you watch old movies from the black and white era, it looks great
even more modern ones look good - schindler's list, man who wasn't there
then you watch twin peaks s3 or lighthouse and something's not right
i'd say it was old heads dying off, loss of technical knowledge - but lynch is old, did great black and white in the 70's, meanwhile black and white scenes in tarantino's latest all look right
is it digital film? is it my TV?
>i'd say it was old heads dying off, loss of technical knowledge - but lynch is old, did great black and white in the 70's, meanwhile black and white scenes in tarantino's latest all look right
I'm going to assume based off the factors you've listed and taking them as accurate, it has to do with digital.
funny to think how much time people spent placing all the little set details, making up the actors, processing the film, etc when I'm just going to watch it on a lossy stream with big jpeg squares over most of it
They didn't make it for you
ty, this guy understands
low contrast, that's what i was getting at
Cinematography and proper use of lighting play a big role. Watch the man who wasn't there, a great modern black and white film
yes, that's why i think loss of technical knowledge plays a part
lighthouse is made by (relatively) young people, which might explain why it didn't pop visually
but as i said, what's lynch's excuse in recent twin peaks?
i'll add there was that climactic game of thrones episode set at night where much of it looked shit - not black and white but still
>what's lynch's excuse in recent twin peaks?
1. Lynch doesn't shoot his movies 2. Lynch likes the digital look
>Lynch doesn't shoot his movies
come on, he doesn't hold the camera but he's making executive decisions regarding the look of the film
he's got eyes, don't he? (maybe he doesn't anymore, maybe his eyes are bad)
>Lynch likes the digital look
i guess this is the question: can you make a b/w digital movie that looks as good as ye olde b/w films?
>can you make a b/w digital movie that looks as good as ye olde b/w films?
sin city comes to mind, but that actually was a bit low contrast with grey faces
>2. Lynch likes the digital look
Lynch like shooting a movie for $120k like Inland Empire is what it is. No need for a big crew. Just borrow an apartment, have a lighting man, a camera man, a sound man, and have the costumes makeup and continuity all set up. Very lightweight crew. I can work well or not. I think it's a lot like oil painting. You have these pigments suspended in oil and they're the texture of melting butter on the panel or canvas. You're going to have to blend the colors finely for sfumato effects but....if you overwork the paint, fuss with it too much the colors lose their freshness, their brightness.
Same thing with digital and especially 3D compositors. Fiddle too much with the original digital video captures in the editing room and you get a muddy dull mess. The temptation to tinker endlessly becomes irresistible especially if you've got a bunch of artists in there each with his or her own ego and vision for the film. Too many cooks spoil the broth...
Black and White noir was heavily inspired by German Expressionism.
and so the light play a big part in that. it's more of a style not exactly the lose of technic.
compare Hollywood black and white to the European black and white and you'll know what I mean.
Say the French new wave. They shot stuff outside of the studio and so the lighting are all natural, compare that to Hollywood stuff where the lighting is carefully place to create strong contrast and shadow
Renoir's Beauty and the Beast.
they shot that in studio, I should've pick better example.
a style that depends on technique though
and a style that modern black and white throwbacks are explicitly trying to recreate - especially eggers, he even used old-timey aspect ratios but he couldn't get old-timey lighting, makeup, contrast? somethng's not right here
i've seen one of them french movies and i remember it looking pretty good
it was the one where he's killed a policeman and his girlfriend's american
based anon understands, cinema is a visual medium, the look of the film matters more than anything
aviator and gangs of ny do have something wrong with them, i thought maybe digital colour correction? it all looks a bit cgi-ish
as for twin peaks i was of course specifically talking about the black and white scenes but even the colour scenes don't look as good
i think maybe lynch got sloppy in his old age and/or was just cashing in - case in point, dougie: pretty sure dougie is just his old ronnie rocket screenplay shoehorned into the twin peaks universe because no-one would give him funding for it
>a style that depends on technique though
I don't get what is this suppose to mean. modern black and white aren't trying to recreate the old hollywood era of black and white.
For example The Lighthouse. I don't know how can you sit here and pretend that it wasn't a good black and white movie and something wasn't right. when it fact it look really good. compare it to like Frances Ha where it feel like regular shot movie with black and white filter.
and The Lighthouse aren't really trying to recreate the hollywood black and white, the movie was obviously influenced by Ingmar Bergman movies.
this scene is great. you got the contrast between the shadow but yet the lighting is believable.
more example of good modern black and white movie
>Ida (2013)
>Cold War (2018) same dir.
>Hard to be a God (2013)
black and white movies aren't getting worse. the technic is still there, but people just choose not to use them.
some director are just lazy and simply want to put black and white filter over the film because it's le classic.
