seemed ancient, not of my time, and therefore not of interest. Now in the '50s, the color or black & whiteness of anything had nothing to do with it. Basically, everything on TV was in black & white, and that was just normal. We had almost no clue that those Bugs Bunny cartoons were really in color unless we went to a movie theatre and they happened to run one before a feature. Color was really nice and special, but we knew how to appreciate black & white just as well.

So my point here, I think, is that it's not so much black & white that turns younger people off (heck, it seems like 75% of the modern music videos I see are in black & white), I think it's just that persepective of time that anything that happened before MY birth is irrelevent to me.

Black & white, when it comes to movies and TV shows, tends to represent something REALLY old nowadays, so it's a certain clue that a young person will use to determine that they're not interested. In my era, seeing that a movie was silent was a big clue that it wasn't for me.

But I think as we age and realize that history IS actually pretty interesting after all, we tend to seek out the best of those earlier eras that we weren't interested in before.

I couldn't have been bothered while growing up looking at CITIZEN KANE, CASABLANCA, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, or HIGH NOON. Today, I count these films as among my most favored.

Harry

 

I'm 29 and love black and white movies. Some of my favorite films are pre-1960.

But I was a film student and have shot things in 16mm black and white, so I guess I'm not your average joe public.

 

I agree with several people here that it's probably more of an unwillingness to delve into the culture before your own lifetime, than the fact that a film is B&W. I've never had that problem. In fact, I went through a noir craze a few years ago. It was as much because the classic noir cycle gives an unintentional window into the American psyche of the 1940s and 1950s, as for the visual style. We grow up assuming that the era was squeaky clean and happy based upon most Hollywood fare, but when viewing noirs we get a subversive view of the alienation that permeated the postwar era in the USA.

I just wish my wife was interested. She's my age (52) but refuses to watch anything older than about 10 years ago. This is partly due to the racism-by-omission that was apparent in most films until about the 1960s. It bothers me a bit, too, but I'm able to get past it.

I do love B&W films, but I also love classic Technicolor films too. The fact that a film is B&W has no bearing upon my interest in it.

Doug

 

That was my video mastering on that title. We worked our butts off just to get it that acceptable -- the negatives are not in good shape on this movie.

The new Blu-ray was done by Scott Ostrowsky over at Sony Colorworks, and I'm sure it's a lot better than what we did 10-12 years ago.

The B&W titles can look good, but they need some grain management and sharpening to look their best. I think most of the nitrate negatives are gone (or at least, won't hold up to modern scanning), so all we can hope for is that the B&W safety finegrain prints look OK. I personally think B&W can look really beautiful, but it saddens me to think that there's millions of people who will just quickly dismiss it as being old and dated, and not watch it long enough for the characters and plot to sink in.

My experience is similar to Harry's above: I didn't go out of my way to see movies made before my birth for a long time, certainly not until I was in college. Only then did I start to realize how many great movies were made in the 1930s and 1940s. (I'm still not a silent movie fan, though, except for a handful of the classics.)

 

Good job you did, here's a comparison I recently saw of the PAL DVD with the new Blu-ray, and yes, it is a nice improvement but some parts still look damaged:
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews27/bridge_on_the_river_kwai.htm

BTW, while browsing through that site I stumbled upon this review of the sensational looking Blu-ray of How the West Was Won. I don't have a BD player yet, but this alone could convince me to get one (be sure to enlarge the screencaps):
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film2/DVDReviews40/how_the_west_was_won_blu-ray.htm

 

Why is it young folk ( and some old folk ' )have no love for b&w films ?

 

For me, it's not about the color palette (or lack there of), but that times and culture have changed too much from those depicted in the really old films, to make them espscially enjoyable (with some exceptions).

 

Do you feel the same way about Dickens? Beethoven? Michaelangelo?

 

These aren't at all comparable to movies, but I'll respond anyhow.

Dickens - never cared for his works at all.
Beethoven - like some of his tunes.
Michaelangelo - a brilliant man with an embarrassment of talents.

I'm surprised you didn't include Shakespeare (for the record, not a big fan).

 

I hate that old crap

 

A good sign of hope is that my partner Joyce is finally appreciating older b&w films. It took over a decade but she now is more open to watching them.

 

Someday all these people will experience either fade to black, or sudden extinction.