The Black and White Art Film in the Age of its Digital Distribution

In 2018, two of the most acclaimed international films, Roma and Cold War, were auteurist movies shot in digital black-and-white and distributed by two newcomers to the field of prestige cinema — Netflix Movies and Amazon Studio, respectively. Both films are now vying for many of the same accolades, including the Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film, Best Director, and Best Cinematography. How should we evaluate digital black-and-white film in our current cinematic dispositif?

All contemporary works of black-and-white cinema, be they analog or digital, share a common aesthetic risk. It has been many decades since black-and-white was a technical necessity, and so its continued usage risks coming across as merely stylish. Digital filmmakers face this same challenge, but more acutely, since in digital filmmaking, black-and-white no longer even imposes itself as a technical constraint, such as the investment in some discrete material support over some other. Critical evaluations of a digital black-and-white film must determine whether its style is meaningful to its contents or incidental to them.

Roma and Cold War's distribution by two film industry disruptors poses a second critical dilemma. 2018 was a year in which blockbuster filmmakers — most notably Stephen Spielberg — could still contend that Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu-distributed films ought to be ineligible for Oscars, meriting Emmy's, instead.1 For Spielberg, these works remain, no matter their particular attainments, more TV-movies than theater-films. (which is to say, in a category somehow distinct from his notion of cinema as such). The director's claim implies that simply by accepting the distribution of one's film by a digital-first platform, directors must "commit to the television format," whatever this medium is now meant to stand for after the rise of streaming services.2

However much I disagree with Spielberg in this instance, I take his underlying concern that these works might fall under different aesthetic criteria to be a worthwhile consideration in a post-medium condition. Like art historian Rosalind Krauss, who first defined the post-medium condition to describe the general loss of conviction in specific artistic mediums (such as painting, sculpture, or film) during and after the 1970s, Spielberg has recognized the existential threats posed by amorphous media entities for directors still wishing to work within an earlier regulative ideal for cinematic achievement: the theater-film.3

At issue, then, is the problem of how to create meaningful works of cinema in an age in which the medium's technical identity is no longer a given. Both Krauss and Spielberg worry that the post-medium condition jeopardizes the integrity of filmmaking and film criticism, since the dispersal of the medium onto any number of digital supports risks the loss of those shared rules and criteria necessary for coherent evaluations of what ought to count as a work of cinema. For Krauss, who remains wary of the digital, the two remaining solutions for contemporary filmmakers are either to reflect upon the obsolescence of their privileged, analog technical support or to become artists of a different kind by inventing new ones.4 Spielberg prefers the retrenchment of site-specificity, insisting that he will go on making films that "ask an audience to go to the theater," as if the transforming conditions of cineplex-reception might somehow stave off his underlying doubts about cinema's identity as an art form.5

Alfonso Cuarón and Pawel Pawlikowski pursued alternative approaches to this same critical dilemma.6 Less allergic to digital media and their hybrid platforms than Krauss and Spielberg, both directors were concerned with creating works that would have standing within the theater-film tradition, and which could do so even in the face of their work's historical, technical, and institutional deracination from this same tradition. This shared gambit is what makes both directors' adoption of the black-and-white format critically salient, since the stylistic choice makes explicit their effort to conceive of a work that would not just look like a work of cinema, but which should also count as one. In what follows, I want to compare both works' divergent achievements, and on the basis of this comparison to develop my own account of what a compelling digital black-and-white film ought to look like.

Both directors used Alexa digital camera equipment to shoot their films, but toward different stylistic ends. Cuarón shot Roma in 65 mm on an Alexa65 camera with a widescreen 2.35:1 aspect ratio, while Pawlikowski shot Cold War in 35 mm on an AlexaXT camera with a traditional 4:3 aspect ratio. Both make clear that these technical elements are meant to count formally through repeated compositional acknowledgment of their picture's particular dimensions — Cuarón through his regular use of side pans, which key up his image's structuring horizontal extension, and Pawlikowski through his various still shots, which amplify his film's underlying pictorialism. This mode of self-reflexivity exemplifies both directors' commitment to what Krauss describes as "the internal plurality of any medium."7 It concerns the secureness of their work's representational frames in terms of ratio, not literal scale, and so can anticipate their pre-planned platform shifts from theater screen to TV screen to computer monitor or even phone.

Additionally, these tech specs open onto both directors' contrasting aesthetic rationales for shooting their works in black-and-white in the first place. For Cuarón, Roma was always meant to be a digital black-and-white film. As he describes in a Vimeo interview for Alexa Cameras:

Original ideas, those are the seeds of your project. You don't question them. You know, it's in black and white. It was black and white [ . . . ] The process was going to be about memory. The present looking to the past on black and white.8

Based on these remarks, the director's use of a modern theatrical widescreen format makes sense, since his black-and-white film was never meant to look old-fashioned per se. Instead, Cuarón considered black-and-white to be the most appropriate medium through which to screen his present-day workings-through of the past. It is for this same reason that he avoided shooting in analog.

