LOS ANGELES, United States — Black-and-white is the hot new trend in
Hollywood, where directors of
Oscars-contending films such as “Belfast” and
“The Tragedy of Macbeth” are embracing monochrome for its storytelling power.
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Kenneth Branagh’s childhood drama and Joel Coen’s
Shakespeare adaptation are among a batch of recent acclaimed movies shot either
entirely or mainly without color, as filmmakers seek to tap into the medium’s
inherent sense of historical authenticity and humanizing intimacy.
“Color allows you brilliantly to describe people,
but black-and-white allows you to feel people,” Branagh said of his deeply
personal drama about violence in 1960s Northern Ireland, which is up for seven
Oscars on Sunday including best picture.
While a “sweeping landscape of a desert or a
mountain range” can be made epic by color, “an epic dimension of
black-and-white photography, on a massive screen, is the human face.”
The choice “makes for a poetic dimension to things
that can otherwise seem a little banal,” he told AFP.
Meanwhile, “Tragedy of Macbeth” cinematographer
Bruno Delbonnel told The New York Times the effect was “meant to bring
theatricality” and give the film a timeless quality. Its star
Denzel Washington
is in the running for best actor.
Monochrome movies have of course continued to exist
since they fell out of mainstream favor during the 1950s, when cheaper color
technology enabled more directors to emulate the bright tones that had dazzled
audiences years earlier in “The Wizard of Oz” and “Gone with the Wind.”
In 2012, “The Artist” — a film that was not just
black-and-white but also silent -- won best picture at the Oscars, while the
likes of “Roma” and “Mank” have won Oscars for best cinematography more
recently.
But this year’s colorless contingent has grown.
“We all got together ... it was a DGA [Directors
Guild of America] meeting,” joked Mike Mills, whose family drama “C’mon C’mon”
starring Joaquin Phoenix also comes in grayscale, and was nominated at this
month’s BAFTAs.
“I love black-and-white. I’m super pretentious. I
watch a lot of black-and-white films -- they’re my heroes’ films, right? I just
adore them,” Mills told AFP.
In “Passing” -- whose star
Ruth Negga has been
nominated for a batch of awards, winning at the Film Independent Spirit Awards
earlier this month -- the format is used to tackle the issue of racism.
Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut explores “racial
passing,” as two childhood friends of mixed racial heritage have a chance
encounter in 1920s New York while both are pretending to be white.
“It wasn’t just a stylistic choice. I felt that it
was a conceptual choice — to make a film about colorism ... that drains the
color out of it,” Hall said at its Sundance film festival premiere.
“We look at faces, and then we immediately put them
into these categorizations ... the categorizations become important, but they
are also in some senses absurd.
“Nobody is actually black-and-white. Film isn’t
black-and-white. It’s gray.”
‘Crazy abstraction’
So, why are directors
getting on the black-and-white bandwagon now? Is it simply a coincidence?
Experts have pointed to broader trends such as the
rise of Instagram and social media, that may explain why audiences — which in
recent times may have seen black-and-white films as “old-fashioned” or “boring”
— are now more willing to give it a go.
“Most Americans have become their own filmmakers and
photographers with the ability to slap a filter onto an image and render it in
grayscale or sepia or heightened color,” wrote
Alissa Wilkinson, who covers
film and culture for Vox.
“Getting used to seeing color-adjusted images,
including black-and-white videos and photos, could make us associate them with the
past less. Instead of being bound by history and time, we start to see them as
simply aesthetic choices.”
The idea that black-and-white is a choice to
deliberately look less real than the color-filled world we actually live in has
been embraced by several of this year’s efforts.
“Black-and-white is such a crazy abstraction, so
does a great sort of magic trick on the viewer,” said Mills. “’I’m not in the
real world anymore. I’m a little kicked off into a story, into art.’”
And there was a more specific reason for his choice
in “C’mon C’mon,” a movie about an absent uncle -- played by Phoenix -- bonding
with his precocious nephew.
“I have this really cute kid — black-and-white
helped just take the cute sting off of it.”
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