Why are black and white films still being made?
As soon as the first black and white photographs were being exposed in the early nineteenth century, inventors started looking at ways to produce colour images to make the technology complete. When movie reels started turning shortly after, there was pressure to start making films in colour and feature a soundtrack.
Making colour technology reliable, cost-effective, and easy on the eye proved to be a stubbornly difficult problem to crack. Colour film might have been pioneered in the late nineteenth century, and became economically viable by the 1930s, but even so, the majority of movies were still shot in black and white until the 1950s. Even as late as the 1960s, when colour epics like The Sound of Music, The Graduate and Cleopatra were filling cinema seats, there were still big movies such as Dr Strangelove, La Dolce Vita and A Hard Day’s Night being shot in monochrome.
Refusing to dye
In 1966, the pioneering US studios decided to finally put black and white to sleep and started producing only colour movies. Over the next few years, the medium was all but phased out in mainstream cinematography. But every now and again, successful (or at least critically acclaimed) movies would pop up that were resolutely black and white. You’ll probably recognise many of these modern black and white movies:
● Night of the Living Dead (1968)
● Young Frankenstein (1974)
● Eraserhead (1977)
● Clerks (1994)
● Manhattan (1979)
● The Elephant Man (1980)
● Raging Bull (1980)
● She’s Gotta Have It (1986)
● Schindler’s List (1993)
● Ed Wood (1994)
● Clerks (1994)
● Sin City (2005)
● The Artist (2011)
All the films were made after the official cessation of black and white, when audiences fully expected new movies to be in colour. And that’s a selective list, too.
Monochromatic motivations
Why are some modern movies in black and white when the whole machinery of the movie industry was set up for colour? And why are they still being made to this day? There are some compelling reasons.
Budgetary restrictions
Back in the day of physical film, before digital took over, there was a big difference between the cost of processing and reproducing colour film and that of monochrome. Black and white is a simpler, more forgiving medium to process, and the film stock is cheaper too.
At least two of the black and white movies from the list above cite budget as their reason for shooting in monochrome. According to MTV, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It had a modest budget of $175,000, which still dwarfs Kevin Smith’s budget of $27,575 for Clerks. In both cases, these feature-length movies served as springboards to greater success, although when Clerks II and Clerks III were made in 2006 and 2022, there were no such restrictions, and both were in colour.
Purely creative purposes
The cost of processing film doesn’t really feature in the digital era, as any visual effect can be achieved with a different type of processor. So, making a black and white film is really an aesthetic decision. That said, movies made between 1966 and the early 2000s still relied on film, and there were notable monochrome movies made then, as we’ve seen.
Raging Bull is perhaps the most famous, and Scorsese’s decision to shoot in B&W was partly down to the aesthetic, but also to distinguish it from a slew of boxing movies that came out around the same time, particularly the Rocky films. For Manhattan, Allen’s decision was also creative, as it evoked the New York of his youth, and allowed some stupendous shots of the city. With Eraserhead, Lynch wanted the film to appear surreal, and monochrome fitted perfectly. And for Sin City, Miller and Rodriguez wanted to imitate the story’s comic book origins.
The devastating Schindler’s List earned Spielberg his first Oscar, and was something of a departure for a director famed for big budget action and adventure movies. Being shot in black and white not only set the dark mood for the movie, but also allowed one of the most moving sequences of scenes in cinema history, when the monochrome rule was broken for a single character, a nameless girl in a red coat, symbolising innocence and humanity.
To evoke a certain era
It’s difficult to imagine the 2011 multi-award-winning movie The Artist as anything but a black and white film. Set in 1927, Hazanavicius’s masterpiece is also a “silent” film, although it has a musical soundtrack, so it really evokes the era it’s portraying. Tim Burton’s 1994 film Ed Wood was set in the movie industry of the 1950s, so again, the choice of monochrome was perfectly in keeping. And Mel Brooks’s comedy horror Young Frankenstein was made in black and white to resemble the classic Universal horror movies featuring vampires, werewolves and mummies.
For cut scenes or other purposes
Black and white is also used in selected parts of a colour movie. The Wizard of Oz (1939) starts and ends in sepia tone, when Dorothy is in the real world, while the fantasy part is in wonderful Technicolor. In Oliver Stone’s conspiracy movie JFK (1991), the action flits between colour and black and white to illustrate different parts of the narrative. It’s also common for scenes that appear in the past compared to the main timeline, such as memories, to appear in black and white.
Get your audience immersed
Black and white can be forced by external pressures or can be a purely creative choice, but in modern film, it’s always going to make a movie stand out. Music can also be used for evoking certain eras or setting a mood, which is why it’s just as important a choice as the colour of the imagery. It’s one reason why having an era-and mood-spanning library of production music can be the final touch for your own masterpiece.
