Additionally, monochrome helps express nostalgia as it links the time period and deepen the audience’s immersion in a movie’s historical context. The lighting and contrast also enhances the brutality of the violent scenes especially if it comes across as film noir style. Hence, using black and white heightens the impact of RB and Pi’s violence.
Therefore, black and white gives off a subdued tone in dealing with bloody scenes. (2) Also, “sponges filled with fake blood were inserted into the boxing gloves, spraying the fighters and the ropes with amounts of fluid previously unseen in a sports movie.” (3) In Pi, however, Max burns the paper with the number and casually performs a trepanning on himself in the right cerebral hemisphere with a power drill. Trivia: Hershey’s chocolate sauce was used for blood in this movie.
However, because it’s in monochrome, we are not distracted by its color especially if we see the boxers with a cut profusely bleeding in close-up during a fistfight. The fight scenes, both inside and outside the ring, in RB, involve blood. Violence is also showcased in both films. As Eisenstein would have it, these two shots, when combined, create a new meaning altogether. We move jarringly from a slow to a fast pace, from peace to loudness, from stillness to motion and from restrained violence to clear-cut violence. And the cut is accurately timed with the first punch and we hear a rowdy crowd. (see below) Then suddenly, it cuts to an extreme close-up of a boxer getting punched twice in the face, might be Janiro. But we feel like Jake is being jealous, making this a tense moment between the two. The pace is slow and the lighting is low-key. There was this sequence showing Jake and Vicki La Motta in their bedroom cut to a boxing scene between La Motta and Tony Janiro. Scorsese also used Eisensteinian visual collisions in editing. For additional trivia though, its director, Martin Scorsese has stated that he “decided to film it this way at least in part because fellow director Michael Powell, who happened to be viewing the initial (color) footage of de Niro as LaMotta, pointed out that the gloves the actor was wearing were the wrong color for the period.” (1) The movie is entirely in monochrome, except for the opening billboard and the sequence of home movies shot in color. Thus, black and white captures the mood of the period because it shows the way many people visualize that era and the movie also had fight footage inserts in it. RB recounts the story of boxing champ LaMotta between the 1940s to the 1960s.
The absence of color in film is also an artistic and psychological convention of taking the viewers back in time.
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