It’s almost time to make my annual pilgrimage to the Telluride Film Festival. I’ve attended it every year, religiously, since 1995. Sure, there have been changes. The mountain area has certainly seen a shocking amount of growth and sprawl. Big money continues to alter the landscape and overall vibe. It’s expensive, and gets more expensive with each passing year. But despite these drawbacks it still sucks me back. I love the mountains, the box canyon, the crisp fall air, and (of course) the films. And I’m always impressed with the care and presentation with which the films are both selected and presented. When they did a Cinerama show they actually built a screen to Cinerama specs that mimicked the eyes curvature and had three interlaced projectors ready to go. They also had the film loop that was used on one projector in case of technical difficulties – and it was used for real, not just for show! Last year they lugged in 70mm projectors to show Jacques Tati’s Play Time (1967). And one of my all-time favorite highlights was a special show dedicated to the various 3-D formats (also including 70mm projection) – it blew my socks off.

Getting back to the subject of economics, I feel obliged to add that I appreciate the fact that even my friends who can’t afford a pass can still see free movies in the park at night and that the festival organizers do find creative options for people on a budget who can’t afford a film pass but really want to see some of the cinematic gems that are brought in, be it affordable late show tickets or the dedicated ACME pass. It’d be a shame to limit the offerings to only the affluent or well-connected, for at the core of the Telluride Film Festival is a careful selection of hand-picked films that honor both the past and the present that deserve to be seen by all.

As I approach my 12th Telluride experience and reflect on my favorite film experiences it strikes me how many of those highlights were in black-and-white. Although I’d already seen Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) several times on 16mm, it was at the 1995 Telluride Film Festival that it really came to life for me. The Alloy Orchestra was there to perform alongside it with a dynamic score, and its driving visual rhythm and self-reflexive genius was enhanced on 35mm. In 1997 I was completely captivated by Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin (1952). In 1998 Telluride had a steady stream of classics: Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928), Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Paul Lemi’s The Man Who Laughs (1928), Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955), and Joseph Losey’s M (1951) – I was very sad not to be able to see them all on the big screen and in 35mm. In 1999 they brought Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and a historic restoration of Greed (1924). In 2000 it was F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). In 2001 they brought Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965), and so the list grows and goes from there.

I remember a fun book I read many years ago called Horror Writers on Horror Film: Cut!, edited by Christopher Golden. One of the excerpts (chapter 10) was written by Charles L. Grant and was titled Black-and-White, in Color. Therein Grant makes the argument that “color often robs a scene of intended drama simply by being there.” Later adding: “Without color, the eye, and the emotions, are drawn to the person. To the lines in the face, to the eyes, to the feature often concealed, or camouflaged, by makeup and the set of the head or the lips.” Grant’s bottom line keeps coming back to the idea that there is “More strength (and thus potent emotion) in suggestion than in depiction; there is a difference between being scared and being shocked or repulsed; and there is a vast difference in the reaction of the mind to images bright and colorful, and to images where color must be supplied.” He then goes on to discuss The Leopard Man (1943) and Cat People (1942) – exemplary films, both, in use of light and shadow – and many other titles. He also, intriguingly, discusses the idea of “films that have managed to approach a black-and-white sensibility without actually using it.”

This last conceit I mention by Grant, the notion that some color films can work on the same powerful and suggestive level normally reserved for the black and white film, is not a cheap loophole. In the way that a walk in your own neighborhood during a full moon reveals an alternate landscape that seems familiar but somehow more dream-like, which is a crowning attribute to most black-and-white films, there are some color films that take you to that same almost meditative state. And in my book a prime example would be Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967) – my favorite film of the 1996 Telluride Film Festival.