Are black and white films making a comeback – or did they ever really go away? With Belfast, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Passing, Mank and Roma all generating critical buzz, they are certainly having a moment.
Even after the advent of colour motion pictures, black and white movies continued to be made, chiefly for economic (lower cost stock) and aesthetic reasons. Some present-day directors have even released monochrome versions of their colour movies, including The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2008) Logan: Noir (James Mangold, 2017) and Guillermo del Toro’s remake of 1947’s Nightmare Alley (2021).
Why is the Black and White format growing in popularity? For a few directors, it can be a pretentious device, a shorthand way to signify artistic importance, without the heavy lifting of producing something of real value. These arthouse affectations have earned justified mockery over the years, notably in The Simpsons, where town drunk Barney Gumble wins the Springfield Film Festival with this touching Black and White movie about alcoholism, titled ‘Pukahontas’ (A Star is Burns, 1995).
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