Re: Color Films Photographed To Appear B&W
In William Wellman's Track of the Cat (Paramount 1954) Robert Mitchum and a conflicted family are snowbound in a mountain-side ranch house while a carnivorous mountain lion stalks their livestock for food, and later, it stalks them when they try to hunt it. On another level, members of the family are at each other's throats. The production design is black and white. The walls of the house are a different white than the snow, but it's still white, with black or blackened props and furniture. Even horses are chosen for how well they favor black. Every once on a while there is a splash of red, like Mitchum's coat, or a bedspread. Wellman creates the tension of a Val Lewton horror film in this odd western. Technicolor is desaturated in post to simulate monochrome. The full range of the color spectrum is present -- flesh tones are still flesh and wood still looks the color of wood, for example, but in deference to monochrome. Just how this effect was achieved, and why Wellman wanted it, is worth a supplement, but Paramount released the DVD barebones. Good-looking transfer of an interesting and highly unusual film.
I doubt if George Lucas had Track of the Cat in mind when he directed his first feature, THX-1138 (Warner Brother 1971). Although shot in a rich color, the film takes place in a world of white to illustrate how clinical and sterile life has become in this heavily medicated underground environment. Black-clad robots police the humans. White on white surfaces with colorless props, furnishings and mechanisms predominate. It's all in the carefully controlled production design. I love all the films George Lucas has made since, but THX-1138 impresses me the most.
Director of Photography Gordon Willis has stated in interviews that he shot The Godfather (Paramount 1972) as a monochrome film in Technicolor. He uses color in interesting ways, but he wanted a pictorial graphic look that evokes early gangster films. The color is not so much desaturated as skewed in a certain direction.
The idea of a black and white production design in a color film is explored by Marc Forster in his entry into the James Bond franchise. The natural color of locations is desaturated and adjusted toward the black level in Quantum of Solace (2008). Wardrobe and sets are rigidly controlled. Bond wears the same black suit with a white shirt throughout, except for one scene where he wears white pants with a black T-shirt. The only color on him is a splash of blood on his white shirt which he wears like a badge of guilt, or dishonor, during the second half of the film. Perhaps Forster saw Track of the Cat. Likewise the nagging den mother who follows Bond around the globe is only seen wearing black and white pants suits, mostly white, with upturned pointed white collars. He short-cropped hair is white. She is shown in a grotesque close-up smearing white cream into her rapidly expanding pores. Her office is all white surfaces and milky glass. Hotels, apartments, warehouses, theater lobbies are all white places. The Tosca opera sequence is set-designed in black with white trims, the audience in black evening gowns and black suits. Verbal references to black and white objects pepper the dialogue. "I need help finding the stationary" Bond says from a black-tiled room, as if drawing the audience's attention to the monochrome aesthetic. The movie generated a ton of reviews and a storm of criticism, but so far as I know, not one reviewer mentioned the monochrome aesthetic that the filmmakers obviously worked hard to achieve.
There are more, but this is all I can think of at the moment.
