- Joined
- May 1, 2016
I might be misreading what you're saying, but I think Kyle just used the Casablanca scene as a visual comparison of white and black skin in film lighting without intending to offer any further commentary on the lighting in Casablanca specifically.The stupidest part is when he talks about film stock being designed for white skin then showing a clip of Cassablanca. Isn't this purely a matter of lighting not the film itself? Black and white particularly film noir brings up contrasts (chiaroscuro). It's the nature of the technology back then. But there were also black directors and black actors in black and white films then. Even after the advent of colour there were independent black directors who used 'racist' b&w film.
In any case, this portion of the video frustrated me, because Kyle neglected to explain how film stock was designed for white skin, plus the use of the Casablanca example obscures the fact that it wasn't black-and-white film which was designed for white skin, but early color film. In the early-to-mid-20th century, Kodak used color reference cards featuring all-white models as the standard against which they calibrated the colors of their prints, creating a technological bias which flattered white skin but made black skin underexposed.