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.