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Thinking of the magic and beauty of early filmmakers, it’s like they were pioneers. They were creating the technology while capturing their stories! And they were fearless because it was an untapped territory.
The limitation of black and white film? Let me tell you: art, creativity, and film are all created within constraints. It’s these bounds that help up create, not hinder us.
In this black and white medium, filmmakers had to think about lighting differently. Their lives were (obviously) in color, but their equipment only shot black and white. Everything is going to appear different.
Let’s say I’m wearing a blue jacket and a yellow shirt. In black and white? All you see is shades of grey, no actual pigmentation.
Now, you can control the lighting and create slits and angles. By controlling light and shadows, you can make an image look more interesting. In some of the earliest films, you can see when filmmakers started understanding this dynamic.
For example, the first iterations of Dracula and Nosferatu were scarier, all thanks to careful lighting. You can see how they can make a room look vast or small by collapsing the space with an entirely black background. You can see how they could paint something on a wall and make it look like it was miles and miles away. Because they were only working in black and white, its limitations were liberating.
Particularly in the silent era, when filmmakers didn’t have to think about sound or color, they got incredibly innovative just focusing on the visual image. There’s a saying that people forgot to be cinematic again as soon as sound came into film. These early black and white filmmakers led the charge for what was possible in cinema.
It wasn’t until I saw a particular film that I had a different respect for black and white. The original Imitation of Life (1934) was a black and white film that was risque, intense, and complicated. It was deep. It was heavy.
Here you have a Black woman and a white woman working together to start a business. There were some complicated tensions, both racially and in the relationship between the characters.
But for what it was — a story about two women, with no men, building a life together — it was magical. Seeing a film like that? It was about the story.
