Welles and Color Photography

[Roger Ryan]

Tony - I believe you meant that Welles shot CHIMES in black-and-white after it was acceptable, right? Actually, I'd have to disagree with that statement. Shooting a film in black-and-white in 1964/65 was by no means "past the point of being acceptable". In fact "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?", to name just one major studio film released in B&W in 1966, was a big success and ended up winning 5 Oscars.

I am familiar with Welles's quote concerning B&W improving an actor's performance (I would even agree with him to an extent) and I noted in my earlier post that Welles preferred the format. However, I was responding to MartynH's statement that the reason Welles "didn't use colour more than he did" is because he "hated it". Given that every project instigated by Welles from 1966 on that actually reached the filming stage was in color strongly suggests that Welles did not actively "hate" the format. Again, he may have wanted to shoot BBR, TCWR and LEAR in B&W, but the footage he actually did shoot for the remaining twenty years of his life was all in color and this includes some of his most personal projects ("Moby Dick", "The Dreamers") that had significantly less commercial appeal than something like BBR.

Yes, he did shoot his own close-ups for "The Dreamers" in black-and-white, but that could very well have been a stylistic choice to have Marcus Kleek telling the story of Pellegrina in the stark present (represented by the B&W format) with the flashbacks showing Pellegrina herself in the more romantic color format (some of Gary Graver's best work, by the way).

Saying Welles hated color photography, but used it continually after 1965 simply because he had commercial aspirations is like saying Welles hated thrillers, but directed them because they were the only projects he could get off the ground. In reality, the thrillers were more readily bankable, but Welles actually enjoyed making them as well. Likewise, I suspect he shot so many later projects in color because it did have more commercial potential and because he wasn't particularly troubled by the format (and in many instances sought to use it in creative and artistic ways).

[Tony]

Roger: Thanks for the correction.

As for Chimes, it was Welles who joked that it was almost past the time when one could legitimately put out a B&W picture- not me. I wish I could remember the source. Of course 66 was the last year B&W pics could be released and expect any business (until "The Last Picture Show", of course- but that was an anomoly which no one copied), but Chimes was released in 67 in the States, and it really WAS too late for B&W.

I don't believe you've dealt with my main point: that we can find solid evidence of Welles's dislike for colour, but we can find no evidence of his liking it. (We can also find evidence of his wanting to return to B&W as soon as it was economically, in a market sense, possible: after the successes of Raging Bull and Manhattan.)

The only possible evidence that I vaguely recall of his being at all positive about using colour was in an interview with Willy Kurant, who said Welles was very creative for a colour novice, but this doesn't lie (at least for me) outside the range of his making do with a medium which he had prefessed open dislike for; after all, one can't condemn colour more totally than claiming that it robs all actors of 50% of their performances! I guess that leaves the using of colour for documentaries featuring non-actors, such as It's All True.