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List of movies featuring both black and white as well as color scenes:

  1. Pleasantville (1998)
  2. Moulin Rouge! (2001)
  3. The Phantom of the Opera (2004)
  4. Winter’s Bone (2010)
  5. Oppenheimer (2023)

What was the first movie to feature both black and white as well as color scenes?

Max Power
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    Whattabbout wizard of oz? Though it wasn't the first to do that either – blobbymcblobby Jul 21 '23 at 08:28
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    If you do the Dark Side of the Moon thing, Money starts to play when it turns to color. – Mazura Jul 21 '23 at 16:50
  • Another example: Space Cowboys (2000) – Zac Crites Jul 21 '23 at 19:34
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    Schindler's List, too. That was in 1993, predating the earliest example you listed. – Deepak Jul 22 '23 at 04:07
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    Memento used this technique very neatly, intercalating B&W and colour scenes, with the significance being different for each sort. – Deepak Jul 22 '23 at 04:10
  • If memory servers, Natural Born Killers also had B&W scenes "randomly" interspersed in between the colour scenes. And Kill Bill Vol 1 had the gory Crazy 88 mass kill scene shown in B&W in most versions. – Deepak Jul 22 '23 at 04:13
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    @blobbymcblobby that was my first thought as well, although calling it "The Wizard of Oz (1939)" highlights that it came out almost sixty years before the earliest movie on the above list. – Michael Jul 22 '23 at 10:07
  • The most recent episode of The Great American Pop Culture Quiz Show included a segment full of questions about movies that mix B&W and color footage. Some earlier examples mentioned there (ROT13d if you want to play along at home): WSX (1991); Fur'f Tbggn Unir Vg (1986); Jvatf bs Qrfver (1987); Qrnq Ntnva (1991); Entvat Ohyy (1980); Gur Cvpgher bs Qbevna Terl (1945). – Michael Seifert Jul 22 '23 at 13:27
  • Also, the 2022 movie Babylon, can be in the list. – Etack Sxchange Jul 22 '23 at 21:45
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    @blobbymcblobby Even though many people remember it as being in black and white, the Kansas portions of The Wizard of Oz were actually filmed in sepia tones. – trlkly Jul 23 '23 at 01:40
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    FWIW: The first chapter of the book, The Wizard of Oz, is quite explicit: Everything in Dorothy's home is gray. The sky, the dust, the house, the grass,... Even the eyes of her aunt and uncle are as gray as the the clothes they wear. The only exception is her little dog, who is jet black, with sparkling eyes. Then, when Dorothy is transported to Oz, the first thing she sees is an astonishingly beautiful garden. The book is not so explicit about the colors of the garden, but how could an astonishingly beautiful garden not be colorful? – Solomon Slow Jul 23 '23 at 14:03
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    Based on the answers here, you might consider asking a follow-up question about movies containing both 1) scenes filmed in color using color stock film, and 2) scenes filmed in black-and-white using black-and-white stock film. – uhoh Jul 24 '23 at 05:34
  • The Australian TV series The Aunty Jack Show had a special episode which transitioned from black and white to colour to mark the introduction of colour to Australian TV. I wonder whether other countries had anything similar. (Probably worth its own question) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aunty_Jack_Introduces_Colour – Golden Cuy Jul 24 '23 at 22:13
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    @trlkly - actually the Kansas scenes were filmed in black and white, then tinted sepia in post-production. The shot where Dorothy opens the door was filmed in Technicolor, with Garland's double initially opening the door wearing a sepia colored dress. She steps back as the camera zooms in on the garden outside, Garland then steps into the frame wearing her blue and white dress. – Steve Pemberton Jul 25 '23 at 02:35

2 Answers2

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If you include early hand colored scenes, then it might be 1916 Joan the Woman.

Black and white silent feature with colored scenes (burning at the stake)

This was the first film to use the Handschiegl Color Process (billed as the "Wyckoff-DeMille Process") for certain scenes. This process is especially noticeable in the scene of Joan burning at the stake, the use of red and yellow gave this a heightened dramatic effect.

The process was invented for this feature and was used for further features through into the 1920s.

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(With technicolor's second full-length color feature release in 1922, that color film process became very popular and the number of technicolor inserts or parts in black and white features increased dramatically after this, replacing the hand-colored processes)

The question is problematic because due to the laborious nature of early colourization processes and that of filming in color being in its infancy, filming in black and white, with colored parts or inserts, was actually incredibly common throughout the late teens, 1920s and 1930s. It's considered unusual today but at one point in early cinema, also coinciding with the introduction of other new technology like talkies, it was incredibly common.

Have a look at these for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_color_feature_films

With this list, you might note the earliest (hand) colored scenes are listed for The Passion Play (Vie et Passion du Christ), released in 1903; but I had not included this as it was never released as a single feature, only as a series of shorts.

https://moviessilently.com/2015/10/24/silent-movies-101-color-before-sound-and-why-colorization-is-not-always-a-bad-thing/

In his book Silent Cinema: An Introduction, Paolo Cherchi Usai writes that about 85% of silent films featured at least some color tinting and toning. Tinted footage could be achieved by either using a chemical process after the scene was shot or by using pre-dyed film stock.

The worlds longest narrative film at the time of its release, the Australian 1906 feature, The Story of the Kelly Gang, contains a red tinted sequence for a house fire scene. This was not listed as a feature with color, however.

blobbymcblobby
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    The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) added a red tint to the film to depict the fire:

    https://aso.gov.au/titles/features/story-kelly-gang/clip2/

     – Hugh Jul 22 '23 at 06:57
  • Thats interesting, aside from that page I had not come across any other reference to the tinting. – blobbymcblobby Jul 22 '23 at 09:52
  • I added it for completeness, hopefully – blobbymcblobby Jul 22 '23 at 11:33
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    I wouldn't consider tinting to be color. You're not getting a greater variety of shades, you're just substituting one color for white. – Mark Jul 23 '23 at 19:56
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Even if one only counts scenes which were filmed in color, feature films which included a few color scenes but were otherwise filmed in black and white were common long before full-color feature films. Examples of such films from the mid 1920s include Phantom of the Opera, Ben Hur, King of Kings, all of which feature a few minutes of two-strip technicolor.

Trying to date hand-colored films may be more difficult, since many films have been hand colored years or decades after they were shot, and many hand-colored prints of films have been lost to the ages. If the oldest hand-colored copies of a 1904 film that are known to exist date from the 1980s, and it's believed some copies of the film would have been colored in 1904 but there is no surviving record of what they looked like, should that be considered a hand-colored film from 1904, or from the 1980s?

supercat
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