The famous anecdote about The Wizard of Oz’s switch from black and white to color is that
a whole generation of people who grew up seeing the film on black and white TVs were
never aware that there was this glorious transition.
Films portray the world in color or black and white.
By mixing the two in the same sequence, filmmakers draw a line between waking life and dreams
and can even distinguish between the world of the living and the afterlife.
But in a mostly black and white film, what does color symbolize?
Three notable films make use of color imagery blended with black and white.
In Rumble Fish, the Motorcycle Boy is colorblind and the whole film is in black and white as such,
except for the Siamese fighting fish in the local pet shop.
The fish represent the young gangs that continually fight each other in the street: but the fact
that they are in color drives home the metaphor that these youths that fight each other to
death are just trapped in their own box like fish in a pet store.
To create this effect in 1983,
the fish scene in this pet shop was done by making a composite of color footage of the fish,
with black and white footage of the actors looking at the aquarium.
In Schindler’s List, the little girl in red is in color in an otherwise monochrome film.
The color of her coat draws our eyes right to her, no matter where she is in the frame.
In a violent, de-personalized landscape, this short scene makes us feel that there is someone
recognizable among all the devastation.
When we finally see the girl up close, her coat is no longer colorized, but we finally
see her eyes, which provides all we need to identify with her.
Spielberg’s editor Michael Kahn cut Schindler’s List on a flat bed Moviola, which meant those
frames of the girl in pink had to be tinted by hand.
This technique dates back to the very beginning of cinema.
Pleasantville makes the thematic difference between color and black and white
it’s central plot point.
When the two main characters find themselves trapped in the confines of a 1950s
black and white TV show, traces of color begin appear.
The emergence of warm colors symbolizes the characters’ discovery of art, knowledge
and sex.
The world of Oz appeared as a Technicolor wonderland to a small-town girl from Kansas
...by the end of Pleasantville, the town is both Oz and home.
To show how the naïve attitudes of the 1950s are subsumed by the revolutionary 1960s,
the film uses color to dive into visual metaphors like female empowerment
and freedom of expression.
In the age of digital editing, the process of altering color became more streamlined.
The whole film was shot in color and strategically desaturated in post-production
using computer technology.
Nowadays it’s as simple as doing this.
But whether you’re using your hands or a keyboard, deliberate for a moment
what you are saying with color...
because color never speaks more loudly than when its portrayed
against black and white.