baracine

Actually, I haven't always been pro-colourization and I'm not sure I am today. I just appreciate good work on its own merits, in other words, I like it when it's well done. And I'm anti-fanaticism, which means I will try to appreciate something new before condemning it.

I admit I attained my first colourization satori while watching the Turner-colourized King Kong (only legally available on laserdisc): the sight of all that artificial (but pretty) colour on top of all the artificial (but pretty) animation, matte paintings and special effects, just did it for me! (1)

(1) This moment also marked a sea change in my social life. I noticed I was no longer relating to my flashier, trendier, more superficial friends until that night when I was simply cut by a business associate of my father at the opera. I started connecting more and more with people I considered my true friends, who introduced me to an underground railway/support group/subculture of like-minded artistically adventurous individuals who would occasionally turn on viewing the more advanced colourized productions - some of them bootlegs - from America and other countries. To this day, I am in constant fear of losing my job or being found out by the anti-colourization lobby, which, as you know, is just as powerful in Canada as it is in the States, or by the police, who call a group of people like myself "a colour coven". But it's a chance I am willing to take for my convictions.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong_(1933_film) ):



I guess America is not ready...

The Valeyard

I don't think it has anything to do with not being ready. It might have more to do with having more respect for a classic film. That picture is gut-wrenching to look at. It's so garish and muddy.

Blech!

Trust me, I spend several minutes going over my posts again and again before putting them up.

I'll have to go back over the Thread to see if there's anything else to comment on.

baracine

Well, it's part of the first generation of colourization where the palette was limited and everything was done manually. I fell in love with it because of its naïveté and artificiality, which I think is on a par with the film itself.

Now is probably a good time to tell you that the first time I "saw" King Kong was as made-in-China 3/4 in x 3/4 in coloured skin decals found in chewing gum packages when I was four years old, which reproduced frames from the film. You can imagine the detail and resolution... This was years before I saw a film or a TV set. So, for me, King Kong has always been garish, muddy and in colour.

The Valeyard

Well alright. I'll give you that one....

baracine

Besides, when you take away the colour, Fay Wray just disappears from the top of that tree:

The Valeyard

That's easy to say with a still frame (which I CAN see her). When the film is actually running...she's moving around and you can see her clearly.

Deco King

As a footnote Walt Disney's animators used the costume of Helen Gahagan She's character as their inspiration for the costume of the Wicked Queen Grimhilde in Snow White!!

Deco King

Mae West always wanted to do an "all color remake" of She Done Him Wrong - she'd love colorised versions of her movies to be done and the wonderful camp kitsch nature of her movies would suit the process!

baracine

Yes, she must have been soooooo flattered by that.

Her bio on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Gahagan ) :

baracine

Speaking of obscure cultural references, I always assumed that in the Simpsons' Skinner's Sense of Snow episode ( Season 12, episode 8, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner's_Sense_of_Snow ), where the children are snowed in at their school the last day before school vacation and are forced to watch a silly 1938 Christmas movie, that that movie was March of the Wooden Soldiers in its unrestored, scratchy, decrepit, crappy, spliced, defective, uncolorized form...

You remember the dialog...

Well, it turns out that crappy movie, according to Wikipedia, was really a reference to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), one of the worst films ever made, which is mercifully already in colour ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_C...s_the_Martians ), and its title was borrowed from another colour atrocity called The Christmas That Almost Wasn't (1966, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059032/ ).

Still, as the film is in black and white, stars Bo-Peep and is from the thirties, it still could be a reference to March of the Wooden Soldiers.

Ambassador

FWIW, Network will be releasing Things to Come in the UK in a few months. I would assume that, being based in Britain, they may have access to the longer existing cut of this film. No word on their official run time though, so we'll have to wait and see.


BTW, I'm surprised that so many people are taking colorization seriously! You guys seem to be forgetting that, apart from the ethics involved in subverting a filmmaker's intentions, the decision to film in color or black in white is a major decision that has to be worked out in advance by the director, producer, and cinematographer. Every subsequent technical decision is an outgrowth of that initial choice: from which type of film stock to use to lighting techniques and costuming. You can't simply bowdlerize all of these careful decisions and retroactively apply color to a black-and-white film. One of the main reasons colorization looks so bad to so many people is that B&W films of the 1930s and 1940s were made on monochrome film stock that works with and privileges shades of gray rather than vibrant hues of color. Whether or not a filmmaker wanted to make a film in color and had to settle for B&W, the fact remains that the film was made in B&W.

baracine

Well that's the Presbytarian point of view, anyway...

