2022-02-28 - 1:17 p.m.
Growing up in the late seventies it was still fairly common to encounter black and white television sets. Maybe due to my rural settings and being in an environment not flourishing in wealth, the sole TV in my home was a small colorless set. By the eighties pretty much everyone including my family had made the switch over but still kept the black and white ones in the bedrooms and play areas. Personally, I always preferred the Black and Whites.
I was drawn in by the classic television shows of the fifties and early sixties. One because of the escapism to a fantasy era that they offered and two because I thought they looked prettier. I’ve always been afflicted with a shade blindness and often an over saturation of color tended to look muddied to me. All of the good monster movies were in black and white and the Film Noir genre transformed the lack of color into art. I gush over seeing light coming through billowing clouds of cigarette smoke and cascading through blinds. Then after discovering Kurosawa and the French New Wave cinema, color film struck me as useless.
Every photographer I had ever known also worked in Black and White film. Probably because it was much easier and cheaper to develop but more so because of the element of chiaroscuro the medium allowed. Call me a purist, a luddite, or plain old fashioned but if color film was to vanish from the earth I wouldn’t be affected. About eighty five percent of what I view on the flatscreen is black and white and created long before I was even born.
I used to think my affection for classic film was strictly maintained by my artistic side but as I get older, I realize my love stems from my puritanical stance on class. Meaning, I have no desire to watch people committing disgusting sex acts in the middle of a feature for no reason at all. I don’t think spewing vulgar sexual dialog for an hour and a half makes a picture more compelling nor furthers the narrative and plot line. If I wanted to see something like that, I would simply watch a porn.
Have you ever noticed that the film “Casablanca” isn’t riddled with fart jokes? It’s set in Morocco, food and drink are being served, I’m sure flatulence was abounds. Yet the director and writer found no need to show Peter Lorre letting one slip out. These people also knew that showing Bogart railing out Bergman in the room above the bar wouldn’t make their love affair any stronger. It’s called taste, and sure these things may have been omitted due to censorship laws and the Hays Code, but I don’t see that to be such a bad thing.
As an artist, censorship forces you to be far more creative. Swearing is fine but when you’re not allowed to, you’re compelled to widen your vernacular and seek out alternative ways to insult someone. You perfect your craft with subtlety and weaving in between the lines. If I see a couple staring into each other’s eyes and kissing I’ve already assumed they’re doing it, you don’t need to hold my hand and walk me through it showing me the act itself.
In the genre of horror, I feel that overexposure is detrimental to the film. You want the viewer to imagine the ghastliness for themselves, to make them uncomfortable with the thoughts that dwell in their own heads. Rubbing their nose in a torture porn does nothing. I’m not opposed to gore, but I have no desire to sit through a snuff film. Plus, I think that anyone who does requires therapy.
So here I sit, an old man in my autumn years waxing nostalgically of a simpler time when Hollywood was glamour and ugly people were mere character actors. When villains were punished, injustice was vindicated, and I don’t have to watch a woman getting raped while some shitty heavy metal song blasts in my ear. Thank god for Turner Classic Movies.
