The original black-and-white film holds all of the brightness information, so the artist can paint large areas with a single color and let the original film handle the brightness gradients. A good number of their performances- or at least a number of the greatest, most revered ones- were shot in black and white.
Motion pictures and animated films were black and white in earlier days until there was a gradual process of colouring, including the hand colouring, between 1930s and 1950s. The Academy Award for Best Art Direction was instituted for black and white movies only during 1940s. Television too was originally broadcasted in black and white. However, the vintage black and white films are still regarded as an asset. As well as traditional and modern normal black and white films, developed in conventional black and white developers, there are also black and white films that use the dye-forming technology developed first for use in colour film. This will not work with normal black and white films, and using a chromogenic film can save you twenty minutes or more of retouching on each scan. With the demise of Agfa Scala there has been a recent upsurge of interest in the reversal processing of other black and white films to give transparencies. One of the main reasons filmmakers choose to go black and white is to give it a documentary feel. Another reason to go black and white is suggest a time gone by; it is also the favorite device for flashbacks.
Gangadhar looks at the trend of lending colour to old black-and-white blockbusters in Bollywood and Hollywood WAY back in the mid-1940s, the audience inside a thatched-roof theatre in the small village of Radhapuram in Tamil Nadu clapped and whistled as the Gemini studios box office hit, Mangama Sabatham (The Oath of Mangama), starring swashbuckling hero Rwandan and popular heroine Vasundhara Devi, came to an end. These did not matter to the audience which cheered the novelty that colour brought to the average black-and-white cinema. These sequences looked quite ordinary in black and white but caught the eye in colour. The Indian cinema scene changed fully to colour from the 1960s, though the occasional black-and-white film continued to be made. In the fast-changing world of entertainment, someone had to come out with the idea of converting many of the old black-and-white classics to colour. Today’s movie audiences, accustomed as they are to colour, cannot appreciate the black-and-white movies of the past. The film was remade in colour in the 1990s with Harrison Ford in the lead but was nowhere as good as the black-and-white original.
Actors in black and white movies cannot rely on looks or physical appearances, instead having to use the force of their personalities, their charisma and strong characterizations to grab the audience. Not to say that all of them made just black and white movies, but more people fondly remember Brando for On the Waterfront then for The Island of Dr. Color movies are easier to light and film than black and white, which require different types of lighting tricks (Modern day cinematographers whom have done black and white movies, though, greatly enjoy the rewarding challenge).
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Source: www.ezinearticles.com
