Back to Kansas, Toto

by David Benjamin

“Color is just not real enough … Perhaps it is for television, where your audience is sitting in a room with the lights on. But in a dark theater, confronted by that huge screen, I feel that it’s just not convincing.” ―Carol Reed

MADISON, Wis.—On the eighteenth anniversary of D-Day, in the era of Technicolor, movie houses screened Darryl F. Zanuck’s epic production, The Longest Day, in black and white
How come?

Not much later, in the era of Living Color, Peter Bogdanovich won the hearts and minds of film critics everywhere by filming The Last Picture Show in B&W and then reprising this heresy in Paper Moon.

I thought about these and other post-Technicolor B&W flicks—Hud (directed by Martin Ritt, photographed by James Wong Howe), Breathless (Jean-Luc Godard), Young Frankenstein (Mel Brooks)—while watching Odd Man Out, Carol Reed’s tragedy set in Northern Ireland. Reed’s cinematographer, Robert Krasker, manipulated light and shadow in the dark streets of Belfast, in a style that was stark, vivid and captivating.

Watching Odd Man Out and then Reed’s classic, The Third Man, evoked a moment in my checkered past. One morning in 1974, starting work for a weekly newspaper, I was handed a Fifties-era twin-lens reflex camera and told I had just become a photojournalist. Who, me?

This was six years before USA Today began publishing photos in color, forcing its competitors to catch up. For impecunious weeklies like mine, the color revolution was still in the future, if it ever came. The paper’s technology deficit relegated my photography, felicitously, to B&W—with a film stock called Tri-X.

As I ventured out to shoot the endless flow of grip-and-grins that are the grist of local rags, I fell in love with Tri-X, the most flexible and forgiving film ever devised (by Kodak in 1940). Until my publisher splurged on a new Pentax K-1000 SLR (which also used Tri-X), I operated without a light meter, guessing my exposures and trusting Tri-X to mitigate my mistakes. With Tri-X, even the worst guesses can be rescued in the darkroom.

It was in the darkroom where I learned the truth of what Ansel Adams once said: “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” By adjusting a negative’s exposure in an enlarger—under that spooky red light—the photographer heightens or subdues contrasts among blacks, whites and grays in the finished photo. Watching the image materialize in its D-76 bath, the photographer begins to study the edges between shades and learns how the clarity of black-on-white, or gray-on-white, or silver-on-slate makes an image deeper or more shallow, softer or harder.

After a lot of muddy, ill-defined snapshots, I learned to see my vistas drained of color, to perceive the scene before my eyes stripped to a two-dimensional monochrome. The more I shot, the better I understood that contrasts created by color—say a bright red dress against a vivid green background—can come out in B&W as vague and indistinct. To create a depth of field and a third dimension in black and white, I had to look behind my subject and around, for the source of my light. I couldn’t move the background or the sun, so I had to move the camera.

Eventually, like most shutterbugs, I transitioned—reluctantly—from Tri-X to color film and now to a digital camera. But now, in the digital darkroom that came with my computer, I can turn color photos to B&W. This effect works especially well in street scenes of old buildings—in Paris, for example. With a click of my mouse, I can age a storefront a hundred years.

You see now why Bogdanovich reverted to B&W in The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon—because they were set in past times. Memories come back to mind more easily in black and white. Why else would George Roy Hill have processed the opening scenes of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in sepia?

By 1940, filmmakers had the option of filming in color, but the transition was gradual. Black and white was cheaper than the complicated cameras, film and processes necessary to making a colorful movie. Some directors resisted, though, because they preferred aesthetic elements inherent in B&W that are unattainable in color. Black and white cinematography is an art form unto itself, as different from filming in color as painting in oils versus lost-wax sculpture.

A handful of directors enforced standards in B&W cinematography with a passion that separated them from their peers. Carol Reed was one. In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles put his cinematographer, Gregg Toland, through challenging paces. Toland was a master—possibly the originator in film—of chiaroscuro, bright light slanting into darkness. Welles lavished this technique on Citizen Kane, along with other lighting effects lifted from his theater days. In doing so, he challenged Toland to invent solutions unprecedented in Hollywood.

Welles made indirect lighting fashionable. He was comfortable exposing only half a face or a silhouetted figure in a doorway. The half-light he threw onto Marlene Dietrich in Touch of Evil was both evasive and evocative. Welles once explained, “I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves.”

The Welles/Toland partnership, matching a brilliant, risk-taking director with a patient, meticulous photographer, was a rare phenomenon in the grind-it-out culture of the film industry for most of the twentieth century. Although I grew up watching B&W movies, I was oblivious to issues like quality of contrast and image clarity. My newspaper days as a black-and white photographer altered my perceptions. Back at the movies, I discovered those directors who were as hard on their darkroom guys as they were of their actors, camera operators and editors. I found some of the most startling examples of this discipline in movies not very famous. For example, in Out of the Past, a noir B-movie with Robert Mitchum, the use of shadow—its clarity, depth and contrast—becomes a narrative force.

That film’s director, Jacques Tourneur, had contracts at MGM and RKO, generating a lot of low-budget potboilers. But when he teamed with cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca—as his did in Out of the Past and with the creepy-wonderful Cat People—he made movies speak a whole different language.

Of course, the godfather of B&W, for most movie mavens, is John Ford. Like Billy Wilder in Double Indemnity, Ford did his best work in the dark. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the shootout between James Stewart and Lee Marvin on the night streets of Shinbone is one of the most striking B&W sequences in the history of film. Unlike Tourneur and Carol Reed, who had their pet cinematographers, Ford had none—possibly because he was hard to work with.

I’ve wondered if Ford was entirely happy about the arrival of Technicolor, and I suspect he wasn’t. I have no proof that Ford preferred old-school, but I see it suggested in The Searchers. This was a color film, probably dictated so by Warner Bros. But Ford returned in crucial scenes to motifs that evoke his B&W movies. Ford, also a reluctant convert to VistaVision, often shot scenes through doorways, from a dark interior to a bright background outside. This method not only shrank the wide screen to a square. It washed out exterior color and turned the focal figure (usually John Wayne), into a dark and enigmatic monochrome.

Brooding silhouettes are incompatible with Roy G. Biv.

Ford understood, as did Charlie Chaplin, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges, etc., that we see the world in color, ordinarily. Black and white, the language of photography for its first century, is extraordinary. To learn that tongue and to speak it as fluently as John Ford or James Wong Howe, is to enter a seemingly simpler milieu that’s beautifully complicated after all—like Dorothy going back to Kansas.