Is black-and-white the new color? It was looking that way when the American Society of Cinematographers placed two B&W films, Belfast and The Tragedy of Macbeth, on its list of the year’s five best—but the Academy dropped Belfast and only went with one monochrome film, Macbeth, making it the fifth B&W film to be nominated for cinematography in the last four years. (Or maybe it went with one-and-a-half such films, since Nightmare Alley exists in both color and black-and-white versions.) That’s still a lot, considering that only 12 such films had been nominated since the Academy killed its separate Best Black-and-White Cinematography category in 1967—but in bypassing Belfast, Passing and C’mon C’mon, the Cinematographers Branch suggested that it likes a full palette, too.
Greig Fraser, Dune
In sheer size, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s mammoth sci-fi novel dwarfs almost every other 2021 film—but that’s not why Fraser wanted the gig. “What drew me to this story and appealed to me about Denis’ take is that he didn’t talk about scale,” Fraser said. “World-building happens in the background—what’s leading the charge are the characters.” In the vast, scorching outdoor scenes in the desert, he tried to rely on natural light as much as possible; in the almost-as-vast indoor scenes set inside a bunker-like fortress designed to keep out the sun, he tried to make it look as if the action was lit by small slits of light.
Dan Laustsen, Nightmare Alley
Creating the shadowy film noir world of Guillermo del Toro’s dark drama required painstaking work, according to D.P. Laustsen. “The light has to be specific, they have to hit the light, and if you’re five centimeters to the right or left, you’re off,” he said. “But when it works, it’s amazing.” As for the black-and-white verion of the film, which also received a theatrical release, “It’s another look. It’s another movie.”
Ari Wegner, The Power of the Dog
Working with light, Wegner said, is “like science and art in one art form.” For Jane Campion’s Western set in the 1920s, she drew from the colors of the West—”the grass, the cattle and their color, the browns and the blacks, the leather of the saddles, and the timber of the barn and the dust”—but also expanded the palette in a secret willow glade that pops with vibrant greens. All of this, she added, was part of an effort to explore the characters’ repressed emotions. “Whether that’s loneliness or longing or shame or confusion—everyone’s making a huge effort to keep all that inside.”
Bruno Delbonnel, The Tragedy of Macbeth
For this Shakespeare adaptation filmed entirely on a dramatic, shadowy soundstage, six-time nominee Delbonnel and director Joel Coen had an easy choice of format. “Black-and-white brings with it an element of abstraction,” Delbonnel said. “It disconnects you from reality in interesting ways, and we liked that idea for this.” Influences ranged from German Expressionism to The Passion of Joan of Arc, from The Night of the Hunter to previous takes on Macbeth by Orson Wells and Akira Kurosawa.
Janusz Kaminski, West Side Story
Kaminski has won two Oscars and been nominated six times, with both wins (Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan) and five of the six nominations coming for films by Steven Spielberg. “Between shooting the streets of New York with anamorphic angles you didn’t think they made anymore to finding a color palette that perfectly captures the way Technicolor and Kodachrome made us all remember the 1950s, Kaminski gives the film an old-Hollywood look that also feels fresh and dynamic,” wrote TheWrap’s Alonso Duralde in his review.
Steve’s Perspective
This could be a race between the stark monochrome of The Tragedy of Macbeth, the showiest and most dramatic of the nominees; the beauty of The Power of the Dog, the most sweeping; and the scale of Dune, the biggest. Macbeth is probably the dark horse of the three, though the American Society of Cinematographers could well go for it. Oscars voters, though, are more likely to make history with Power or salute the oversized achievement of Dune, the last of which might be the likeliest outcome.
