The moment that decided it for me was October 1980. I was watching “Raging Bull” in a theater on Hennepin Avenue in Minneapolis, and there was a scene in which Jake LaMotta had been pinned against the ropes for about thirty seconds and blood was running down his face and off the bottom rope onto the canvas. Martin Scorsese and his cinematographer Michael Chapman had shot the entire film in black and white, in 1980, when nobody did that anymore. What I was seeing on that canvas wasn’t blood. Not the specific red thing that blood is. It was something darker, something the light was drawing up from the canvas and the viewer’s mind was completing, and the mind always completed it worse than the image showed.
I understood then that I had been wrong about what color does. I had always assumed it added information. What Scorsese showed me is that color also removes a kind of distance, and that distance, the gap between the image and what the imagination fills in, is where a certain kind of truth lives. Black and white creates that gap. The best films in the format know it and use it deliberately.
This isn’t a ranking. I don’t believe in ranking films any more than I believe in ranking books. This is a guide from someone who has watched too many films in too many dark rooms and has strong opinions about which ones earn the two hours they ask of you, and why the black and white, in each case, isn’t something you have to get past. It is the reason you’re watching.
If you’ve been skeptical of black and white because you associate the format with obligation, start with the contemporary films, where the choice was deliberate and you can see the reasoning right there in the image. “Roma” (2018, directed by Alfonso Cuarón) is the clearest argument for why a filmmaker working in the age of color would choose to work without it. Cuarón shot his memory of 1970s Mexico City in black and white because the distance the format creates between viewer and image is exactly the distance of memory. It looks like something already past, something you’re being allowed to witness rather than shown. The film follows Cleo, a domestic worker in a middle-class Mexico City household, across a year of private and political upheaval, and Cuarón’s black and white turns the specific textures of daily life, the streets, the sounds, the quality of light on a concrete wall, into something both intimate and irrecoverable. It won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 2019. It deserved that and more.
“Nebraska” (2013, directed by Alexander Payne) made a simpler choice and arrived at something just as honest. Bruce Dern plays an old man who believes he’s won a million-dollar sweepstakes prize and wants to drive from Montana to Lincoln to collect it. His son, played by Will Forte, makes the drive. Payne and his cinematographer Phedon Papamichael chose black and white because the high-plains winter light they were photographing looks different without color. In color it would look like a postcard. In black and white it looks like a fact about the world, something that has always been true and will continue to be. There is more dignity in that, and the film earns it.
To understand where black and white came from before it was a choice, you have to go back to the silent era, and the best place to go is “Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans” (1927, directed by F.W. Murnau). This is a film made before synchronized sound existed. What Murnau and his cinematographers Charles Rosher and Karl Struss found in the pure format was that light could carry the entire emotional argument of a scene without a word of dialogue. The story is simple: a man is tempted to do something terrible to his wife, and then he isn’t, and the two of them spend an afternoon in the city together that feels like a whole marriage compressed into a few hours. What the camera does with that afternoon is the film. The quality of the light over the lake in the opening sequence. The fog on the water. The way a face looks when the cinematographer has decided to love it. If you’ve never seen a silent film and don’t know where to start, start here. You’ll understand in the first ten minutes what the camera is capable of before anyone says a word.
The studio era that followed the silent period worked in black and white because it was the medium, not a choice. But the system produced extraordinary cinematography and the best practitioners of the era found something specific in the shadows. Noir was what they found. “Double Indemnity” (1944, directed by Billy Wilder, shot by John Seitz) is the place to start. Barbara Stanwyck plays a married woman who wants her husband dead, Fred MacMurray plays the insurance man who decides to help, and Edward G. Robinson plays the investigator who starts asking the right questions a little too late. Wilder understood that in noir the outcome isn’t the point. The film tells you how it ends in the first scene. What you’re watching is a person who can see the machine that will destroy them, choosing to walk in anyway. The venetian blind shadows cutting across the actors’ faces aren’t decoration. They’re the sentence structure of the film.
