Harriet Andersson and Jarl Kulle in Bergman’s All These Women (1964)

Yesterday I posted about my love for black & white films. Today, I would like to redress the balance by talking about the pros and cons of color film. With the new motion picture and video cameras, color is, for the most part, what the camera is programmed to shoot, especially when the camera is digital.

There was a brief time in the 1960s when film directors made some exciting use of color film stock. I am thinking of such films as Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Red Desert (1964), Ingmar Bergman’s All These Women (1964), and—going back a couple of decades—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s Black Narcissus (1947).

In fact, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) has released a list of 275 films “with Amazing Use of Colours.” The list includes some well-known titles as Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994), Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), and Steven Spielberg’s E.T. (1982). Interestingly, there are scores of titles of films of which I have never heard: In each case, some film-maker wanted to make something different and succeeded.

As digital film becomes more prevalent, the temptation is for producers and directors to not attempt anything special. This is particularly true of films released by HBO, Netflix, Hulu, and others in multiple parts. Most of these productions I frankly ignore. Graphically speaking, most are failures.

Even films released as features for the theaters are not necessarily any better. In the old days of the Hollywood Studios, interesting cinematography was a matter of institutional pride. But that was then….