Removing Color from Older Images is Unacceptable

[Rev. Rye]

Because they like it?

Yeah, black and white photography can actually be quite beautiful, and, if not exactly gorgeous, still striking. Just to name one particularly extreme example, by changing to black and white film, the second Human Centipede film actually was rendered somewhat watchable.

On a less horrific note, one person who routinely makes films with unrealistic color choices is Guy Maddin, who does this because he really loves the aesthetic of films of the 1920s and 1930s:



Most of the film is in black and white, but small sections are in colour, specifically an early type that used only green and red strips but no blue. Only a few films managed to use it before they finally figured out how to properly do blue, few of those did it the whole movie, fewer survived, and you can probably count the number of all-two-strip Technicolor films to reach DVD on your fingers. And the strange color scheme, where everything was shades of red, white, and cyan, really intrigues me to no end to the point where I snatched up a copy of The King of Jazz (one of those few to make it to DVD) as soon as I found out it was coming to Blu-Ray:



Yes, Rhapsody in Blue in a system that can't actually do blue. I ate it up and I even managed to find an app that mimics it damn well. It's called Recs and look for the Hollywood 1929 filter. Here's some photos I took with this even less natural-looking system:





#hailtritanopia