“Out of the Past” (1947, directed by Jacques Tourneur) makes a related argument with Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas. Tourneur photographs the past as a physical substance that follows you through every frame, denser and heavier the longer you run. Mitchum’s face in that film is one of the great uses of black and white lighting in American cinema: you’re never sure, watching him, whether he is trying to escape or waiting to be caught. The format is what allows that ambiguity to live in a single expression.
The screwball comedies of the same era work for different reasons entirely. “His Girl Friday” (1940, directed by Howard Hawks) stars Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell as divorced newspaper editors in a newsroom that never stops moving. Hawks let them overlap their dialogue so completely that you sometimes can’t catch every word, and it doesn’t matter. The film is funnier than almost anything made since, and the black and white makes it feel like it’s happening at a speed that color couldn’t keep up with.
For the international cinema of the 1950s and 60s, I’ve written about several of these directors more thoroughly in my piece on the filmmakers who changed what cinema can do. What I want to say here is more specific to the format. “The Seventh Seal” (1957, directed by Ingmar Bergman) is the film you know the image from, Max von Sydow playing chess against Death on a Swedish beach. That image has been used as a cultural shorthand often enough that people forget the film is a sustained argument about faith and doubt and the specific quality of divine silence. Bergman shot it in a black and white so deliberate and high-contrast that the light itself seems to be testifying. The whiteness of the sky over the water. The black of Death’s cloak. There’s no gray in between, and that’s the point. Go past the famous image. The film earns it.
Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” (1954) is, among other things, one of the great demonstrations of what black and white photography does to water. The final battle sequence, in rain, is photographed so that you can feel the cold of it through the screen. Kurosawa’s cinematographer Asakazu Nakai used black and white to make the rain look less like weather and more like a substance, something the characters are drowning in rather than simply getting wet from. Federico Fellini’s “8½” (1963), with Marcello Mastroianni as a filmmaker circling his own memory and fantasy, uses black and white the way Bergman does: to make the interior visible. You won’t find the story in the usual places. You’ll find it in the light.
“Manhattan” (1979, directed by Woody Allen, shot by Gordon Willis) is what black and white looks like when a filmmaker decides to make a declaration about a city. Willis, known as the Prince of Darkness for what his shadows could do in films like “The Godfather,” turned that reputation around in “Manhattan” and found the white of New York at night. The bridges. The skyline. The way the city looks in the opening sequence, set to Gershwin, when someone has decided it’s worth loving. You may have complicated feelings about Woody Allen. You can still watch this film and understand what a camera can do with a city it has decided to celebrate.
“Schindler’s List” (1993, directed by Steven Spielberg, shot by Janusz Kaminski) is the essential film on this list if you want to understand why black and white isn’t only an aesthetic decision. Nearly three hours, the Holocaust, and Spielberg chose black and white because color would make the atrocity look like a period recreation. Black and white makes it look permanent. The choice says: this happened and it happened and it happened. There’s one moment of deliberate color in the film. You’ll know it when it comes, and you’ll understand why it’s there. The whole argument of the film is in that contrast.
“The Lighthouse” (2019, directed by Robert Eggers) pushed the logic further than any recent film I can think of. Eggers shot on actual black and white film stock in a nearly square frame to recreate the visual grammar of early 20th-century photography. Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson play lighthouse keepers going mad on a New England rock, and the format makes the whole thing look like it was always old, like you’re watching something that happened before you were born and couldn’t be changed. It’s the most formally ambitious black and white film in recent memory, and it succeeds on its own terms.
If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to give black and white a real chance, watch “Raging Bull” this weekend. If you finish it and want more, start with “Nebraska” for something accessible, “Sunrise” if you want to understand where the grammar came from, and “The Seventh Seal” if you want to understand what a filmmaker can do when the format is working at full capacity.
None of these films are difficult. None of them ask more of you than your attention. The black and white isn’t something that happened to them. In each case, it’s the reason they look the way they look. And the way they look is why you should see them.