Have you heard of the new Mosfilm restoration of Sadko (1954) where they re-recorded the entire music score (by Rimski-Korsakoff) in 5.1 surround stereo instead of salvaging the original mono score?



Besides, what are you going to show the kids the next time they're snowed in at school? The black and white version of March of the Wooden Soldiers?

mdnitoil

Ironically, since we're explicitly discussing the 30's and 40's, even the color films were shot on monochrome film stock. Reference the technicolor process.

baracine

And in the imbibation process of three-strip Technicolor films, a black and white layer was used to help align the colours, which makes the colour-on-black-and-white process of colourization a pretty accurate representation of what a colour film would have looked like.

Ambassador

I was under the impression that the technicolor process employed panchromatic film stock. But I'll readily admit that I'm not a techie, so I'll bow to others' knowledge on this one. (And yes, I also know that many b&w films were made on panchromatic film stock as well. But I don't think that this negates the fact that cinematographers, directors, costume departments, etc. have always employed different techniques for shooting b&w and color movies. These are factors -- both subtle and overt -- that get swept aside through the digital colorization process.)

Yes, I am aware of this. Ruscico regularly bumps original mono scores to 5.1. Fox also used to provide stereo for films that were originally recorded mono. I'm also opposed to this practice, and it seems that Fox has more or less abandoned it -- or at least provided the false tracks as alternatives (rather than the original mono, as they used to).

Well, if I raise my own kids right, they'll grow up appreciating b&w photography as a separate art form from color photography.

Funny, I thought it was called respecting an art work's original, inherent qualities....

While we're at it, why don't we go back and colorize Hans Holbein's woodcuts and Alfred Stieglitz's photographs. I'm sure that digital technology will help us improve those old-fashioned things and get kids excited about them again!

Ambassador

To put your theory to the test, I'd love to see Legend try to colorize something like Fort Apache. In order to accurately reflect what the film (as filmed) would have looked like in color, we'd actually be watching ashen-colored, unnaturally made-up faces, which Archie Stout and John Ford demanded in order to accommodate Stout's experimentations with infrared filming. It's a perfect example of filmmakers developing a technique specifically for black and white. And it would be a perfect test-case for just how far digital colorization would ignore accuracy in favor of a supposed but non-existent "intention." (In other words, since a digital colorization couldn't very well go for complete accuracy of what the actors' faces must have looked like, they'd have to aim for some sort of "ideal" color palette -- which of course didn't exist because Ford and Stout weren't aiming for color.)

baracine

You're not the worst offender by far but the Puritan anti-colourization stance usually is this: "If we allow those things to even exist, the uneducated masses will get curious about them and pretty soon, the colourized product will take over because of market forces. Letting the people decide for themselves may be a good thing in a democratic government but it certainly doesn't apply to the arts and culture."

Whereas, in reality, colourized films have been allowed to exist (despite the tonier establishments refusing to encourage them) but can only be found nowadays at outrageous prices on eBay or in the occasional sidewalk sales. A company like Legend Films is fighting a lonely, uphill battle all the way. I'm not saying it's a good battle, necessarily, but every effort of film preservation and restoration should be encouraged.

baracine

Actually, I think Legend Films should test its mettle by de-colourizing a few early Technicolor movies that are so bad they could be salvaged as half-way decent black and white films, like Nothing Sacred (1937) with Carole Lombard and Fredric March, whose colours are an affront to civilization:







Personal story: I first saw Hitchcock's Vertigo¸in Jesuit College film class in a black and white 16 mm print and I always assumed it was a black and white film. It made a great impression on me but I had to discover it all over again when I saw it in colour and mile-wide VistaVision...

John Hodson

Now, y'see, these arguments usually to and fro for a while, and then the pro-painting-by-numbers brigade simply accuses anyone who attempts the opposite stance - the 'offenders' in this instance - of being 'close minded', some kind of weird techno-phobes, 'puritanical' and not open to all the glories the modern age has to offer.

Then the naysayers lob in reverse accusations of philistines enouraging artistic vandalism. See? I've just done it.

Par for the course really.

They're fighting a 'lonely uphill battle' (God; the humanity!) to make cash. This is not some altruistic crusade aimed at film restoration - surely you aren't arguing that?

baracine

Well, they're surely not making now the kind of money nay-sayers were afraid they would be making - twenty years ago - if we (gulp!) allowed this sort of thing to go on.

And I'll make you a deal. I promise to stop pushing for a slowed-down, colourized, widescreen, 3-D, all-talking, all-singing musical version of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (words and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, voice-over by Britney Spears and K-Fed), if will you stop saying catty things about Legend Films. Thank you.

