High Contrast Hollywood

<p>Black-and-white cinema effectively died out almost overnight in the mid-1960s. But in the face of a decade of serious competition from colour and widescreen-not to mention visual fads like 3D-black-and- white cinematography remained innovative and even experimental as it reached what looked like its endpoint. The evidence from a host of films from the mid-1950s onwards was that black and white cinematography was also still improving. It still had places to go new techniques to exhibit.</p><p></p><p>High Contrast Hollywood revisits the groundbreaking black-and-white films from the period when the format was first under siege in the 1950s to those scarce but bold monochrome movies of the 1970s and '80s made when black-and-white had long since become a cinematic relic of the past. It chronicles how the resilient medium fought back during the Technicolor and CinemaScope age (1953-62) in films such as <em>Blackboard Jungle</em> (1955) <em>Marty</em> (1955) <em>The Apartment </em>(1960) and <em>Psycho</em> (1960) and details how black and white came back into fashion thanks to the influence of the French New Wave in striking adult- oriented 1960s movies such as <em>Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</em> (1966) <em>Seconds </em>(1966) and <em>In Cold Blood</em> (1967).</p><p></p><p>High Contrast Hollywood also explores how black-and-white film became the format of choice for avant-garde iconoclastic and maverick directors in Peter Bogdanovich's <em>The Last Picture Show</em> (1971) Bob Fosse's <em>Lenny</em> (1974) Mel Brooks' <em>Young Frankenstein</em> (1974) David Lynch's <em>The Elephant Man</em> (1980) Martin Scorsese's <em>Raging Bull </em>(1980) and Francis Coppola's <em>Rumble Fish</em> (1983). Finally it celebrates the continued power of black and white as it crossed over from celluloid to digital filmmaking still able to captivate viewers in offbeat and uncompromising films from <em>Ed Wood </em>(1993) to <em>Sin City</em> (2005).</p>