I was clear that I didn't want to shoot in film. I love film, but being in black and white I was afraid that it was going to give a nostalgic element to the film [...] and because this is a film that is a vision of the present looking at the past so that is the reason that I took the most contemporary tools that were available. That is 65 mm. To create photography that is in black and white, but that is pristine without any grain. With great resolution.9

Roma's black-and-whiteness was not, therefore, treated as a quality of the cinematic image itself, but of the cinematic screen, which it formally repeats ("the past on black and white.") Put differently, black-and-whiteness functioned as a contemporary mnemonic filter on the past, and Cuarón sought to keep it from appearing as either a timeworn image or a historical form of cinema so as to avoid nostalgia.

Unlike Cuarón, Pawlikowski chose to shoot Cold War in digital black-and-white only after some delay. The director had first intended to use color, analog film, but for reasons of financing, ended up opting for digital, instead. His cinematographer, Łukasz Żal, describes the shift from color to black-and-white in an interview with the French Society of Cinematographers (AFC):

Because [Cold War] was strongly anchored in a specific historical era and places (Paris, Berlin, etc.) we watched plenty of documentary images and archival footage. For example, the choice of shooting in black-and-white was made during that preparatory period. We were considering colour at first, but we couldn't find the right palette and it struck us that we would have been stuck with a look resembling a GDR's Orwo film stock. Unlike America [ . . . ] Poland in that period was drowning in different shades of grey.10

The differences with Cuarón are striking. Cold War's black-and-whiteness functions as a historical representation of the past, which the director understood as having already been colorless, rather than as a present-day representational screen. Unlike Cuarón, Pawlikowski meant for his usage of black-and-white to underline his work's relationship to an earlier visual archive of filmic materials, be they canonical works of cinema (the French New Wave) or more quotidian artifacts (such as documentary footage). Instead of defeating nostalgia through a make-it-new approach to the contemporary black-and-white picture, Cold War registers its cinematic past-ness as explicitly as possible so as to determine whether or not it can withstand comparison to it. Finally, the black-and-white format was not a fixed idea for Pawlikowski's film prior to its execution, but only came about as result of pre-production self-criticism so as to avoid the appearance of Soviet-era kitsch.

Beyond indicating the contrasting functions of black-and-whiteness in Roma and Cold War — one mnemonic, the other film historical — Żal and Cuarón's quotes also register the intensity of both directors' auteurism. For Cuarón, this meant an unrelenting exactitude. As he recounts in an interview with Variety magazine, "At the beginning you're so concerned that the characters need to look right, and is the costume right; is that the right sweater [...] It was beyond surreal. There were moments that it was painful, to be honest."11 What the director seems to be describing here is the pain of subjecting one's personal past to a cinematic archaeology. This is because Roma tells the story of Cleo, an indigenous-Mexican maid to a white, middle-class Mexican household, whose experiences are based loosely on those of Cuarón's own childhood. The director even dedicated his film to his nanny Liboria Rodriguez, whom he interviewed over the course of the work's production to help him reconstruct their shared past.12

Cuarón's forensic approach to his childhood complicates his earlier association of the black-and-white format with the operations of memory. Roma does not formalize memory as a personal, subjective point of view, but rather as an objectified, semi-autonomous externalization of disparate memory images. The director admits as much in his revision of a statement by writer Jorge Luis Borges:

Borges talks about how memory is an opaque, shattered mirror, but I see it more as a crack in the wall. The crack is whatever pain happens in the past. We tend to put several coats of paint over it, trying to cover that crack. But it's still there.13

This quote helps explain why Cuarón refused any intrusion of analog graininess into his film's camera-work. Memory, for the director, is not in itself an enigmatic patchwork of partial images that an artist must then re-interpret into some new aesthetic whole; it is, instead, an indelible trace of the past in the present, which the director is obliged to develop with the greatest possible clarity and exactitude.

