Notes on the transition from black and white to color


Corpus Magazine, 1, Summer/Fall 2013

translated by Julien Guieu


There was a whole era in my childhood when I would systematically prefer films in black and white over those in color. If, a posteriori, I try and find the reason why, I believe it was first of all because they truly opened up a whole world for me: that of the past. And this is the first thing that we expect from an aesthetic experience: it must give us the certainty that it is opening up a world for us. The black and white picture was to me an impalpable sign of that. Later on, I understood that all black and white films were not equally extraordinary. 

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Something also greatly intrigued me: I wondered whether the people who had lived at the time when those films were shot actually saw in black and white. After all, how could the way the world was represented fail to influence the way it was perceived? Did you see things in black and white when you were about ten or twenty? - I remember almost asking my father this question. Did you spontaneously restore, could you somehow make out, the colors in the images? Did the black and white pervade your gaze? Or did nothing happen at all? As far as I'm concerned, whenever I thought about what life could have been like in the thirties or sixties, I was absolutely incapable of picturing it in any other way than in black and white, even through substantial exertion of the mind. 

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Within the world of images, or at least the greater part of it, the transition from black and white to color really took place in the late sixties, even though the requisite technical advances predates that period. Before 1968, there were still black and white films; since then, they have all been in color. (Or, to be more precise: a black and white film is now necessarily a voluntary departure from the norm.)

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From then on, it seemed as though the world had bit into the proverbial apple, as though it had discovered it had colors, in the same way as Adam and Eve had discovered they were nude. This sudden reflexivity brought about a certain amount of distress and frenzy, a discrepancy with one's own being, an imbalance of the senses. Hence the incredible profusion of colors in the human wardrobe of the seventies and the abstract, multicolored animated films that appeared on TV screens at the same time. 

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Godard's Pierrot le fou, in 1965, with the final scene where Belmondo paints his face blue before blowing himself up, was the forerunner and the emblem of this frantic relationship between the world and its colors. 

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You often hear about the stars of the Silent Era who did not survive the advent of talking pictures. Are there stars from the Black and White Era whom color either killed or at least relegated to the background? Maurice Ronet, perhaps? Simone Signoret? - Georges Poujouly...

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The advent of color represents a rift in the history of perception and of the different ways of positioning oneself in the world, the significance of which has seldom been noticed. It more or less coincides with the disappearance of hats, and later of ties (in Godard's black and white Breathless, Bemondo still wears both; in Pierrot he no longer wears a hat and soon throws his tie away); with the revolts of Western students, who wanted to invent a new world attuned to these colors, as if they existed independently, as separate entities, and as if the world should somehow come unto them, join them, become worthy of them; with the moon-landing of Apollo 11, the filmed evidence of which, in color, reveals a universe that is actually black and white, the only visible colors being those of the American flag.  





​original text in French here