In black and white...

Watched Le Divorce yesterday. In black and white. Also Usual Suspects and Scent of a Woman. Again in black and white. Not by choice. Something in the DVD player went kaput and rather than fiddle with it and waste time, we thought it was better to leave it the way it was. I have seen all these films before (except for Le Divorce, which is a good book but avoidable film) but absolutely loved Usual Suspects in the black and white version. The movie has that dark, 1960s gangster feel and the unintentional lack of colour added to it. The other black and white scene I loved was the one in Scent of A Woman, where Al Pacino teaches a girl in a New York bar how to tango. It looked very old Hollywood, vintage romance…
There’s something about black and white. Both films and still photographs.
It got me back to movie days during my mass comm. course. Every Thursday afternoon, the chairs would be shifted, the projector set up, a screen put up in the classroom and it was showtime. Films were part of our ‘course’ and we watched everything — from Satyajit Ray’s Charulata and Pather Panchali to Renoir’s Rules of the Game to strange movies you must endure if you are studying cinema, like Battleship Potemkin, Un Chien Andalou, Birth of a Nation; we also watched absolutely fantastic stuff like Breathless, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Rashomon.
Didn’t always look forward to the discussion and analysis that was to follow (Why did Bunuel slice the eye and show ants crawling all over a hand? Because he had a fit of madness, that’s why!) but loved most of the films. Ninety-percent of the stuff was black and white, our course in-charge having a marked partiality for the early part of the 20th century. I loved her for it, never mind Bunuel and movies that sympathised with the Ku Klux Clan. Some films are best seen in black and white. Like old photographs. Madhubala and gang look much better in black and white than they would have looked in colour.
Black and white just seems very classic. And beautiful. Colour can sometimes bring out the flaws that black and white shadows over. Gosh! Shall stop before I sound like arty type. Had fun watching unplanned black and white fest. That’s all.