Monochromatic For the People

Monochromatic For the People

An examination of cinematic reality through the lens of Noir & Chrome

by Hunter Bush

Movies used to be black and white (and silent to boot, can ya believe it!) until it stopped being cost-prohibitive to shoot them in color, at which time color films began to overtake them in frequency until b&w seemed largely like a thing of the past, foreign and/or independent films. Occasionally something like Schindler's List would come along and remind everyone about the undiluted power of b&w cinema, which essentially brings us to the subject of this article: the semi-recent semi-trend of converting films to black & white to better appreciate the language of film.

Illustration by Mary Tomcavage - Instagram @marytom_makes   

Specifically Mad Max: Fury Road: Black & Chrome directed by George Miller and Logan: Noir directed by James Mangold. Fury Road proper was released in summer 2015, with Black & Chrome getting a limited theatrical run in December the following year and was included on a later physical release. Logan was released in March of 2017 and, aside from a few specialty screenings, the Noir version was only included on the physical release. There was a feeling that perhaps this was a way to entice film lovers to continue buying physical media at time when it looked like digital would overtake physical the way color had done to b&w (I would argue that an true lover of film would intrinsically have a love and appreciation for its preservation via home libraries, but that's for another column entirely). I was curious what benefits - or detriments - the b&w viewing experience brought to these films.

By way of context, I love both of these films in their colorized versions, though I think Fury Road is a better wholesale movie because it requires zero foreknowledge of the concepts while Logan is benefitted from a teensy bit of familiarity. It has to do with their settings and the requisite worldbuilding needed to support them. Fury Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting either at some unspecified point in the future or an alternate present, depending on how strictly you adhere to the established timeline. Inhabitants survive in a makeshift desert community centered around a self-styled god-king who controls access to water. His war boys (soldiers) drive war rigs (vehicles modified for battle) in search of provisions including blood bags (humans not tainted by radiation, used to blood dope the war boys) and guzzoline (gasoline). Point is: it only resembles our world in the vaguest ways while the world of Logan seems fairly contemporary and recognizable. It's easier then, for George Miller to pull off batshit crazy moments and visuals in Fury Road, like when our heroes' war rig is attacked by pole cats (basically Cirque du Soleil performers on huge counterweighted poles that look like ship's masts, able to quickly attack from above and be whisked away before you know what hit you) while driving at top speed through the desert wasteland. Since so little of the movie is based in a recognizable reality, Miller can get away with quite a lot before things start to feel "unrealistic". In Logan, James Mangold takes the familiar X-Men character and fits him quite easily into the neo-noir / contemporary western subgenres by carefully doling out moments of unreality in a very familiar setting. In the opening scene, Logan (Hugh Jackman) fights off a gang of carjackers using the retractable metal claws planted in his body and his mutant healing ability. Though these are both decidedly unreal, they play onscreen like the kind of tough guy archetype common to both noir & westerns: poor slob who brought a knife to a gunfight but luckily can take a beating.

Watching their respective b&w alternate versions, there were some differences in how certain scenes played. We'll call these The Micro. For instance: The violence in the opening scene of Logan: Noir felt more brutal than in its colorized version. Something about the monochrome made the blood droplets flying through the air more noticeable while making Logan's claws going through a hoodlum's face less distinct, meaning my brain had to fill in the visual gaps with educated guesswork and, in much the same way that a horror movie builds tension by not showing the monster right away or Se7en turns your stomach by not showing you everything the killer has done, the things that flashed through my mind in that fraction of a second were more graphic than anything onscreen. Your mileage may vary, but those moments helped ground the flick in its noir trappings to me. They gave the violence weight and established early on how much the pain in this movie actually hurts. Counter to that, there were some moments in Fury Road where the monochrome actually takes some of the weight away, like when the vehicle chase that makes up the majority of the movie heads through a gargantuan dust storm. In the full color version, each lightning strike bleaches all the (heavily saturated) color from the world, making it seem like the storm itself is of a strength and severity (and danger) unknowable in our world. In the Black & Chrome edition, the lightning just seems ...very bright. Sure the storm is still so large it swallows the horizon but we've seen that before in such notable films as ...Hurricane Heist.

For every Micro, there must be a Macro. The thing that struck me most about the b&w versions was the sense of unreality. In Logan, it turned much of the movie into a perpetual twilight and brought to mind the disorientation people feel in areas affected by the midnight sun. That otherworldliness actually benefits Logan in my estimation, further divorcing it from a world we recognize, allowing it to take on and fully inhabit a world that, because it was so well grounded in the first place, still feels cohesive. Adding that sort of unreality to the world of Fury Road, rather than enhancing it, snips the few strings still tethering it to a recognizable world and in effect removes much of the stakes at any given moment. In much the same way that watching CGI superheroes fight fails to hold my interest, removing the color from Fury Road also removed a key component that I didn't even realize was there: their goals. The underlying message of Fury Road is about freedom, but also a desire to abandon the technology that led to the destruction of the world as we knew it. The characters want to escape the desperate clutch that passes for civilization in their dieselpunk world to find "the Green Place" which offers not just salvation and sanctuary but access to nature, which barely exists at the Citadel they are escaping from and, in the case of water, is cruelly rationed.

In a classic example of You Don't Know What You've Got 'Til It's Gone, until watching the Black & Chrome edition, I never noticed how subtly but constantly this goal was underlined. Easily 80% of the film is one long vehicle chase / combat sequence in the endless desert wasteland, which in the colorized version is a heavily saturated, Cheetos-esque orange landscape under a sky that's just the most soothing, visually thirst-quenching blue. George Miller said in an interview that the choice to over-saturate Fury Road was to distinguish itself from other post apocalyptic movies, the majority of which choose to de-saturate as a way of adding grit and conveying exhaustion. In doing so, he allows the horizon to be a reminder of what they're after. That sky, being that color, in contrast with the vivid orange landscape rather than white or grey or some other cliché hue from the "dystopian" color palette subconsciously reminds you of water > nature > life > freedom. Taking that away robs the final product of some of its heart.

That the simple act of swapping color for black & white can change my read on a film speaks to the magic of movies. Of course it doesn't hurt that both of these films were made by directors (and cinematographers) with strong sensibilities and style who were paying attention to the lighting the entire time, meaning that translating the films into b&w doesn't diminish the visual impact, it just serves up a stronger element of chiaroscuro - the dramatic quality of light and shadow in an image. Mangold was always shooting for stylish high contrast lighting with Logan, so shifting to b&w isn't as severe a change as is to the regularly over-saturated world of Fury Road. There are pluses and minuses to both versions of both movies, and that too is magical and amazing.

When I was a kid, there was almost no more surefire way to put me to sleep than to put on a black and white movie in a dark room. I'm no ophthalmologist, but I think there was something about how my rods and cones interpreted the high contrast imagery that made my eyes tired and then, just like that, out like a light. If I could travel back in time to find kiddo me drowsing on my grandmother's couch in northeast Philly through any number of classics, I'd sigh vexedly at my sleeping younger form and whisper "You are a boorish moppet and have no appreciation for cinema".

That's a joke, but clearly I had a lot to learn about movies.