10 great modern black-and-white films

M

Meanderer

Supreme Member
What is it about black and white movies that we love?

Black and white is the new colour in cinemas this year, with Frances Ha, A Field in England and Much Ado about Nothing all joining the trend. But black and white films have never really gone away – here are 10 monochrome masterpieces of the past 20 years.
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/lists/10-great-modern-black-white-films
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The White Ribbon (2009)
 

To me B&W has always put more emphasis on form, structure and mood. Color can do it too but it's a tough one to pull off.

This list seems a bit too art-house to one who thinks the epitome of B&W was achieved in short features by Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy and The Three Stooges. :eek:
 
[h=3]http://www.infoplease.com/cig/movies-flicks-film/aesthetics-black-white-color.html

Black and White and Technicolor in Hollywood's Golden Era[/h]"In the 1930s and 1940s cost was not the only factor determining which film stock a film project would employ. Hollywood Technicolor tended to be used to make everything pretty, so that the most serious dramas often tended to be black and white: Citizen Kane (1941), The Little Foxes (1941), the entire genre of film noir, and so on.
[h=3]Black and White[/h][h=5]Director's Cut[/h]Silver nitrate stock, on which much silent film was shot, produced a shimmering, other-worldly quality, seeming to set the screen on fire. Unfortunately, because it was rather unstable, it could also set the projector, the booth, and the theater on fire, so that its projection is now illegal in all but a handful of theaters in the country specially equipped to contain a blaze.

It's extremely important to remember that black and white can be just as subtle as color because you can do so many things to it. First, black and white is never just that: It is also all the gradations of gray in between. And silver. And beiges. And so on. When you walk into a paint store and ask for black the clerk (after laughing at your naïveté) will hand you 50 color chips: jet black, deep-space black, Frederick's of Hollywood black, midnight blue, and so on. White has, if anything, even more variations, and gray is practically infinite.
Black and white is the color of glamour cinematography. The most glamorous icons of the screen, those actors who only require last names—Garbo, Bogart, Bacall, Gable, Dietrich—are most famously photographed in black and white.
And, as its name suggests, at least one whole film genre is defined in large part by the fact that it was shot in black and white: film noir."
 

I believe "noir" is a bit more than just being shot in B&W ... it's a moodiness, it's the characters' personalities. It's generally a skeptical, pessimistic view of the world filled with anti-heroes.

So you could shoot Mary Poppins in B&W, but that wouldn't automatically make it noir unless Mary was a former call-girl and Bert a down-on-his-luck PI ...
 
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