Was the art of film making developed with white skin in mind?
July 22, 2015 10:24 PM   Subscribe

I've read that the art of film making was developed with white skin in mind. Are there articles or books that describe this bias in more detail? I remember reading somewhere that The Wire, having to film many scenes featuring only black people, developed techniques to film black skin more effectively. Is that true? Thank you.
posted by I made this account so Matt could have a $5 beer to Media & Arts (9 answers total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
Best answer: On the Blue:
http://www.metafilter.com/150840/China-Girls-Color-TV-And-Racial-Bias
posted by Ideefixe at 10:27 PM on July 22, 2015


Response by poster: Thank you! I am still curious about The Wire specifically, but that is a fantastic link. That FPP also links to two more, worth calling out here for convenience:

How Photography Was Optimized For White Skin
Teaching The Camera To See My Skin.
posted by I made this account so Matt could have a $5 beer at 10:35 PM on July 22, 2015


https://library.creativecow.net/articles/griffin_nick/hbo_the_wire.php

http://davidsimon.com/the-wire-hd-with-videos/
posted by Ideefixe at 11:05 PM on July 22, 2015


Response by poster: Ideefixe, unless I'm missing something, those last two articles don't seem to specifically mention the challenges of filming dark skin…?
posted by I made this account so Matt could have a $5 beer at 11:22 PM on July 22, 2015


There was a movie called "The Blue Bird", in which appeared Cicely Tyson. Quote:
As the box-office failure of the first two versions of this story proves, putting this sort of children's fantasy on film is tricky business, and despite a top-notch cast of American and Soviet talent and the directorial expertise of veteran filmmaker George Cukor, The Blue Bird had a notoriously difficult production, with the American and Russian crews not always understanding each other's working methods, the Soviet camera crew not knowing how to light African-American actress Cicely Tyson, and Jane Fonda often trying to engage the Russian crew members in political discussions. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
Emphasis mine. Miss Tyson has particularly dark skin, and she was the only person in the cast who wasn't white.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 11:26 PM on July 22, 2015


This article in The Washington Post is relevant.
posted by SillyShepherd at 1:30 AM on July 23, 2015


Best answer: Early colour film & colour TV was colour balanced by checking against the developed / broadcast images of white women, and this was a pretty clear example of racial bias in action. (See the metafilter link above) But this is about subtleties of tone, not over/under exposure - the film stock that Kodak sent to different parts of the world in the 70s to match local expectations wasn’t any more or less sensitive, it had slightly different colour biases.

The second issue is that the limited dynamic range of film&print means that if you had both white & black people in shot you had the choice of either underexposing black skin or overexposing white skin, unless you were willing to play endless dodge+burn games, assuming the details was there in the original shot to start with. The contrast between skin & teeth is also much greater for black people than for white & sometimes this exceeds the dynamic range of the film/camera sensor. People appear to have conflated these issues & assumed that they were *also* the fault of the film companies, rather than being a consequence of the limitations of chemistry, print technology & human vision which persist to this day.

As that WP article SillyShepherd linked to says, modern films that mix black & white actors on screen simultaneously are doing so by individually re-balancing the faces of each actor in the same frame during post-processing. The human eye/brain automatically does this in real life by 'rebalancing' as we switch our focus of attention from one person to the other in real life, so the end result looks entirely natural to the viewer. Vastly more sensitive modern cameras are also making it much easier to film black skin in relatively low light & have it look good instead of being crushed into the shadows.

So, yes: early colour film / TV was implicitly racist, but there are also absolute technological limitations in play.
posted by pharm at 1:59 AM on July 23, 2015 [9 favorites]


The article by Lorna Roth that goes into a lot of this history & asserts that Kodak could have made film with a wider dynamic range from the start. Colour prints had (still have in fact) far less dynamic range than film however, so the issues about exposures & mixing black/white skin on the same image still apply regardless of any improvements in film chemistry.
posted by pharm at 2:24 AM on July 23, 2015 [1 favorite]


I bought this book: http://www.amazon.com/Film-Cultures-Reader-Graeme-Turner/dp/0415252822/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1438124808&sr=8-1&keywords=the+film+cultures+reader&pebp=1438124805406&perid=1FN1FCADF2WZ7PQHPCHN specifically for the chapter by Richard Dyer ('Lighting for Whiteness') which is exactly about this issue.

The chapter is an extract from this book: http://www.amazon.com/White-Essays-Culture-Richard-Dyer/dp/0415095379/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
posted by BobsterLobster at 4:09 PM on July 28, 2015


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