As such, Roma does not end up telling a story of Cuarón's childhood or his nanny's life as he himself remembers it, and instead creates a prosthetic form of cinematic memory capable of capturing overlooked details with enlightened hindsight. The clearest instance of such mnemonic prosthesis is found in the film's bilingualism, which translates the Mixteco language spoken by Cleo and other indigenous characters on the screen with subtitles. But we also learn from the film itself that this language was unintelligible to young Cuarón in a scene where a toddler demands with childish indignation that Cleo speak in Spanish so that he may understand her. Roma's memory-work is, therefore, not even all that memory-like in its final appearance, since Cuarón opted to shoot the film from a vantage point in which all of the incidents of the past could interlock with fabulous clarity. It is for this same reason that Roma, which is so clearly pre-occupied with race- and class-based antagonisms, ends up depicting a social world that appears contradiction-less. Here again, the director's usage of side panning is instructive, since the technique functions in Roma to suture unrelated incidents contained within a given shot's widescreen panorama. In one instance, Cuarón's camera pans leftward away from a fairground scene in the middle distance; as he does so, an anonymous circus performer shoots out of a cannon in the same direction as his camera's pan. This cannon-firing bears no meaningful relationship to Roma's narrative, and yet it conforms with explosive salience to the film's central movements and rhythms. Similar instances of only apparent contingency recur throughout the film. They range in significance from the background happenstance of water splashing off of a retracting storefront awning to the pivotal re-appearance of Cleo's para-military ex-lover, Fermin, in the same department store in which she shops for their baby's crib. Nothing—not even the breakout of a political riot—appears out of step with Roma's formalist re-description of its social conflicts as interpersonal ones.

Ultimately, Cuarón's underlying association of his film's format with memory is either aesthetically trivial or incoherent. By trivial, I mean that if the film's black-and-whiteness really were meant to function as a visual cue for its retrospective orientation, then it would serve as a literal-minded metaphor for how films always inevitably appear to us, anyway. Just try to imagine a color film that would be capable of thwarting the medium's intrinsic temporal conditions on the basis of its being in color and you will get my point. By incoherent, I mean that if Cuarón's true aim was to reveal a memory image of his past that would bear a likeness to an indelible crack in the wall, then it is unclear how his use of black-and-whiteness as an Instagram-style filter could do anything more than replace one layer of paint partially obscuring that crack with some other. Based on the director's own descriptions, it seems more accurate to describe the film as a consolatory image of Cuarón's past as he wished he could have remembered it. This aesthetic concern for personal consolation has political ramifications, since it ends up falsifying the film's central social relations.

Consider, in this latter regard, the movie's climactic image of Cleo being embraced by her newly divorced employer and the children whom she cares for. The housekeeper has just saved two of the kids from drowning in a riptide. It is only now, after this harrowing experience, that she breaks down in grief, confessing to having never wanted the child that she had given birth to stillborn. The family responds by showering her with hugs and declarations of their love. In this shot, Cuarón assembles his actors into a pyramid such that their embrace looks as if it were intended for someone else to behold. This theatrical image supports Cleo's exceptional declaration of desire, but only in the past negative — what she did not want and so what history took from her against, but now not against, her will — all while enmeshing her further in a labor relation transcended by her employer's (and now also her audience's) good feelings. Roma concludes with Cleo gaining a room of her own in her employer's household, and, therefore, with her earning more love, but not more wages, or if she does receive a raise, then by earning more money while her fellow maids continue to be exploited. The household has changed. It remains just the same.

In all, I find Roma far less compelling than Cold War, even though Pawlikowski was no less pre-occupied with his on-camera minutia and with human sentiment than was Cuarón. As Żal puts things:

With Pawel every scene is like a little film in itself on a micro level. Every layer of the scene has its own spontaneous rhythm and life, yet nothing is unintentional [ . . . ] [T]ons of things are happening in the background and every detail revels [sic] a piece of the secluded world the characters have found themselves in.14

For Pawlikowski, too, Cold War represented a deeply personal work, having been inspired in part by his parents. The film recounts the turbulent romance of Wiktor, a pianist/composer, and Zula, a singer/dancer, as they shuttle back and forth between the Second and First Worlds. But unlike Cuarón, Pawlikowski intended for certain incidents in his movie to contribute to the appearance of secluded worlds and to withdraw from comprehensibility. Early on, for instance, as Wiktor and his creative partner Irena and the party functionary Lech are all still traveling the Polish countryside to collect examples of folk music, Lech interrupts their listening to ask in which language the singers are performing. When his companions confirm that the tune is in Lemko, he sighs, "It's beautiful. Shame it isn't ours." To this, Irena bristles, "Whether or not it's ours is none of your business." Her retort means two things at once. First, as a choreographer who treats traditional song and dance with a curmudgeon's fidelity, Irena believes that works of art are valuable as things in themselves, and not because they are ours or are made for us. Second, the exchange takes place in 1949, two years after the forced resettlement of the Lemkos during Operation Vistula, and so it hints at a subtle defense of this ethnic minority's right to be left alone.15 In short, this scene introduces the modernist agon of autonomy vs. heteronomy, which Cold War redisposes over the course of its narrative across the conflict-laden political terrain of an Iron Curtain-divided Europe. The prime object of the trio's discussion — that unintelligible lyric — is barely even audible before the film's characters start to talk over it. If this song is not meant for Lech, then it is certainly not meant for the film's audience, either.

