From black and white to colour: a colour chart of Palme d’or winners

Colour in filmmaking is almost as old as cinema itself! As early as 1895, the short film Annabelle Serpentine Dance was already coloured by hand. In 1917, a revolutionary procedure known as Technicolor would shake up the world of cinema. The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs were among the box-office hits that made use of this process in the 30s and 40s. With three-strip Technicolor, it became possible to capture three colours on three different film strips, then to superimpose them on a single strip to add the colours.

Screened during the second edition of the Festival in 1947, Vincente Minnelli’s Ziegfeld Follies made use of this type of colourisation. Winner of the Grand Prix – Comédies Musicales, the film is about Florenz Ziegfeld, a famous Broadway producer, dreaming of staging a new revue. For lovers of musicals, it was the only occasion to see Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly together on the big screen.

Introduced in the 50s, Eastmancolor would gradually take over from Technicolor. Easier to use and less expensive, this process uses a single multi-layer film: each strip of film is sensitive to a different primary colour. Jigoku-Mon (Gate of Hell), from the Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugasa, is the first award-winning film at Cannes to have used this process. For Jean Cocteau, president of the 1954 Jury, the film had “the most beautiful colours in the world”.

Favoured by some filmmakers for the way it plays with light and for the aesthetic it provides, black and white film was still popular in the 60s. As far a colour was concerned, the decade marked a turning point for artists in search of new aesthetics. The Festival de Cannes was part of this cinematographic renewal. In 1967, the Grand Prix was awarded to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up. This story, a mise en abyme of a photographer discovering a crime scene in his own photographs, is established through very specific chromatic choices. Mauve, in particular, plays a key role: we perceive it within the first few minutes, before it takes over the photography studio… and is scattered throughout London wanderings. To get the colours he wanted, Michelangelo Antonioni went as far as to repaint the grass of the crime scene green.

“Antonioni and Carlo Di Palma, his cinematographer, gambled on making less use of light in order to achieve more realism and modernity. At the same time, they decided to emphasize the colours of the settings and the costumes. These two choices gave the film its visual identity.”
Luca Bigazzi, cinematographer (source: Festival de Cannes)

As witness to the transition taking place, the Cannes awards distinguished two films that blend colour and black and white. In 1966, Claude Lelouch’s Un homme et une femme (A Man and a Woman) won the Grand Prix, tied with Signore e Signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians).

After the cancellation of the 1968 edition, the Festival closed the 60s by giving its highest honour to Lindsay Anderson’s If…. In this satire, black and white plays in contrast with warm colour shots, as if to better condemn the rigidity of the English educational system of the time. This film is not without recalling Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (released three years later), particularly with respect to its reflections on violence and its lead actor, Malcolm McDowell.

Throughout the 70s, colour films became the new standard for cinematographic production. The progressive disappearance of black and white was reflected in the Festival’s awards. From M.A.S.H., Palme d’or winner in 1970, to Anatomie d’une chute (Anatomy of a Fall), winner of the Palme d’or in 2023, almost all Palme d’or winners were shot in colour.

With the improvement of colourisation, certain directors started to seek in the chromatic palette of a film a distinct means of expression. Colours are used as symbols to transmit ideas and emotions, as in the case of Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, winner of the Palme d’or in 1984. In this film, the German director projects a dreamlike vision of the Western U.S. through vivid colours: the ochre of the desert contrasts with the deep blue of the sky and the bright red hat of the hero. Later in the film, the appearance of red creates visual links between the hero Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), his son (Hunter Carson) and his wife Jane (Nastassja Kinski)…eventually filling up the visual field right when the two adults reunite.

The arrival of digital cinema in the 90s and the progressive abandoning of film during the 2000s finalised the triumph of colour. At Cannes, artists have made the choice to combine these two technologies, like Terrence Malick with The Tree of Life.
Shot in film and digital with different formats of film and multiple types of digital cameras, the Palme d’or-winner in 2011 takes an aesthetic risk to put into images a poetic vision of the creation of the world and the arrival of life on Earth. Accompanied by Douglas Trumbull, a producer and special effects expert, Terrence Malick created a lab to carry out visual experimentations.

“Terry didn’t have any preconceived ideas of what something should look like. We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.”
Douglas Trumbull (source: Wired)

What if a black and white film was shot in colour? With Das weiße Band (The White Ribbon), Michael Haneke found a method to combine technologies and colorimetry. The film was shot in colour with film and digital cameras before being scanned and then altered digitally into black and white. The story of a protestant village in North Germany at the beginning of the 20th century won the Palme d’or in 2009, a first for the Austrian director.

“I think that, especially on the scale of greys, there is no comparison possible with old black and white negatives, whose technology has not progressed in almost 30 years… Today, this quality can only be obtained digitally.”
Christian Berger, cinematographer for The White Ribbon (source: French Society of Cinematographers) (In French)