>some director are just lazy and simply want to put black and white filter over the film because it's le classic
or maybe they don't realise that a black and white filter doesn't look the same - they dont know they need to light and dress the scenes differently - because they don't have the filmmaking/technical knowhow
but as i said, david lynch does have that knowhow, and yet he queefed out all this low-contrast digital shit 5 years ago, so idk
>>a style that depends on technique though
>I don't get what is this suppose to mean.
it's a stylistic choice to film a movie in black and white, but the style can only be done properly with the proper level of technical skill, which is not necessarily available anymore
>modern black and white aren't trying to recreate the old hollywood era of black and white.
that's exactly what they're trying to do: black and white in the modern era is done solely to ape old movies
nothing wrong with that as long as it looks good
which it doesn't, in the lighthouse
your scene's a good example, it's too dark, i can't even see their fricking faces half the time, and even when they do step into the light, their faces look grey rather than white
i suspect he's given them smudgy make-up because he thinks "dirty face" looks more realistic, or maybe thinks these guys should be tanned
you say the lighting is believable, i think you're onto exactly what the problem is there: too much emphasis on "natural" and "real" these days - i wouldn't be surprised if eggers tried to film it with only "natural" light, and that would maybe account for it
just my guess anyway
They are CGI that's the problem. It's compositing. What the frick are you looking at now when you watch a movie? It's starts with Woody Allen's Zelig and now it's just out of control with the Foundry's Nuke. You can't even say it's about cinematography anymore. It's compositing by a technical director who just sits around writing new nodes in C to string together.
Twin Peaks season 3 is so problematic for me. It reaches pinnacles of utter greatness and then it descends into total Jerry Lewis unfunny clowning with Dougie and the Casino hag. The episodes Lynch did himself though are really powerful.
I'm glad you like Cinema Noir though. I think that directors should be forced to film nothing but black and white for the first 10 years of their career before they're allowed to touch color. Even Kubrick had difficulty using color. 2001 was excellent color work but I found Clockwork Orange's color sense to be not right. Hitchwiener did some superb color work after an English career using black and white.
Fellini was the master of color and black and white.
Scorcese showed himself to be the master of Cinema noir in Raging Bull. He really pulls off some magnificent handling of different film stocks with oily inky blacks in the 1940's sequences and then he switches over to these really fine silvery film stocks for the 1950's.
I disliked the Aviator and the Gangs of New York however on a lot of other grounds. The Aviator was needlessly cartoonish at times with its use of color.
old DOPs had to be very careful with light ratios and composition because the barely had tools to give them feedback
modern DOP don't even care on how to light and frame to guide the audience's attention
yes thank you
but david lynch did it right in the 1970s (with no money) and got it wrong in 2017 (with $100 million dollars)
did he just forget how to do it? did he stop caring? did he never know, and always rely on some DP/lighting guy who's not around anymore? or is it something about digital film that makes it hard to shoot in b/w?
Mank had some of the worst modern B&W cinematography I've seen and it won an oscar for it
Maybe it looked much better in HDR, but in SDR it was awful, you cant even see the faces in some shots
meanwhile check some random movie from the 50s/60s and every B&W shot looks great
RIP Geoff, what a guy
I've learned more about lightning from his videos than from any other ever
haha amazing
Costume colors also look different in black and white.
yes, different colors have different values of saturation
they teach you this in Watercolor Painting 101 btw
I think its because people dont shoot b/w anymore, they shoot in color and correct later. For b/w contrast and lighting are super important, and you cant have for example a green and a red jacket at the smae darkness because they will look the same. If youre not used to it, youll think "in color it looks great, lets just take the chroma out" and then it looks bland.
It's digital
It's dps not knowing how to light for b&w
It's dps not even knowing how to light for film anymore
It's getting lazy because 'you can do it in post'
Nobody gives a shit about lighting anymore
Digital is the death of the medium
Even Mank looked like shit compared to CK/Toland and Fincher is the one guy who can do digital better than most
up to a point Lord Copper.
The advantage is WYSIWYG in digital. Instant real time awareness of the light you're capturing. Imagine shooting scenes that are costing 10's of thousands of $$$ per second and you're not going to know what you have till the film gets processed in the lab then sent for viewing in teh rushes. If you don't have some very talented experienced people that know everything about lenses and light metering and film stock you could have a lot of garbage film on the cutting room floor.
That kind of education doesn't come cheaply and the cost is that you get a lot of technicians making the decisions...safe decisions but not necessarily artistic ones. For every great memorable movie even from the golden era there's a mountain of boring repetitious crap.
