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A Maestro For All Times
Why the look of excellent storytelling shouldn’t be perfect
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
— Marcel Proust
If you’ve seen The Mother and the Whore by Jean Eustache, you might recall the film looks green. It’s a black and white film with green. There’s a green tint in the coloring of the transfer, like oxidized copper or something. A greenness.
You might think Hey, shouldn’t this movie be remastered?
Maybe it will be and they’ll get rid of the green. Or maybe Eustache wanted that oxidized look. But you can tell — no, it wasn’t Eustache. It’s not meant to look like that. Something’s amiss.
The early part of Maestro comprises a nest of black-and-white episodes that introduce us to the wonderful chemistry of Fiona and Leonard, bringing us from meeting through courtship to coupling. It’s a sweet, unsentimental message, memorable for the delivery of its frenetic communications.
Though the look of the black and white is distracting. Digital is crisp, too clean, and artificial. Whereas celluloid transferred to the screen was kind of grainy and rich in definition, there’s a flatness, a sort of sterile clarity to the quality of the black-and-white we get with digital shooting.
Digital shooting ripped some of the mystery out of David Lynch.
If everybody spoke Spanish, they wouldn’t need to translate The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie into Russian or English, but I have English subtitles at the bottom of the screen. They don’t have to be there, though to convey their message to speakers of other languages, subtitles are included so Russian and English viewers who don’t speak Spanish can follow the story. But the characters have nothing to do with the subtitles — they speak Spanish. They don’t know the subtitles are there. Digital black-and-white is there, but it doesn’t need to be there. The characters don’t know they’re black and white-they see themselves in color.
Digital stock could have a grainy-rich appearance and be lit differently, so there’s a darker contrast. Though the digital clarity of the black-and-white scenes is distracting, in the moment, it doesn’t devalue the integrity of…
