I
was thinking about reading/watching films last night. For all the txts
I've read, they helped me v little in terms of understanding images.
The
concepts and abstractions in an image, the ideas contained in them, yes, mos def, what's symbolized in some of them can be made
clearer when one understands/absorbs them first through the written
word (maybe).
These past few days, after watching a couple of films in B&W, I've wondered why I've such trouble with it, and decided it
isn't to do with its Idea.
It is just harder for me to apprehend,
understand and see, really, what B&W images depict in fim. It's a physical
constraint. Objects lose their immediately recognizable quality to me,
in B&W, and I have to make a lot of effort to see what is there,
even. I find B&W works v v well for photos and film when the object
depicted is a human being; faces, bodies, both. No problem there, at
all.
But when it is a scene in a room or outdoors, with a lot of "things"
(tables, walls, trees, chairs, bottes...shelves; dresses, decor; even celestial bodies-- is it the moon? the sun?) not only do the things
themselves become more difficult for me to identify, but what really
requires my attn (and thus removes it from the narrative, from the art,
from the dialogue- it 'kidnaps' my attn) is depth and perspective.
I lose most of my ability to see it at a glance.
There are scenes I
can barely "read" because of this. "Are they indoors? Outdoors? Is that a
table or paint on wall? Chair or sculpture? Is it the sky or the sea?
Grass or sand? Are they standing on something? Are there stairs? Is it
daytime? Night?" These details suck me out of the film proper and back into myself, my thoughts about the material world of objects, and the consciousness of my own thoughts about the scene/object(s) over which I'm puzzling.
The mysterious pact between viewer
and actor/director - a tacit understanding that that is
fiction but it nevertheless manages to make the viewer "forget it" for
the duration of the work (when it's good) - is interrupted, switched off.
There are moments where B&W is better than colour.
For instance, the one scene in the beginning of Stardust Memories
by Woody Allen where ppl finally leave his flat, and he walks from the
door toward the bookcase/bookshelf... on the big wall to the left,
there's a blown-up photo of an Asian man with a gun pointed at his
temple. Here, I was truly impressed by the use and effect of B&W.
It highlighted the thing that needed to be highlighted, but also I
suspect that photo is already in B&W anyway; if it is, this is a fun thought to me: the beauty of a B&W photo is made invisible by B&W.
What I dislike when watching a film is spending time thinking about what objects are and what
colour they might be, and miss what the characters are saying/doing, and
trying to figure out where they are, or if they're standing in the
background or the foreground, etc etc. And I like B&W so much! the
colours themselves, their juxtaposition! I like it in animals, clothes,
photographs, paintings, drawings, and I'd love few things better than a
B&W Kaleidoscope.
Up till colour in film was possible, there was no alternative. Now there is, and I'd very much like to know what the justifications are for using it instead of colour, in commercial films. I consider all films released in cinema commercial. Films made to be shown only in museums are not commercial at inception, and usually do not tell a story in the sense of fictional narrative, so if theyre B&W it doesn't remove from the purpose of the film in the first place.
Provocatively, the thought I'm left with is that contemporary commercial directors who use B&W in a film where the form doesn't require it for one reason or another, end up making anti-modern (AKA post-modern) films, rejecting stylistic and formal considerations, instead of adding to them.
