Djelloul Marbrook

Calling American society Manichean, as I do in my last post, prompts me to think of a remark my mother often made about black-and-white photographs of paintings. She said they show the true composition of a painting and are a kind of qualitative litmus test.

Because I’m an insomniac and often watch Turner Classic black-and-white movies I’m aware that well made black-and-white movies are subtler than full-color movies, more nuanced. They’re especially effective for character studies, the depiction of moods. So I accept my artist-mother’s word about composition.

Anyone who has seen F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) will know what I mean. Subsequent vampire movies in color, even Frank Langella in John Badham’s beautiful 1979 Dracula, appear garish and distracting by comparison. Murnau keeps us focused on the central theme, how we interiorize the vampire myth.

Another angle from which to consider the matter is the harm colorizing inflicts on black-and-white movies. It desecrates the formative sensibility of the film. It’s not unlike airbrushing or painting a fig leaf over private parts.

Musing about all this, I wondered why a Manichean society, which I deplored in my last post for its simple-mindedness, should not reveal nuance as tellingly as black-and-white movies. After all, if color gets in the way, why should a society not benefit from a purifying black-and-white reduction of matters?

I think the answer lies in nuance. Black-and-white films depend on nuance, shadow, what is not seen as well as what is seen, for their impact. They focus our minds on nuance, on subtlety, whereas color distracts and incites us. The black-and-white film singles out and studies, but it does not reduce imagery to simplicitude.

This is the opposite of the Manichean view in black and white, the struggle of opposites. Black-and-white films are about the marriage of opposites, the interplay of shadow and light. And when they are silent films they work hand in glove with the color-silence of the format itself. Color often presents itself as noise, even interference. It gets in the way of study, of contemplation, the way a flickering screen, a video game or a booming radio can get in the way of concentration on a book.

(This is a point brought home by a fascinating exhibition at the D. Wigmore Fine Art Gallery on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The exhibition Explorations in Black and White, on view through December 23, features painting from the 1930s through the 1960s.)

Europa, 1939, Juanita Guccione

The point is also made by modernist poetry and literature. Writers like Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Stephen Crane, e.e. cummings, and many others, stripped away language excess to enable us to penetrate subject matter unencumbered by tangent, adjectival coloration, self-indulgence, discursion and polemic.

In a sense, a poem by Williams or a story by Hemingway is a black-and-white film compared to wordier poems and stories. The composition in Hemingway’s masterpiece, The Killers, for example, is immediately apparent and we never stray from it. It is because of this that we are able to identify so closely with the solitary Swede. It is because of this that the language of the gangsters in the diner is so memorable and reverberates today in such television scripts as The Wire and Generation Kill.

But modernism is relative, and the black-and-white film is only a recent iteration. When the medieval Arab poet in Al Andalus speaks of the Guadalquiver River as a white hand opening a green robe, that is the modernism of his time speaking to us. This breathtaking image comes to us unadorned, unfreighted with fanciful language. We get it, and because we so cleanly get it, we can go on considering it. I don’t know if Dr. Williams read a translation of this Arab poet, but I’m quite sure he would have liked the image.

I often think of my mother’s remark (one of her paintings, inset) when I see people “shooting” great paintings with their smart phones in museums. They wouldn’t think of photographing them in black and white simply because they have color. It’s like Bill Clinton saying he fooled around because he could. But to consider the composition of, say, an El Greco, carefully, nothing works like black and white. Every shadow, every reticence, every nuance engages the eye. Color would be like a flashbulb going off in your eye.

But this contemplation leads inevitably to the uses of color, as if the artist had seen the work in black and white and then carefully, reverently applied just so much color and not a brushstroke more. And it is at this point that some art becomes overdone and therefore less than it had set out to be. At this point art may fall short of the artist’s original vision.

I remember my mother struggling with a painting over several years. The colors were gorgeous, because she was a brilliant colorist, but she had failed. Once she had lost her original vision she had tried to recover it with color. It’s done, she said. But she didn’t mean finished, she meant ruined. I don’t think she ever looked at the painting again, a project for which she had had high hopes.

I asked her once why she had not gone back to her initial sketches and she said it was because she wouldn’t be able to forget all the color she had brought to bear on them. She would make the same mistakes. That, of course, was an insight into her mind. I have seen the phenomenon repeated in my own thinking many times: The fatal urge to fix something that doesn’t want to be fixed.

I think our society sees increasingly poorly in dim light. I think we’re always trying to turn the spotlight on things, drown out the background, the nuance, always trying to tune up the color, tweak the screen, and we then become foolishly grateful to demagogues and bullies who seem to help us see when we should be seeing on our own without stagecraft. We get louder as we become more deaf, and the blinder we become the more we tinker with the lighting.

Dogs see better than we do. Literally. They see in dim light. Their retinas see in shades of gray, the grays we no longer wish to see in our Manichean lethargy. They see reds, yellows and blues, not all colors, as we do—of course we don’t know how well all other creatures may see—and yet they see better than we do. They take in more. We are no longer dogged in our effort to understand shades of difference, and that is why our leaders no longer know how to reach the compromises necessary to keep the Constitution alive.

I muse about these things in the middle of the night, remembering how I used to feel walking home from a black-and-white movie compared to driving home from a full-color extravaganza. — Far From Algiers music