James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

There were only isolated experiments with muted color in this periodamong them, William H. Clothier's Cinemascope and Eastmancolor photography for Track of the Cat (1954), a western set in the north woods, where nearly everything except the flesh tones of the actors and Robert Mitchum's red jacket was depicted in shades of black and white. At another extreme, elaborate black-and-white lighting and deep-focus compositions were put to effective use in two sumptuously colored pictures about women in distress: Ross Hunter's Midnight Lace (1960) and Portrait in Black (1960), both photographed by Russell Metty, who previously worked with Orson Welles and Douglas Sirk. But Metty's work was becoming an exception to the rule in an industry whose product was, at least temporarily, growing brighter and brighter. By this time, the old masters of black and white were nearing retirement or were finding new careers in television. Karl Freund, for example, invented multiple-camera techniques for I Love Lucy, and Nicholas Musuraca became the chief photographer for the Jack Benny Show.

Eventually, the techniques of what John Alton called "mystery lighting" fell into disusea phenomenon that was hastened by portable cameras and sound equipment, but most of all by color television. Don Seigel's remake of The Killers (1964), originally intended as a TV movie, is pervaded with noirlike sadism and double dealing but is photographed in bandbox colors; significantly, its bloody conclusion takes place on a sunlit, suburban lawn. A similar brightness can be seen in two of the most expensively produced private-eye movies of the 1960s: Harper (1966, based on Ross MacDonald's Moving Target) and Marlow (1968, based on Raymond Chandler's Little Sister). Whatever their incidental virtues, neither of these films was able to provide a visual correlative for the shadowy, decadent romanticism of the 1940s. Even in the 1970s, color films dealing with noir subjects were sometimes flatly and brightly lit, using few points of illumination and relying on color alone to create separation; The Laughing Policeman (1974), for example, is an extremely gritty police procedural about the mean streets of San Francisco, but it contains relatively few dark areas or cast shadows.

The early 1960s were years of crisis for old-style mystery photography, but they were also the last years in which black and white could be shown in the United States without seeming like a parody or a deliberate allusion to the past. The Beatles made their film debut in black and white, and because of the huge commercial success of Hitchcock's Psycho, horror films in particular seemed to resist a complete move toward color. Notice also that the period was a golden age for U.S. art theaters. Although the major European directors eventually became interested in experimental uses of color, they were at first identified with a kind of visual austerity. The most influential importsIngmar Bergman's Seventh Seal (1957), Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura (1960), Federico Fellini's 81/2 (1963), Joseph Losey's Servant (1963), and the early work of the French New Wavewere shot in black and white. Raoul Coutard's early work for Godard and Truffaut was especially noteworthy because of its lack of studioish gloss and its freewheeling use of available light. A few European thrillerssuch as René Clément's Purple Noon (1960) and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960)offered vibrant and expressive color images, but they attracted comparatively little critical attention in the United States, in part because they looked too much like mainstream commercial products. Change became evident only in the second half of the decade, especially in two "art" thrillers by European directors, both of which used color schemes reminiscent of abstract-expressionist painting: Antonioni's Blowup (1966), and John Boorman's Point Blank (1967).

Even today, black and white is sometimes associated with intellectual abstraction and the kind of artistic integrity that rejects big budgetsdespite the fact that it has become the most expensive film stock a director can use. Perhaps one reason why its aura of art and authenticity survives is that a generation of moviegoers born in the 1950s and 1960s have a nostalgic memory of classic Hollywood. Not surprisingly, some of the most respected American films of the past twenty-five years involve a deliberate regression to black and white. Peter Bogdanovich's Last Picture Show (1971), photographed by Robert Surtees, evokes the dirt-poor life of a small Texas town in the 1950s, at a time when the town's black-and-white movie culture is slowly dying. Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979), photographed by Gordon Willis, pays enraptured tribute to sophisticated New York's black-and-white taste in nearly everything. Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), photographed by Michael Chapman, unifies contemporary camera technology with the great tradition of black-and-white movies about boxing. And Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), photographed by Janusz Kaminsky, terrifyingly recalls the gray skies and black horrors of the concentration-camp news-reels, disrupting the colorless atmosphere only once, with a breathtaking use of red.

Meanwhile, prompted by a generation of largely New York-based directors and photographers who reached maturity in the 1970s, Hollywood has learned that color films about murder can be as somber and shadowy in their own way as anything from the 1940s. 26New Yorker Gordon Willis, who photographed Klute (1971) and parts 1 and 2 of The Godfather (1972 and 1974), became famous as the "Prince of Darkness" because of his use of color with extremely low levels of illumination. His two Godfather films often show the actors as silhouettes or as dim presences hidden in gloom, and the interior scenes tend to be monochromatic, suffused with an amber, incandescent glow that established a widespread fashion. Another photographer in the same tradition is Willis's former camera operator, Michael Chapman, who recalls that before he began work on Taxi Driver, he and Martin Scorsese looked at a variety of old movies, including "New York movies, film noir, Sweet Smell of Success, things like that." The completed film contains especially dense and mysterious blacks, which were achieved by underexposing half a stop on the exposure meter, "pushing" the development process, and making sure that at least one point of light within the frame was overexposed. "You know," Chapman told an interviewer, "you can shoot with no lights at all in the taxi as we did, as long as there's some point somewhere in the frame that's over-exposed, really burned. If you do that then your blacks will be acceptably dense. . . . [When you work in the classic stylewhat you think of as the New York style of one lightbulb in the john and nothing else and everything is dark and shadowwell, that one light bulb should be there.''

Taxi Driver is memorable not only for its blacks but also for its neon, steam, and smoke. In still other ways it is indebted to the postclassical, documentary effects of the French New Wave, and its highly mobile cameras and Panavision lenses create a nervous but spectacular flanerie that would have been impossible to achieve in the classical period. Perhaps equally important, its lurid world of porn theaters and child prostitutes is illuminated with colored lights (similar to the ones used for barroom scenes in Scorsese's earlier Mean Streets), which create a very different effect from the chaste, artful blacks and whites in even the grittiest earlier films about urban crime. This technique (partly derived from the "blaxploitation" films of the 1970s) was so crucial to Taxi Driver and other movies of its day that it has become a mannerism in all types of post-1970s noir. In Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981), for example, photographer Richard H. Klein augments the shadowy effects of the 1940s with colored gels, which often divide rooms or faces into "hot" and "cold" areas. And in Wim Wenders's period movie Hammett (1983), Philip Lathrop and Joe Biroc, assisted by production designers Eugene Lee and Dean Tavoularis, employ gels and painted walls to create a fusion of pulp illustration and German expressionist theater (which, we tend to forget, was often garishly colored, much like European expressionist painting).