Black Narcissus / Great Expectations (1947)

SERIES
See It Big! Best Cinematography, in Black & White and Color

February 24–March 11, 2018

Presented in collaboration with Reverse Shot

Every year from 1939 to 1966, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences named winners in two Best Cinematography categories: black-and-white and color. Released just four years after Hollywood's first three-strip Technicolor feature film (Becky Sharp), Gone with the Wind was the first color winner, while the black-and-white Wuthering Heights won that year for Gregg Toland’s atmospheric evocation of the nineteenth-century Yorkshire moors. This series highlights a handful of years in which both winners are equally spectacular, with pairs of films that offer some of the greatest images in Hollywood history, whether shadowy chiaroscuro or vividly colored.