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Nightfall (1957)

"Things that really happen are always difficult to explain."

Date: 2010-07-09 02:43 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
This image is tremendously powerful, a power that's merely amplified by the caption quote. A b&w picture or scene evokes different emotions in me, with different intensity, than the exact same scene in realistic color. I wish more comic book readers appreciated this, and I suppose it's the same among movie viewers.

-- Denys

Date: 2010-07-09 03:12 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] randy-byers.livejournal.com
It's true that the common wisdom is that a lot of people don't like B&W movies. Thus the attempts at colorization a few years back -- and even now and then today. But color defeats the purpose of a movie like Nightfall, which delves into visual regions of deepest black (night and shadows) and purest white (daylight on snow) and then confuses the supposed duality.

Date: 2010-07-09 08:14 pm (UTC)
From: (Anonymous)
That makes perfect sense. I see an analogy to Alex Toth, who used black as an actual color not simply to delineate the border between two other colors. Greg Theakston's over-sized b&w reprints of Toth reveal an artistic vision almost entirely hidden behind color. (And of course, "color" in Toth's case meant cheap four-color printing on toilet paper.) Toth could have drawn the still in this thread.

-- Denys

Date: 2010-07-09 08:48 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] randy-byers.livejournal.com
I'm sure I've seen quite a bit b&w work by Toth, haven't I? He could well have been influenced by film noir, since he would have been a teenager when the films started hitting the screen in the '40s.

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