In 2021, The World Is Back To Black And White

This year, over a dozen films, sidestepped color in favor of black and white. Many are vying for major awards this season — the pandemic-shot Netflix drama Malcolm & Marie, the farm animal doc Gunda, Kenneth Branagh‘s Belfast, Mike Mills’ C’mon, C’mon, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, Rebecca Hall’s Passing, Jóhann Jóhannsson‘s Last and First Men and segments of The French Dispatch and Being the Ricardos. Recently, Searchlight Pictures announced that Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley is going to be re-released for a limited Los Angeles run in black-and-white 35mm. Even if you’re not counting the black-and-white rereleases of Parasite and Justice League: Justice Is Gray or international fare like the Hong Kong film Limbo, you still have the largest slate of major B&W releases in any year since the 1970s.

But why 2021? Why do black-and-white releases seem to come in waves? The truth is, black-and-white filmmaking is a trend, and even if directors want to shoot pictures in monochrome, producers and studios always have the final word.

The End Of Black And White

Major Hollywood films haven’t been made in black and white since 1967, the reason being a proviso issued by television networks saying that they would only purchase color films (most new television was in color by that time anyway). That same year, the Academy Awards for art direction, costuming and cinematography, having previously been divvied up into black-and-white and color categories, were merged, ending the reign of B&W filmmaking in Hollywood.

The transition to color’s dominance in the U.S. had been gradual, and many films since 1967 have used a black-and-white aesthetic. The style isn’t dead; it just means something else now. In the 1960s, it usually meant a film (be it The Apartment or Psycho) wasn’t intended to be a prestige production like West Side Story or Cleopatra, projects where art directors and costumers could let their chromatic imaginations run wild. Since 1967, monochrome became a distinct indie calling card, from Peter Bogdonavich’s The Last Picture Show through Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise and Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, and to some extent, the rumblings of black and white we’ve seen in the past five decades have been indie cinema doing its thing.

Now, digital filmmaking means that anybody can make their film black-and-white for the same cost as color, so the technology isn’t the same barrier it was in, say, 1994, when Kevin Smith had to shoot Clerks on black-and-white 16mm to save money. Most modern black-and-white films are shot in color, then graded black and white — even The Artist, 2011’s Best Picture-winning silent film homage, was shot on color film.

2021 In Monochrome

All black-and-white films now are color-graded that way, to some extent, to harken back to older eras of filmmaking. The black-and-white portions of The French Dispatch pay tribute to the French New Wave, while Branagh intentionally modeled Belfast’s look after Henri Cartier-Bresson’s street photography. The Tragedy of Macbeth draws on film history as well, evoking the films of Ingmar Bergman and famous black-and-white Shakespeare adaptations such as Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, Orson Welles’ Macbeth, and even Joss Whedon’s 2012 Much Ado About Nothing.

In terms of small-scale B&W indie dramas, Malcolm & Marie evokes old Hollywood glamor, bringing a high-contrast, crisp digital look to its black and white. C’mon C’mon, meanwhile, is soft, low-contrast, and nostalgic in its approach: “Black and white, because it’s a crazy abstraction, we’re no longer in the real world, right,” said Mills of his color grading. “We’re kind of in an art world, you know?”

Simply wanting to shoot your film in black and white, however, is no guarantee that it will be released that way. When Alexander Payne was making 2013’s Nebraska, the studio slashed his budget when he insisted on shooting in black and white, assuming that black-and-white films wouldn’t get the same box office returns as color ones. Payne was also forced to shoot a color version of the film.

Black And White Waves

Cinemas always see a trickle of monochrome films, but some years, as in 2021, see an abundance of prestige B&W pictures. This isn’t a 2021 phenomenon; it’s a recurring cycle, usually kickstarted by a string of successful black-and-white releases.

The critical success of auteur-driven independent black-and-white films in the early 2000s — Memento, The Saddest Music in the World, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Coffee and Cigarettes, and parts of the Kill Bill duology — surely paved the way for major monochrome productions in 2005. Sin City aimed for the same type of polished digital black-and-white pulp as Quentin Tarantino’s films, while Good Night, and Good Luck capitalized on the arthouse appeal of those early ’00s monochrome dramas.

After all that simmering, black and white exploded in 2012–14, three years after The Artist won Best Picture that saw Much Ado About Nothing, Frances Ha, Nebraska, A Field in England, Ida, Escape from Tomorrow and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, plus the high-budget, high-profile releases of Frankenweenie and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. While many of these films were low-budget, they enjoyed large marketing pushes that they might not have gotten had the ground not been seeded in the preceding decade.

The six years between A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and now have seen few monochrome releases on that scale. But in a new twist, directors began recoloring and rereleasing megabudget tentpole films in black and white: Mad Max: Fury Road got a “Black & Chrome” release on its Blu-Ray, and Logan got a second theatrical run as “Logan Noir.” Since, that creative strategy was used by Parasite and Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

Plenty of prestige black-and-white films in the interim similarly set the stage for 2021. Belfast’s most obvious antecedent is Roma, without which Branagh’s film wouldn’t be having the awards push it’s enjoying now; and films like Cold War, The Lighthouse, The Painted Bird, and The 40-Year-Old Version have kept a strong arthouse wind blowing in black and white’s favor.

Conclusion

Black-and-white films, like all films, rely on studio backing, and producers simply won’t finance a film without evidence that it will turn a profit. That’s why the style keeps experiencing these “comeback” periods — critics said the same thing in 2013. Sure enough, in another year or two, B&W will die down again and return in another few years’ time. But as black-and-white releases continue getting traction, both in terms of box office enthusiasm and critical support, hopefully, we can see more directors flexing their monochrome muscles. At the end of the day, it’s all about the tools you use to tell your story — as we’ve seen this year, that’s easier when producers don’t view shooting in B&W as a commercial risk.

What’s your favorite B&W film from this year? Let us know in the comments below!