Reflections after 25 years at the movies | Roger Ebert
Color is too realistic. It is too distracting. It projects superfluous emotional cues. It reduces actors to inhabitants of the mere world. Black-and-white (or, more accurately, silver-and-white) creates a mysterious dream state, a simpler world of form and gesture. Most people do not agree with me. They like color and think a black-and-white film is missing something. Try this. If you have wedding photographs of your parents and grandparents, chances are your parents are in color and your grandparents are in black and white. Put the two photographs side by side and consider them honestly. Your grandparents look timeless. Your parents look goofy.
The next time you buy film for your camera, buy a roll of black-and-white. Go outside at dusk, when the daylight is diffused. Stand on the side of the house away from the sunset. Shoot some natural-light closeups of a friend. Have the pictures printed big, at least 5 x 7. Ask yourself if this friend, who has always looked ordinary in every color photograph you've ever taken, does not suddenly, in black and white, somehow take on an aura of mystery. The same thing happens in the movies.
On the other hand, I am not one of those purists who believes the silents were perfect, and sound ruined everything. To believe that, I would have to be willing to do without Marilyn Monroe singing "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend." Groucho Marx saying, "This bill is outrageous! I wouldn't pay it if I were you!" Robert De Niro asking, "Are you talkin' to me?" Sound is essential, but dialog is not always so. The big difference between today's dialog and the dialog of years ago is that the characters have grown stupid. They say what is needed to advance the plot, and get their laughs by their delivery of four-letter words. Hollywood dialog was once witty, intelligent, ironic, poetic, musical. Today it is flat. So flat that when a movie allows its characters to think fast and talk the same way, the result is invigorating, as in "My Dinner with Andre," or the first 30 minutes of "White Men Can't Jump."
Home video is both the best and the worst thing that has happened on the movie beat since I've been a critic. It is good because it allows us to see the movies we want to see, when we want to see them. It provides an economic incentive for the prints of old movies to be preserved and restored. It brings good movies, new and old, to towns without good movie theaters. I get letters from people who live miles from any good-sized town, but rent the new foreign films through the mail.
Home video is bad because it has destroyed the campus film societies, which were like little shrines to the cinema. If the film society was showing Kurosawa's "Ikiru" for a dollar and there was nothing else playing except the new releases at first-run prices, you went to "Ikiru" and then it was forever inside of you, a great film. Today, students rent videos, usually not very good ones, and even if they watch a great movie, they do it alone or with a few friends. There is no sense of audience, and yet the single most important factor in learning to be literate about movies is to be part of an audience that is sophisticated about them.
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