Best Black and White Movies: What the Absence of Color Actually Does

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 06:00:00 -0500

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.

Nebraska on Sunday Evening Review

Best Black and White Movies: What the Absence of Color Actually Does