Frances Ha: black-and-white cinema is dead Jul 22nd 2013, 05:00
Noah Baumbach's new film is not great but luckily for him Greta Gerwig saves the day
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Frances Ha was a something of a problem for me. On the one hand I've never much liked the work of writer-director Noah Baumbach, finding it awash in NY-boho insularity and parochialism. For all its nouvelle vague flourishes, its Raoul Coutard-ish black-and-white cinematography, and its quintessentially French directorial obsession with its leading lady, Frances Ha is bedevilled by a vignette-based shapelessness that it never quite overcomes and a self-absorption it can't shake. On the other hand, it stars – indeed, almost fetishises – Baumbach's partner and co-writer Greta Gerwig, whom I've liked since I first saw her in Hannah Climbs The Stairs, absent-mindedly looping a luminous green thread around her nipple. It is her charm, beauty, daffiness and combination of smarts and unself-awareness that give the movie what energy it has.
So I tip the balance – Noah: meh; Greta: yeah – by also admiring the film's black-and-white cinematography, a homage to Gordon Willis's work on Manhattan. Arriving alongside Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing and Ben Wheatley's A Field In England, this has boosted nonsensical talk of a revival of monochrome cinematography.
I hope not. Black-and-white cinematography is as dead as the western, or as rare, and all the better for that. On the few occasions when the western is successfully resurrected, we get fascinating oddball movies such as Dead Man and Meek's Cutoff. We have been reviving black and white – like the western – since the early 70s, shortly after monochrome was considered obsolete (there was no separate black-and-white cinematography Oscar after 1966, and little black-and-white American TV after about 1969), but in films as diverse as Paper Moon and Young Frankenstein, Lenny and Raging Bull. To shoot a film in black and white on a major studio picture you needed clout, like Scorsese with Raging Bull or Spielberg with Schindler's List. Or to keep things cheap, as Woody Allen did on Broadway Danny Rose. Indeed, Wim Wenders's dyspeptic movie-movie The State Of Things ends with the director and producer shot dead by their mafia backers for that same crime: not providing a colour product.
The rarity of black and white is its salvation. Once it was the stale norm, and people hungered and thirsted after three-strip Technicolor. Now it is a place on the palette where the most interesting artists on occasion like to linger, to find out what they can add to their movies when they subtract an entire formal dimension. The results since the supposed death of black and white – The Last Picture Show, the Terence Davies and Bill Douglas trilogies, Heimat, Radio On, The White Ribbon, Sátántangó, Brand Upon The Brain! – suggest that although it looks dead, it just needs the merest prod and it's back up on its feet again in a second.
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