David went to E. Europe to video Inland Empire scenes about the street walker...and he got all this nasty sodium vapor street lamp footage...
and by nasty I mean very effective..
>black and white film is superior to digital trash
wow who would have guessed
It's mainly an issue of technical skill and lighting. A lot of the older black and white films had their lighting down pat, their make up and costume also was picked to be complimentary to the medium that they worked with.
The Lighthouse is the only good example of black and white from the past 50 years so the question is weird.
https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/blog-post/robert-eggers-the-lighthouse
>“Two primary ideas emerged,” he says. “The first was the unsurpassed tonal range and ‘liquid’ look of a special class of developer (pyrogallol) that had its heyday at the turn of the century. The other was the hard tonal rendition of orthochromatic film, which exaggerates skin texture, atmospheric haze and brightens skies. This is because orthochromatic film can’t ‘see’ red light: ultraviolet and blue light are rendered quite light, whilst orange and red colors, such as skintones, are rendered darker. I realised that this would give a specific B&W tonal signature that would transport the viewer right to our period setting. Although the film developer idea didn’t work out this time, we were able to accomplish a very good orthochromatic look through unique filtration.”
>During prep, Blaschke started by testing digital footage and color negative film (KODAK VISION3 500T Color Negative Film 5219 ), both desaturated in post, alongside EASTMAN DOUBLE-X 5222 panchromatic negative. Introduced in 1959, DOUBLE-X Film 5222 was used to create the moody intensity on many Hollywood features, such as Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980, DP Michael Chapman ASC) and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993, DP Janusz Kaminski ASC).
>“The results confirmed my hunch, that nothing approached the palette we were after quite like B&W negative film,” says Blaschke. “Rob and I saw that the blottier, murkier qualities of DOUBLE-X better-suited our misty, salty, visually-distressed film.”
One director who really loves black and white and then just brings in slight tints of color for dramatic effects at key points in the story is Lars Von Trier. Europa or Zentropa (contentious naming) really exalted himself in my eyes with this masterful work. He captures the gloom of defeated Germany and imposes this unrelenting severity that even approaches at time the supreme B&W mastery of Carol Reed's The Third Man.
The scene with the slave labor pulling the rail car out of the shed is amazing.
CK is Citizen Kane and Toland is Gregg Toland
i thought you were talking about louis ck's black and white movie that he made
was that any good?
better watch Woody Allen's Manhattan
another great b/w film
kek, yes see it's not just DP and lighting that's gotten worse
who's this guy?
all this is reminding me of 24-96 hi-def audio recording fiasco
define "modern era" - the man who wasn't there looks good, schindler's list looks god, pi looks good, the artist looks good
even clerks looks good
even the few brief b/w scenes in once upon a time in hollywood look good
we can disagree but to me the lighthouse did not live up to those standards
Getting back to what I was saying about fussing with the original prints too much be it in the lab or in teh compositing computer with Nuke, or DaVinci, you don't want to destroy the freshness of your work. I think on a technical level Hitchwiener understood this better than anyone like a painter. He spent more time planning what he would do in the greatest detail so that when he finally came to shooting film or doing editing etc, he already had everything, the camera postions, the lenses the film stock the exact lighting levels, everything, pre planned and on paper so that there couldn't be any messing around with it to muddy his desired results. That took incredible discipline and thoughful calculations which he and Alma had turned into a delicious hedonistic pleasure in itself, just sitting around in their luxury suite in the Universal Studios lot, having drinks and delcious gourmet dinners prepared by Alma his wife with actors and actresses, technicians, studio execs etc, artists, lighting people, writers etc. They'd spend a whole year and a half just talking about what they should do. When Alma was paralyzed by stroke, a big chunk of that meticulous planning disappeared from his movies and the color calculations were gone never to return to his last films which were by comparison to his heyday bleak and ugly affairs.
I was going to say Mulholland Drive was shot on video but..
>>The movie Mulholland Dr., released in 2001 and directed by David Lynch, was shot on film using Panavision Panaflex Platinum Camera and Panavision Primo Primes Spherical Lenses with Peter Deming as cinematographer and editing by Mary Sweeney
Mulholland drive is profoundly beautiful film.
If anybody is going to get great things out of DV then it's Lynch. The last episode of TP #3 was undeniably beautifully filmed, at times very moving emotionally like when Agent Cooper leaves Laura Dern in the motel to go on his final voyage and there's these trees waving in the wind behind him. I think you have to take a medium for what it is and work with it for good and ill.
