Black and White in Modern Film

The first film ever made was Louis Le Prince’s ‘Roundhay Garden Scene’, which was filmed in 1888. In 1906, the first feature film came out, ‘The Story of the Kelly Gang’, which was also the first international feature film. And the revolutionary ‘The World, the Flesh and the Devil’ came out in 1959, in colour. Color has now become a given staple of films, the new normal, when a film comes out in black and white, its seen as different and even experimental and today, if something comes out in black and white today, it mostly has a reason for being (quote on quote) “different”, such as in ‘The Lighthouse’.

One of my favourite uses of black and white, and I believe one of the cleverest uses in modern media, is in one of my favourite TV shows, ‘Better Call Saul’. In each intro sequence from seasons 1 to 5, the colour is slowly draining away, frame by frame each season, until in season 6, the colour is completely gone from the intro sequence, and the final three episodes, plus the scenes set at the same time, are all in black and white. Colour and vibrance are a huge part of the Saul Goodman show and character, representing the extravagant, flamboyant and eccentric lifestyle of Saul Goodman, whereas the monochrome filter of the finale represents the dull, uninteresting, lifelessness of what Saul has become; Gene Takovic. The only time we see colour in the finale is a reflection in Saul’s glasses when he watches one of the old Saul Goodman commercials, a memory of who he once was.

Another use of black and white in film I enjoyed was in ‘Oppenheimer’. In this film, the monochrome filter is used to depict the dark and warped view of Lewis Strauss and his plot to foil Oppenheimer, framing him as a communist; with most of Strauss's scenes being events relayed via conversation, the black and white filter helps to make these scenes feel like a memory, almost as if your mind is piecing together the events by so many people’s accounts. As a bonus it also gives a 50’s TV feel to the courtroom scenes of the trial.