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Director’s Riff on Film Noir
Why would we make a black and white version of our carefully color-corrected movie? It’s because we love b&w movies. If you’re over 18 you may have heard the term Film Noir by now. For those uninformed, sometimes called Cinema Noir, it’s a style of filmmaking made popular in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, recognizable through the use of black and white film, shot with high contrast lighting. This style makes maximum use of the creative possibilities of manipulating the contrast between light and shadows. In French, the word ‘Noir’ means ‘Black’. The term not only refers to the look of the film (dark and brooding) but also to the subject mater. These films usually concerned dark and brooding stories, crime drama, spy intrigue, mystery and suspense. And to most film buffs, these films look beautiful. However the film studios of that era were not motivated by aesthetics. Economics dictated, because b&w films were so much cheaper to make than color. This forced the directors and cinematographers to stretch the limitations of the medium and helped turn b&w cinematography into a specialized art form of its own. Many of our most cherished and classic films where shot Noir style. Modern filmmakers use b&w strictly for aesthetic reasons in films like ‘Sin City’ and “Schindler’s List”. If you’re at all interested in the subject and want a list of these films available for viewing, just type “Film Noir” into Google and you’ll find a ton of information.
Black and white cinematography can be thought of in terms of contrast.
Low contrast b&w images incorporate black, and white, and all shades of gray in between (our use of the term ‘low contrast’ is relative in that contrast can be made too low, as when the blacks start to degrade and the image looks washed out) . Low contrast is useful for showing detail in a scene. A nice, sharp, low contrast image uses all the shades of gray to fill in the detail that delineate spatial references to the eyes and brain, making it easy to recognize objects, without color. All these stark and subtle shades of gray can be quite beautiful to behold in a properly lit and composed scene.
On the other hand, high contrast B&W images reduce the occurrence of gray, and in the extreme, eliminate it all together leaving nothing but pure black and white shapes. Experts in film and video use the purity of blacks and whites in an image as one of the measures of its quality, even with color film and video. With high contrast, mood trumps detail. Strong hard lighting, moving silhouettes and stark shadows can make for a powerful statement in the language of film. The better b&w films incorporate both high and low contrast scenes to tell their stories.
Because our movie, Revelation II involves mystery and suspense and because we lit it Noir style, our movie naturally lends itself to a b&w interpretation. In our b&w conversion we have used four different levels of contrast adjustment. See if you can notice the changes. You can vote on your preference here.
Jobie Smith
Director, Editor
