If Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma lifts the best picture award, it will follow in the footsteps of The Artist, Schindler’s List and others, but black-and-white films are not always what they seem
If Roma takes home the best picture Oscar in nine days’ time, it will be only eight years since another black-and-white film achieved the same feat – The Artist in 2012. “I wanted to do a modern film that looks into the past,” Alfonso Cuarón, Roma’s writer, director and cinematographer told Emmanuel Lubezki, Oscar-winning director of photography on Cuarón’s Gravity. “It’s not a vintage black and white. It’s a contemporary black and white. Black and white was part of the DNA of the film.”
Roma was filmed in colour and converted to black and white in post-production, with the tonal values manipulated to achieve the desired look. This is how most black and white films are made now, though Alexander Payne, whose Nebraska was nominated for best film and cinematography in 2014, was pressured by his distributors into making a colour version as well as his preferred black and white one, for TV outlets. “I hope no one ever sees it,” he said. “Something about the screenplay, the austerity of it, the austerity of the people and the landscapes it would evoke just felt black and white to me.”
Continue reading...from The Guardian http://bit.ly/2IdCY84
