Black-and-White Filmmaking in a Colorful World

“Artsy. Pretentious. Old fashioned. Boring. Period look. Outdated. Rich. Simple. Silent movie. Horror. Film noir."

In the world of film and television production, those are some of the adjectives you’ll generally get when you mention the words “black and white.” What’s intriguing to note is that often the types of responses you get depend on the age of the person talking. (Of course, the responses also depend on how much media a particular group consumes.) In general, younger audiences have much less association with black-and-white footage, and it may appear as a novelty to them.

Audiences a bit older will have some recollections of watching black-and-white television when they were a kid. This is the category I fit into. As a kid in the 1980s, I had a 13-inch black-and-white television in my room, while my family had a massive 19-inch color set in the living room. If you go back to an older audience, they may have experienced a lot more black-and-white television and have seen black-and-white films in the theater.

But why do filmmakers continue to experiment with black and white? One reason is that it can appear more visually