The Impact of Black and White

My background is more in graphic design than it is in film. As an Interactive Media Studies major, I tend to see all the "creative fields" as a sort of soup with various shared elements floating around in different areas. In film there is music, writing, and every frame is its own photograph. Thus, sometimes I look at film through the lens of a writer, other times through that of a photographer, composer, etc.

But rarely do I apply my graphic design knowledge to film, or if I do, it's not in a very conscious way. However, after my last post about She's Gotta Have It, I found myself pondering what it is exactly that interests me so much about black and white film, and I realized that my interest is mostly informed by my interest in color theory in general.

To give a simplified explanation for some background knowledge, there are 3 main components in any given color.

Hue - what "color on the rainbow" it is  (red to violet and back around again)

Saturation - how "colorful" the color is (on a scale from gray/no color to "neon" colors)

Brightness - how light or dark the color is (on a scale from black to white)

Brightness is pretty intuitive to us. We can tell when a shot is bright or dark, and what elements within a shot are the bright or dark elements. Hue is similar. We can naturally tell our oranges apart from our reds and yellows, and especially from our greens and blues.

Saturation, on the other hand, is not as intuitive or often-thought about. We tend to notice really high saturation levels, but otherwise it goes pretty unnoticed. To tie back to She's Gotta Have It, I think one of the reasons the color scene stood out so much is that it didn't just have color, it was filled to the brim with highly saturated colors. This has a powerful effect, especially in contrast to black and white.

In fact, "black and white" films only have access to one component: brightness. There is no hue to be seen in black and white, because the saturation levels of a black and white film are essentially fixed at zero.

With that being said, I can get to the main point I wanted to get at within this blog post: black and white can be so impactful because it leaves more to be interpreted visually. As I just explained, black and white films only have about 1/3rd of the visual information that a color film would have, and this makes it so that we can decide what color dress or what color car we're looking at. We sometimes even assign colors in our heads, even if we can't actually see those colors. For example, in Breathless, I pictured Patricia's t-shirt as white, but when I saw a color photo of it being yellow, it felt wrong. What this tells me is that black and white films take on their own identity, not matching the color of the real physical world they were filmed in, but rather matching the color the viewer feels they would see.

She's Gotta Have It

She's Gotta Have It was another one of those movies that I had put in my "that's a classic I actually DO want to watch" vault in my head that just so happened to pop up on Netflix for me at the right time. I've heard of Spike Lee and his work seems to be held in great regard, and I'm always into first films, which this is his. He wrote, directed, and edited this movie, which is the level of auteur I hope I can reach one day. I was even more impressed when I realized that he edited this on his own during the film days, meaning he was clipping the film himself. In an age with easy lossless editing, it's so easy to forget that it hasn't always been this easy.

The movie was not what I really expected it to be. I mean this in general but primarily I was surprised by its style and aesthetic. I thought it was going to be a bright, Hollywood-set type '80s movie (I had no idea how low-budget the movie was going in). Maybe you can blame the graphic design too, because I based a lot of my expectations off of the poster in the thumbnail. I mean come on, they're in color on the poster!

But instead of giving me arm-warmer, bright neon '80s vibes, it evoked feelings of film noir, with a camera framing not unlike some of what we've seen from French New Wave and a score (by Spike Lee's father no less!) that is impressively true to the classic film style of scores that it imitates. I also didn't know that this film would be entirely in black-and-white with the exception of a single scene. This was a pleasant surprise, since watching things like Raging Bull and Breathless within the past year have made me very attracted to the "feel" that black and white gives off. I found myself literally just watching the film grain cast upon people's skin and the walls just jitter around. I loved it! I feel like something about that soft look gives a film a certain sense of mystique, and this film was oozing with it.

I was also quite struck by that surprise color scene that happens smack dab in the middle of the film. I believe it was meant to symbolize how bright and lovely Jamie's gesture to Nola was, and it does a pretty good job at doing that for me. It also reminds the viewer that despite the look of the film, we actually are in the '80s after all.

I may have already mentioned this on the blog before, but I tend to like character-driven films and this is another good example. Every personality in the entire movie is strong. This is crucial given that this film has a cast of really only 4-6 important characters. I'm also into drama-comedies (it's what I tend to write when I write scripts) and especially ones focused on social dynamics and relationships like this one are always so compelling to me, and help to improve and inspire my own work.

I don't want to even try to talk about the plot, because I know I'll get sucked down a rabbit hole, but the movie does a great job of keeping the audience invested in what's going on. This was a movie that never made me want to take a break from it, which I honestly can't say about your average movie. It also didn't occur to me in 2022 that a movie like this would be significant in another sense in 1986 when it came out: it is now viewed as being racially and gender/sexually-progressive for its mostly positive and naturalistic portrayal of a black woman who holds a great deal of power within the film. Overall, this has made me want to branch out into a bunch of different directions: I want to watch more Spike Lee movies, more "first" movies, more black-and-white movies, and more drama-comedies.