I think really the problem with so much bad film or bad DV work is that while many people coming out of film schools now are educated in all the tech tricks and gadgetry, they're as ignorant as naked savages living in huts decorated with their cones of feces. They know nothing of great art, great literature, great music. Their brains are full of pop culture, comic book aesthetics and that's it. The stuff they produce is technologically a marvel and spiritually garbage. They don't have a clue.
>kids these days
but that's exactly my point: it's *technically* weak, not merely artistically weak
it's shit on all levels
mulholland dr is interesting because so many of the scenes are obviously done in TV aspect ratio and awkwardly cut to fit film
everybody's face takes up more of the screen than it normally would... except in those scenes he shot later when he knew it was going to the big screen
still works
thanks guy
so fincher's another guy who has apparently become less proficient in b/w filming
now, is that because it's been 30 years and he forgot (or the old c**ts who knew how had died)?
is it because he was queefing out some cheap netflix crap and dgaf?
or is it because digital simply cannot look good in b/w? is there any good digital b/w?
re: the batman, it's interesting - because either way the problem we're discussing ought to be manifesting itself in colour films too
wiki says
>le batman used digital capture on Arri Alexa LF cameras, with custom ALFA anamorphic lenses
idk wat means, is that just plain old dv?
i just watched seven again btw, beautiful movie
Not everything looks good black and white, you need to plan for that, such as greens, they come up shit in black and white.
Mank is a recent David Fincher movie about the making of Citizen Kane (CK), which was shot by Greg Toland (also the DP for some John Ford classics etc and often considered one of the best b&w dp). It consciously tries to homage some old Hollywood b&w film techniques and stylistic stuff from CK but it only ends up looking inferior by comparison, when Fincher is one of the most perfectionist, technically proficient and artistically accomplished directors in big budget Hollywood. Arguably it was a pretty suicidal bet to chase direct visual comparisons with the most revered film in history, and probably the peak of celluloid b&w cinematography, while working with digital which is terrible for b&w, poor contrasts etc. But even the key lights placement were sub-par.
Compare Mank to even his old Madonna vids in b&w, or hell even just de saturate your copy of Seven with your player settings, and they look so much crisper and the lighting is so much more precise and lovely. Seven is one of those great color movies that's very much lit like it could be b&w noir with gorgeous use of shadows and depth of field, deep contrasts, etc, which is why it's so lame that an actual b&w movie would be lit like a cheap digital Netflix color show, with only a few superficial throwbacks to the Toland style.
Talking about Seven, I remember an anon made collage posted here that directly compared similar shots between Seven and The Batman, desaturated into b&w with a basic filter. You could still see that Seven had deep blacks and pristine whites, meanwhile Batman was just murky grey all over. I wish I could find it again.
I'm really grateful to you guys for this thread. I've thought a fair bit about this subject for some time now. I love cinema but I've lost interest in it precisely because of the concerns raised by you all.
It's reassuring that others have thought a lot about it too and it's rewarding to read the product of those judicious considerations.
>do they not teach this stuff at film school anymore?
The problem is that photography schools have always (ALWAYS) been filled with geargays.
Just look at the threads on Cinemaphile, nobody has the slightest idea about the basics of composition or tonal distribution.
This is more a problem now than 60 years ago, because digital tools have given much more control to photographers, so their lack of basic art theory becomes more evident.
tl;dr study the old masters
I've met a lot of them at Vancouver Siggraph, senior students from Vancouver Film School.
Hipsterism is cancer.
so the artform becomes the province of nerds who like to play with toys rather than artists for whom the tools are a means to an end?
many such cases!
thanks guy, glad there could be help
one day someone who's thought about this will get a camera and some money and start a cinema renaissance
or maybe just a DIY anime
excellent find, thank you!
this weights the argument in favour of declining/disappearing technical skills, rather than something unique to DV - right?
i mean, soderbergh used the magic of computers to make this happen, so it's digitised - it's effectively DV... or maybe it isn't...
maybe we have three options:
1. getting b/w to look good in either film or dv is possible as long as you do it right - and most people don't do it right anymore
2. getting b/w to look good is easier on film than in digital, therefore digital ruins b/w
3. it's not that digital ruins b/w, it's that *filming* in digital ruins b/w: if you've filmed it (properly) with film, you can transfer to digital and preserve the quality of the image - therefore there is something in digital cameras (rather than computers per se) that crappens images
is this completely mental? i dont know much about cameras
I have never liked the black and white of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It lacks the richness earlier Ford films like My Darling Clementine or Grapes of Wrath, or indeed any given well-photographed black and white film such as The Sweet Smell of Success.
What was the problem -- was it the film stock, the lighting?
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was a cheaper production, it never could have get the same quality than those other films. Besides Toland was dead by then.
