The Face Knife

While I am not currently nor have ever been a cinematographer, I’m enough of a fellow traveler to realize that the term “black and white” covers a wider variety of sins than the impression one would get from reading most reviews of contemporary non-color films, such as George Clooney’s civics lesson Good Night and Good Luck. The confusion tends to come from the mistaken impression that the film was shot so that the historical footage (most of it TV) would blend in seemlessly with the rest of the film, but even a casual observer should be able to tell that the styles are worlds apart, and in any case, most of that historical footage is shown as being mediated even within the movie itself - either projected on a screen or framed in a TV, so that it as much a different world for the characters within the film as it is for the viewers.

The cinematographer could have shot the film in a grainy, old-timey TV look, but instead the low-key lighting and hard shadows of film noir have been used, and one must wonder why that choice among all the types of Black and White photography available to the post-modern DP. The answer is very simple;
Good Night and Good Luck is a film noir.

Granted, there’s no hard-bitten dame but aside from that the movie brims with film noir signifiers - narration, incessant smoking, sealed envelopes, Scotch in the office, a suicide, a boss who might be playing both sides. And the milieu is - well, is there any venue more god-fosaken and savage than power politics?

Our fearless detectives Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly are adrift in a world where moral values are transposed like a television changing channels, and while they seem to score a blow for truth it is immediately recuperated by the forces of darkness. Good night, indeed.