tiistai 15. toukokuuta 2012

Ramifications on black and white + color

This perhaps is a topic I might have a slight fetish on: the introduction of color into a black & white film (or vice versa) for a brief moment. Having spoken about the topic in many a forum, here are a few observations that never have found their way into any other context (hey, waddya think this blog is about if not for emptying my mental trash bin?).

A nice starter. The practically forgotten 1958 B-horror The Return of Dracula is black & white, featuring a terribly bland Drac, and only one quick unexpected cheering up via the film form. Now tell me if you've heard this one before: it's a monochromo movie, and then one scene has blood appearing Simply Red, while the rest of the film's in black & white. Well, back when this was made that cliche didn't exist, Simply due to censorship regulations; if you ever saw blood at all, it certainly was not in color. But here ya have it, ladies and gentlemen: near the end, a staking of female vampire has a close-up of crimson in color.


Intellectually you're aware that what you're witnessing is something horrendous, but at the same time you can't ignore the fact that you're enjoying it. Yeah, it's that sequence from A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 5, where a comic book fan (see, I didn't use the word "geek" - naaah, I'm beyond that) reading a B & W (indie?) comic book gets sucked inside one, where the teen (in color) fights a B & W Freddy in crummily painted monochromatic sets. This scene ends up as the highlight in this rather tedious outing. Here's a quote from that classic of books, Official Splatter Film Guide Vol 2:
"The plot's a bore, sure, and Freddy and his 'sharp wit' take a back seat this time, but director Hopkins and his FX folks pour on the psychosexual imagery and surrealism with such Buñuelian abandon that the film almost becomes an experimental art movie"

                                                                            Sergei Eisenstein used color in the second part of his uncompleted Ivan the Terrible trilogy. Shot on wildly saturated Agfacolor film stock captured from the Nazis, the film equates color with the banquet room, where the lavish but sinister party finale takes place. The otherwordly colors are exactly what you would have excepted the palette of this highly artificial film to be, judging from its preceding B & W moments. The interplay between the banquet room in color and the monochromatic outside world is quite fantastic.


Going towards his doom, Vladimir halts at the room's exit and is washed over by the color green. This cuts to the corridor outside the room, in black & white. Then, subversively for its time, the film cuts back to the banquet room - again in color: Vladimir comes back to his senses, and the green color disappears, and he continues his way to his death. One film scholar described this as a color equivalent to James Joyce-like stream-of-consciousness.

Did I see just see that, or was it something in my eye?                 Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound possesses not only juicy-but-oh-so-brief dream images designed by Salvador Dalí, but also some flair in terms of its cinematic language in the finale, where the main baddie (aaawww, Hollywood...) turns the gun on himself in a startling POV shot, and pulls the trigger. While the gun fires, the screen turn into a comic book-like red explosion for a few frames... so try not to blink, gov! Like it is the case with older films with very limited color footage, most prints are totally monochromatic (like how many times have you seen Eisenstein's Potemkin with the flag being red as it should?), and such is also the case with this Hitchcock film. Even some DVD releases omit the almost subliminal red flash.

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