Over the course of Cold War, Pawlikowski demonstrates an unflagging commitment to his work and his protagonists' self-determination. The clearest example of the film's pursuit of autonomy is found, somewhat ironically, in its repeated use of frontal close-ups.16 The first such face-off occurs in the opening shot, as the camera pans up from the ground and then locks in on a bagpipe player who stares down the camera as he sings of his misfortune. By the next scene or so, the camera angle pivots 90 degrees and we discover that this musician had only appeared as if he were performing for the camera or the viewers, and that he had instead been playing for Irena, Wiktor, and their own audio-recording equipment. Similarly, the subsequent series of close-up, shot-reverse shot sequences between the Mazurka performers and their audiences recall the external unity achieved by seventeenth-century Dutch group portraiture, but they end up developing an internal coherence through the actors' pre-occupation with the on-screen performances and through their montaged relations to one another.17 True, all of the performers are positioned so that they look out directly toward the film's camera, but the effect on the viewer is that of being looked past, of disappearing right in front of an image of one's own ostensible solicitation. Given the frequency of this device throughout Cold War, we can say that the film consists in an ongoing annulment of its apparent address to its real viewers through a shoring up of its own filmic relations.

In a similar manner, Pawlikowski succeeds in creating a compelling work of digital black-and-white cinema by elaborating forms of internal coherence appropriate to this format. The most evocative instance takes place in a Parisian film sound studio, where Wiktor is scoring an Italian horror movie. This filmed film is projected onto the sound studio's rear wall, and is itself a representation of a menacing shadow cast onto another frontally illuminated rear wall. Just then, a door to the studio opens at the shot's extreme left and a ray of light cuts through the musician-filled mid-ground. By composing his shot in this manner, Pawlikowski achieves a glittering continuity between his digital movie's black-and-white chiaroscuro and the filmed film's. This shot could not have existed as such were Cold War in color. An old-fashioned film format is made necessary anew.

Pawlikowski's treatment of his film's digital format is less explicit, but no less compelling. More than just a tragic love story, Cold War is also a reflection on a work of art's ongoing platform shifts, in this case the art of song — one about two hearts, another called "Heart." We hear both initially a cappella, the first in a peasant household and the second taken from a Russian movie but re-staged in a Polish audition room. Next, we hear these songs as group arrangements on Polish, German, and Yugoslavian stages; and then again in Polish but now as a jazz solo in a Parisian nightclub; and then once more in French in a recording studio and also from an apartment victrola; and, finally, but only as a hypothetical idea, to be re-translated back into Polish. In spite of both songs' movements across geographic space, musical genre, and medium, each serves as one of Cold War's structuring leitmotifs, and so each contributes to the film's formal harmony. However, once Zula criticizes the inaptness of Wiktor's former lover's French translation of "Heart," she introduces into the film's reception the possibility of competing evaluations of a work's authenticity as it changes, and so its harmony is not, like Cuaron's cannon-firing, treated as an automatic effect of auteurist calibration.

These songs represent Pawlikowski's reflections on digital cinema for two reasons. First, Cold War frequently uses audio equipment as a substitute for the film apparatus itself, such as in the opening shot where the sound recorder elides the camera. Even the narrative's musical progression (i.e., song collection, musical arrangement, staged performances, studio recording, personal gramophone replay) repeats the protocols of digital film-making (i.e., pre-production research, screenwriting, production, editing, at-home screening). Second, as in the case of the song "Heart," which Zula recalls having first heard on film, or in the aforementioned film studio scene, many of Cold War's audio recordings are themselves effects of some real cinematic assemblage. Traditionally, the goal of a cinematic work of art has been to bring these disparate media artifacts into formal coherence. The goal of a work of digital art cinema must then be to develop forms of coherence for an assemblage that is now not only technically disparate, but which is planned to disaggregate and re-aggregate into the future. Having succeeded in this task, Cold War represents a significant cinematic achievement.

By capturing the grandness of the theater-film tradition without ever depending upon the movie theater's screen space, Pawlikowski proves to film critics that we can still lose it at the movies even after we may have lost them.

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Alex Weintraub is a PhD candidate in Columbia University's department of Art History and Archaeology, where he specializes in 19th-century European painting and the history and theory of media.

Banner Image: Carmen Herrera, Untitled (1952) (Wikimedia Commons)

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