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Color Blind, A GROWING NUMBER OF ACCLAIMED FILMMAKERS ARE TELLING THEIR STORIES IN BLACK-AND-WHITE - LACK-AND-WHITE fi lms are having a moment. The painterly monochrome of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, which received three Golden Globe nominations, and the romantic gray hues of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War have put cinephiles in a heady swoon. Both movies are their directors’ most deeply personal yet. Cuarón has said that 90  percent of Roma, which was shot in his native Mexico with mostly nonprofessional actors, comprises scenes from his memory. Pawlikowski’s movie, which ducks back and forth behind the Iron Curtain, is based on memories of his parents’ tumultuous love aff air.

For years the Polish director has led a peripatetic
existence but never without his fi ve black-and-white
family photo albums. “These photographs have impregnated
my imagination,” Pawlikowski says. Their boxy
format helped inspire the look of Cold War. “I wanted
my fi lm to be as punchy, vivid and as contrasted as
possible,” Pawlikowski says. “I felt that black-and-white
was the most suitable approach to achieve that.”

Cuarón and Pawlikowski aren’t the only fi lmmakers
turning to black-and-white. Leto, by the Russian
director Kirill Serebrennikov, was one of the most
impressive projects at last year’s Cannes Film Festival.
The fi lm, which has been picked up for distribution in
the U.S., is another personal vision: In this case, the
movie covers the nascent Russian rock music scene of
the early ’80s. Other upcoming black-and-white movies
include The Lighthouse—American director Robert
Eggers’s eagerly awaited follow-up to The Witch—as
well as Czech director Václav Marhoul’s The Painted
Bird, a decade-in-the-making fi lm adaptation of Jerzy
Kosinski’s controversial Holocaust novel of the same
name. “I said to myself that this fi lm must be black-andwhite,”
Marhoul says, “because, if not, the color will
damage the message and mood, which I wanted to be as
truthful and sensitive as possible.” —Tobias Grey