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

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.