Stephen Arnell

The return of the black and white movie – and ten of the best to watch

  • From Spectator Life
Belfast (Image: Focus Features)

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).  Which actually wasn’t half bad.

Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka (1991) could also fall into the category of arthouse pseudery but watching the movie you may suspect that the director is really skewering the pretensions of certain contemporaries. Soderbergh went on to make another, more conventional Black and White picture, 2006’s The Good German

But in the right directorial hands, the format gives a film atmosphere, tone and depth that is occasionally missing in colour pictures. Powell/Pressburger’s A Matter of Life & Death (1946) used black and white cinematography to differentiate scenes set in Heaven (monochrome) and on Earth (vibrant colour), which is of course counterintuitive – viewers may have expected the world of the living to be a dull black and white compared to the presumably multi-coloured glories of the celestial afterlife.

The luminous black and white work of cinematographer James Wong Howe (noted for his use of deep focus, wide-angle lens, low key lighting) in pictures such as The Sweet Smell of Success, Hud and Seconds remains a film school staple.

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