> You can't update the medium and not lose the essence of the piece.
I don't find this argument compelling at all. If the director at the time had color film and sound, he certainly would have used them. After all, how many silent films have been made after 1930? 2? B+W persisted for a while because it was so much cheaper than color film, but now that that differential has gone away, how many movies are released in B+W? 1 every 5 years? Even film noir is done in color today.
Yes it's a technical limitation which he would not have chosen today. I agree.
In the silent era they had to work around the missing technology and that affects acting style, story points, the pacing, lighting, set design etc. This created silent film. To reverse those creative decisions you need to redo lot more than color and sound.
Even today when you shoot b+w movies and probably use color camera you light it totally different. Just simply desaturating the image does not work.
The examples in Reddit's colorizedhistory subreddit show how good and effective colorization is. It doesn't have to be effective, and those colorized pictures don't quite look like color photography, but things don't have to be perfect to be a huge improvement.
I don't find this argument compelling at all. If the director at the time had color film and sound, he certainly would have used them. After all, how many silent films have been made after 1930? 2? B+W persisted for a while because it was so much cheaper than color film, but now that that differential has gone away, how many movies are released in B+W? 1 every 5 years? Even film noir is done in color today.