ABSTRACT

In 1927, a group of young Parisian cinephiles founded the so-called Ligue du noir et blanc, positioning colour in the domain of the commercial, and black and white in that of the artistic cinema. This dichotomy between colour and black and white in cinema is still part of our present-day film-historical discourses. As a result, the ligue strongly defined our relationship to early colour films in the archives and film museums. To better understand the 1920s debate, I position it within the broader French discourse on colour and film art, showing that there were other voices that declared colour to be an excellent element to use in an artistic way. The debate was not as black and white as our current historiographical knowledge might make us believe.

KEYWORDS

black and white, 1920s, early debates, cinephilia, French cinema

Twenty years ago, the Nederlands Filmmuseum (now EYE) organized a workshop on colour in silent film. Following this event, it published a book called Disorderly Order, which contains the edited versions of the workshop discussions. One of the first topics discussed in the book is the early film archival practice to reproduce early coloured films in black and white, on which Eric de Kuyper made the following comment:

Reading this, one might say that film archivists simply did not care about early colours. But why did they not care? During the same session, Frank Kessler tried to answer this question, connecting the problem to the earlier wish to define cinema as an art form. He explained that film critics such as Münsterberg and Arnheim built the idea of film art on its difference from reality. As a result in ‘early film theory, the absence of colour, and the absence of sound, were seen as specific aesthetic qualities of cinema’.