BLACK-AND-WHITE SPOTS ON THE MAP OF CONTEMPORARY CINEMA

AND THE DIGITAL MONOCHROME

If asked to reflect on black-and-white films made today, some of us would most probably think of a type of tableau image such as the one encountered in Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon (Das weiße Band, 2011), rendering a solitary, empty landscape accompanied by the voice-over of the retrospective narrator. A still image inserted, as part of a series, into the texture of narration, lingers as a moment of stasis within the moving image. This momentary arresting of time reveals the subjective construct of the past that condenses in its enigmatic tranquillity and fixity the tense atmosphere that precedes World War I. An image of the irretrievable past, a moment of fragile beauty – this is what the photographic still within the film carries in itself, together with the potential of becoming memorable as an image, burnt in the beholder's mind. The Hanekean still may be highlighted as incorporating those qualities that are most commonly associated with the contemporary use of the black-and-white film, namely the evocation of both the past and high artistry. The logic of evocation of the past is actually carried out via the logic of transposition: the effect of calling forth a bygone world is achieved through the mimicry of a past mode of representation and through the quality of the photographic within film. The Hanekean example marks out the terrain that this essay addresses, namely the intermedial sensation, implying the conjunction of photography, painting and film, emerging in the aesthetic of the contemporary black-and-white cinema.

In the digital age, in the spirit of proliferation of a kind of vintage aesthetic, the use of black and white as a tendency to revert to earlier forms of representation has been refashioned with new impetus. The revival of the black-and-white filmmaking is a worldwide phenomenon. Beyond its exceptional diversity motivated by various intents, the aesthetic of the black-and-white image can be traced back to the perceptual otherness that has defined the most realistic forms of representation, thus the rendition of the past – as in most cases the monochrome image is associated with the past – turns up in the form of constructed, artificial, stylised realities: ‘the black and white image is a constructed version of reality.