High Contrast Hollywood

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 reveal.

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 (1952–62), in films such as Blackboard Jungle (1955), Marty (1955), The Apartment (1960) and Psycho (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 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), Seconds (1966) and In Cold Blood (1967).

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 The Last Picture Show (1971), Bob Fosse’s Lenny (1974), Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein (1974), David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980), Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980) and Francis Coppola’s Rumble Fish (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 Ed Wood (1993) to Sin City (2005).

Julian Upton is the editor of Offbeat: British Cinema’s Curiosities, Obscurities and Forgotten Gems (second edition 2022).

^{High Contrast Hollywood (2025)
Paperback ISBN 979-8-89976-025-9 174pp 5×8 inches
Hardback ISBN 979-8-89976-026-6 174pp 5×8 inches}