Film and Crayons
This is a strange sort of question, but does anyone understand the "colorization" movement? The process of taking black and white films and arbitrarily colorizing them?
Ted Turner had a hankering to do just such a thing in the mid-eighties when he started buying up movies like crazy to air on his "superstations", TNT and TBS. For a while, he'd just have his team go in and make color where there was none on classic films. Finally, directors like Orson Welles and Frank Capra raised such a stink about it that he stopped and the issue seemed put to rest.
But Sony didn't get the memo somehow. They've been putting out dvds for the last few years, starting with Three Stooges shorts, in colorized form. Then they went back and colorized black and white tv shows, and in defiance of the ghost of Capra himself, released It's A Wonderful Life in color.
Lately the new trand is to drop old Ray Harryhausen movies like 20 Million Miles to Earth, It Came from Beneath the Sea, and Earth vs the Flying Saucers in newly colorized forms. Legend Films has been offering public domain films like Carnival of Souls, Reefer Madness, and Night of the Living Dead in similar fashion. To be fair, many of these offer both black and white and colored versions, but the whole process puzzles me.
I understand there's a stigma against black and white films. I've seen it, and I've heard people say they'd never watch a movie that wasn't in color because it's "old" and "boring". Getting around this sort of ridiculous blanket statement is difficult enough, but I've never heard anyone who wouldn't watch a movie in black and white suddenly change their mind because it was artificially colored.
If you've never seen a colorized film, please do check one of the above titles out. The first thing you'll notice is just how off-kilter it looks. Skin tones never look right, the sky always looks a little too bright, and primary colors stick out like a sore thumb. It's not easy to mask the greyscale on black and white films, so the artists often overcompensate, creating a reality that's too removed from "normal" color films. Click here to check out some images that have been "colorized" and see what I mean.
Maybe it's just me being confused, but nothing about the process ever made sense. It isn't merely that the colorizing makes a film more artificial than it already would be, but it doesn't seem to change the stigma of an "old" film in the minds of people predisposed to avoid them. It's A Wonderful Life and A Miracle on 34th Street still air every Christmas and they're always in black and white. The color or lack thereof doesn't really impact the quality of the movie.
Personally I couldn't imagine watching Carnival of Souls or Night of the Living Dead in color. A big part of why they work is the stark black and white photography, and as you can see in the photos linked above. At the same time, I don't really have a problem with tinting silent films, particularly if that's what the director had in mind. Since a particular system of color tints correlated to what time of day it was in film (blue being night, for example) it can be helpful. Nosferatu doesn't make a whole lot of sense when you see Count Orlock in broad daylight after all.
Recently I talked about Frank Darabont's The Mist, which is offered both in black and white and in color. It was shot in color, and to be honest, sometimes one works, and sometimes the other is better. The black and white does a great job of making interior scenes more claustrophobic. Dodgier cgi effects are less noticeable on a grey scale, but the primary effect (the mist) doesn't play at all in the beginning of the movie anymore. It's just a window with opaque white outside. All of the nuance of shooting mist in color is lost. Later in the film things kind of even out, but I have to say that it's a trade off.
Are you in favor of colorizing films? Does it interest you, or does the heightened artificiality provide a new way to watch movies? Inquiring minds await your thoughts.
***EDIT***
Future Cap'n here with a few additional thoughts.
After some discussion with others, it becomes clear that keeping black and white films in black and white is actually beneficial if for no other reason than it removes the distraction. The reason The Mist becomes more claustrophobic is because you can't allow your eyes to wander and look at items in the grocery store. Everything is a shade of gray, so you are, in effect, forced to see what the director is presenting to you.
I talked recently with a professor of mine who first saw David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly in black and white by accident. He had no idea the film was supposed to be in color but the end result was that he found the movie more disturbing. Unable to look away or be distracted by the makeup nuances, his eyes were forced to focus on what Cronenberg intended audiences to see.
The Cap'n is sorely tempted to buy a black and white tv set (on the cheap, of course) so that I can run similar tests on other films. It would also be fun just to have a black and white television in the house for people to look at curiously. Using the settings on color tvs to achieve a similar effect just doesn't seen to work.
No comments:
Post a Comment