Schindler's List to The Artist to Roma to The Lighthouse. Why directors are still choosing to shoot without colour.
Almost no commercial cinema since the mid-1960s has been shot in black-and-white. The format is, in production terms, slightly more expensive to shoot well (different lighting demands, different makeup, different art-direction approaches) and significantly more commercially difficult to market. Directors who choose black-and-white are doing so as a deliberate authorial decision, almost always as a deliberate departure from contemporary cinema's default colour register.
Our picks of black-and-white films from the last thirty years.
Three structural reasons recur. First: historical-period registers. Schindler's List, Mank, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Cold War all use black-and-white to signal a specific historical period whose cinematic tradition was itself black-and-white. The choice helps the audience read the period the film is set in.
Second: visual concentration. Black-and-white reduces the visual information the audience must process, forcing attention onto composition, lighting, and performance. Roma's black-and-white reportedly helped Cuarón emphasise the texture of the household routines that the film is observing.
Third: tonal differentiation. Black-and-white in contemporary cinema reads as a deliberate authorial decision rather than as default register. The audience registers the choice as part of the film's argument. Frances Ha's black-and-white signals that Baumbach is making a film about contemporary Brooklyn in a deliberate-art-cinema register rather than as conventional indie.