Carcosa

According to the extra features listings for THINGS TO COME and SHE on the Legend Films website it states a restored B/W version is also included. So stop all the belly-aching already.

baracine

Unlike Albrecht Dürer's hand-coloured woodcuts,




Holbein's woodcuts have only survived in their black and white form but he did leave this coloured self-portrait drawing on paper:



And Alfred Stieglitz did experiment with the autochrome colour process:

baracine

Inside Legend Films: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laQO4cOhVRY

Ambassador

I don't understand your point. Of course, Dürer and Holbein were artists who worked in various media, so they painted and drew in color, too. But most of Holbein's woodcuts were intended to exploit the newly emergent print culture (i.e., mechanical reproduction), and they were designed to be distributed in black and white. And sure, Stieglitz experimented with color photography, but the bulk of his output was created within the parameters of black-and-white photography. Likewise, John Ford shot movies in both b&w and color. So what does that all add up to? To me, it demonstrates that artists choose to work in color or in black and white. We should therefore respect their choices rather than try to second-guess them.


Frankly, Baracine, I just don't understand the appeal of digital colorization. (1) It's a misrepresentation of the artist's intentions and the art work itself. (2) As I pointed out earlier, it works against or erases the subtleties and intricacies of the original medium (of black-and-white photography). (3) There is little evidence that it revitalizes "old" movies or helps kids rediscover them. If kids aren't watching technicolor films because they're also "old," what makes anyone think they'll start watching b&w films that get colorized?


On a personal level, I'll also say that colorization can sometimes "color" a viewer's first exposure to classic films. For instance, the very first time I watched Out of the Past was after it had been colorized. Ever since then, I sometimes mis-remember the film as if it were made in color -- even though I've seen it in its original b&w several times since. Has it ruined the film for me forever? No. But it took me years to start thinking of it as film noir. The colorization completely eradicated all the noirish elements from the film -- at least at the stylistic level. Even worse, it prevented me from understanding its connection to other films of the same period, genre, and style.

baracine

Holbein, Dürer and al.: I was just needling you. And, you are right, it all comes down to the big question: What was the artist's intent? Dürer (pre-printing) often had his woodcuts colorized. Holbein, using the print medium, doesn't have any surviving example of a hand-colored print, probably because only the woodblocks themselves survived or they were intended for a (relatively speaking) mass market and were more cheaply made (no costly hand-coloring).

I think a well-colourized and restored film like My Man Godfrey is a superior viewing and comedic experience than a bad Technicolor film like Nothing Sacred or a badly preserved Technicolor drama like A Star is Born (1937), which should have its colour at least tweaked, cleaned-up and refined. But I don't think any colourization can improve a film like David Lean's Oliver Twist, for instance - I'm not stupid!

Colourized films have by and large failed on the commercial level they aspired to. But they do work, in my experience, in the family enjoyment of holiday black and white classics like Miracle on 34th Street and the like. They have found a niche market in the ultra-camp category (Plan 9 From Outer Space, Reefer Madness, etc.) and they might make inroads in the vintage sci-fi genre. But they're not about to take over the world. I was watching old films when I was a kid (granted, we didn't have much choice) and I was still absolutely flabbergasted by the colourized King Kong esthetic experience, even after seeing it in black and white 17 times.

Well, there are noir Technicolor films. I told you of my experience of first seeing Vertigo in black and white (and in French, by the way). I thought it was a perfect film and I absolutely "got" its pessimistic message. When I saw the magnificently refurbished colour restoration years later, I still found it an extremely "dark" film and the colour simply added to the sensuality and the dreaminess of the James Stewart-Kim Novak relationship (maybe I had just grown up) without distracting from its overriding somberness.

When I watched The Wages of Fear in colour, I thought it was a much more realistic representation of what it is to toil, sweat, bleed (red blood) and die in the merciless sunshine of a (yellow) banana republic, drowning in (grey) mud to earn a few (green) Yankee dollars than I did when the film was more of a black and white abstraction appealing to esthetes and intellectuals for the beauty of its editing and its stark contrasts of light and shadow.

I like having the choice and I don't like warning labels that say watching a colourized film will destroy my soul and lead to harder stuff like the raiding of black and white film libraries at night with torch in hand.

I also resent the lack of respect shown colourization in the industry and among film reviewers especially where any mention of such a product is treated either with condescencion ("surprisingly well done and worth a look, actually") or with total prejudice, like in the case of a certain reviewer of the Miracle on 34th Street 2-disc (original black and white and colourized version) edition who simply refused to have a look at the colourized disc because "it just doesn't feel right".