Clothier did some great job in later John Ford films though, like Cheyenne Autumn.
contrast lighting
with no color, you have to focus on your light values, which is tantamount to color values when painting a picture
Soderbergh famously once posted a b&w edit of Raiders of the lost ark on his blog, urging film school nerds to replicate this little experiment with other films to more carefully observe how they're lit and see how they'd hold up when compared with old Hollywood levels. It's the kind of neat little thing that makes you appreciate a film like Raiders even more than just a fun adventure spectacle, it's genuine masterful craft. To me it was eye opening, once I saw this little webm, it's such a small scene but makes such a strong difference, I can't help but notice this in anything I watch now. There are more examples on flavorwire's vimeo channel.
https://extension765.com/blogs/soderblog/raiders
https://www.flavorwire.com/181969/10-modern-movies-that-are-better-in-black-and-white
>https://www.flavorwire.com/181969/10-modern-movies-that-are-better-in-black-and-white
how can we watch any film in black and white with programs that play the videos?
what settings and preferences?
decrease saturation
It's digital and the fact that no one knows how to light for black and white anymore. They just use the same lighting they would for color, but turn on the b&w filter. You need to play with shadows and lighting to make b&w look great
all alexas must be destroyed
>I'm the guy who posted the Lighthouse paragraphs and the reason I did so was because i was in the same situation as you.
I thought modern B&W looks disgusting, I too saw old film and wondered why they looked good. But then one day The Lighthouse came along and blew me away. It was the first B&W film of the modern era to look good, so I searched out answers as to why.
We both agree B&W used to look good and now doesn't, but for some reason you think The Lighthouse is a part of that ugly trend, when it's a trend breaker and looks beautiful as a result.
You just have personal preferences for high contrast it seems.
does anyone have the batman vs seven pic it's driving me nuts I can't find it again
While Charles Lawton shot Lady From Shanghai it has Orson Welles hand firmly on it. The San Francisco Chinese opera theater in particular is a tremendous piece of cinematography
Does it have to do with led lighting indoors maybe
interdasting, this could be a factor
but i guess that comes back to a lack of technical skill: an old timey hollywood lighting guy would be double-checking whether the new-fangled lightbulbs made a difference
Toland shots
>Toland shots
I love this one, action/reaction in the same shot
>who's this guy?
Geoff Boyle, famous DOP from commercials. He killed himself last year, after a painful cancer.
His mailing list is still active btw
https://vimeo.com/geoffboyle
>loss of technical knowledge
Just like animation. We can't go back.
a subject for another sad thread
don't despair fellas
many lost arts have been revived, and many skills can be developed anew
the old guys figured all this stuff out from nothing
>is it digital film?
The use of digital instead of film, yes
alright gentleman, i have to go now
This has been enlightening, although I don't think we've answered the central question as to why: is it the decline in technical skill among filmmakers (lighting, costume, etc), or is it simply that digital video does not represent black and white as well? It looks like it's both, but I'm still left wondering whether it's possible that a well-lit, well-shot black-and-white image, photographed digitally, could stand up in comparison to high-quality black-and-white film.
The examples of Twin Peaks and Mank suggest not, since both directors have done good work early in their careers, shooting with black-and-white film - but perhaps it's just that, now that they're old, they've lost their touch, or stopped caring.
We must push for a revival of the cinematic arts!
It's simple, to expose film well back in the day, you needed light, a A LOT of it. So the parts that were not lit were heckin DARK. This meant the contrasts were extreme and cinematography revolved around that contrast.
Nowadays cameras don't even need lights to capture the scene well. It's cheaper and faster to not use big lights, everything in the dark is visible. The lights they do use are a fraction of the power they used to be. So the contrast between the lit and not lit is much smaller.
A lot of it can be attributed to loss of skill, particularly in lighting. There simply isn't any Henri Alekans left in the world (picrel).
Kaleman who shot a lot of Bela Tarr's stuff is pretty good though. I think The Turin Horse is very good, but looks nothing like old timey B&W.
Also loss of film stock. No Agfa, Fuji or DuPont around. Most cinematographers fresh out school I feel like go for a Tourneur-style B&W with punchy contrast. Is this what they believe the audience WANTS or is this the only way they know how to shoot? Kodak Double-X is all that there's really left, even though ORWO has B&W stock, it's not used in the industry.
Concerning digital film photography, I feel like digital B&W is its own aesthetic. Digital shouldn't emulate film. If you want a film look, shoot on film. Mank's cinematography is horrendous in many aspects, but adding fake grain to emulate film should be criminal.
bmup
the new macbeth had a great b&w imho
inb4 Black folk lmao