Zack Snyder, Wes Anderson, and Rebecca Hall Led 2021’s Revival of Boxy, Black-and-White Pictures

It’s March 2021. You’re fired up for the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, better known as The Snyder Cut. After nearly four years of waiting, the director’s true vision for the team-up of all your favorite DC heroes has finally arrived.

But you notice something when you start the movie on HBO Max. The image looks square, with black bars on either side of your widescreen TV. What’s going on? You notice something else. Another version is on the app, called “Justice is Gray.” You click on that. Not only is the image square and boxy, but this version is in black-and-white, too! It’s as if Zack Snyder traveled back in time and decided to make a superhero movie in the 1940s.

Snyder is not the only Hollywood director to adopt a format that hasn’t been in regular use for nearly 70 years. Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut, Passing, is on Netflix and uses the same square, black-and-white style. Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, out now on VOD, switches constantly from color to black-and-white, widescreen to square. These movies have the backing of major studios and feature oodles of Hollywood stars, from Ben Affleck and Gal Gadot to Tessa Thompson and Andre Holland. While nobody is expecting square black-and-white movies to make any kind of real comeback, big studios are allowing big-time filmmakers to explore what the style might do for a modern audience.

A quick history lesson: before 1953, almost every movie ever made was shot in what’s known as the Academy ratio: 1.37 times as wide as it is high. Have you ever watched Casablanca or It’s a Wonderful Life? That’s the ratio those movies and every other movie of their time were made in.

Meanwhile, color didn’t come into regular use until 1935, and until the mid-1950s, it was incredibly expensive, so most movies were still shot in black-and-white.

Widescreen formats and cheap color film made black-and-white movies in Academy ratio extinct in the mid-1950s, but the style didn’t completely disappear. However, since it was now the exception instead of the rule, the format could still be found in artier movies from Europe and the American independent scene.

Why did Snyder, Hall, and Anderson decide to make their movies in black-and-white and Academy ratio, and why were their studios comfortable with their decisions? All three recognized the visual possibilities of a square image, and adapted it for very different ends.

Snyder has claimed that he always intended Justice League to be in the square, 1.43:1 ratio, since it’s the native shape of a true IMAX screen. (Snyder may be rewriting history a bit here.) According to him, the added height of a square ratio allows for the cosmic scale of his superheroes to register with the audience. For “Justice is Gray,” he could push the already heavily desaturated image of the color version to its logical conclusion.

Snyder is not entirely successful here, in my view. By merely desaturating a color image, “Justice is Gray” doesn’t create a great deal of contrast or the kind of detail that movies actually shot in black-and-white can offer. Similarly, if the square image is meant to show the scale of Superman and Wonder Woman, he rarely gives us other visual cues to make us feel that. Snyder shoots his characters in the way that most movies shoot characters: with the human body as the main point of interest, rather than setting that body into an environment. Scale is lost, and with it, the awe that Snyder wants to invoke.

If Snyder was looking to add height to the Snyder Cut, Hall wanted to subtract width in Passing. As she put it, she wanted her characters to feel “constrained.” The story of two women in 1920s Harlem struggling with their racial identities is perfect for such an approach. Hall emphasizes this constraint by framing her characters in doorways, hallways, and windows. The outside world is always boxing them in, just as racism has confined the way that they see themselves.

Black-and-white also manages to abstract the image, and blur the perception of the characters’ physical appearance. Clare (Ruth Negga) has been passing as a white woman for decades; Irene (Thompson) has tried it, and is both seduced and repulsed by Clare’s behavior. Hall blows out the image so that the women’s skin tones are never stable. As Hall put it, “black-and-white isn’t actually black-and-white. It’s thousands of shades of gray, just like everything else.”

Anderson is well versed in using Academy ratio from his experience on his previous live-action feature, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and his approach to the frame in The French Dispatch doesn’t alter much from the earlier movie. What he adds to it is by using black-and-white as his base palette, and then switching to color as a tool of emphasis.

The French Dispatch tells several stories set in a fantastical, New Yorker-inspired France, and a couple of them are specifically about artistic pleasure making the world a more exciting place. Much like The Wizard of Oz, the sudden injections of color into Anderson’s stories bring the sensations of experiencing a beautiful painting—or of enjoying a transcendent meal—to thrilling life. The black-and-white moments are drab reality, allowing for color to be glorious, ecstatic truth.

Even though all three filmmakers had different goals, the ways in which Snyder uses black-and-white and the square aspect ratio almost as an afterthought in “Justice is Gray”, while Hall incorporates both into every storytelling decision in Passing, are striking. Anderson, meanwhile, uses black-and-white as the next piece of his elaborate stylistic puzzle to help make his color shots even more breathtaking, and thus more Anderson-esque.

But then again, as one side of the Snyder Cut flame wars so forcefully argued, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by Snyder’s dullness. Hall’s achievement, however, is as surprising as we are likely to get from a Netflix movie this year. Anderson bending stylistic choices to his own eccentric will is as predictable as the weather. Will their use of square, black-and-white imagery become more commonplace in Hollywood? Probably not, but it’s exciting to see it being added to the menu of options.

Evan Davis is a writer living in New York City. Follow him on Twitter @EvanDavisSports