For most of the movies’ existence, we’ve had the ability to show color.  Nothing personifies the transition from black and white to color more than that immortal transition in The Wizard of the Oz, when the movies took the audience from the bleak colorlessness of everyday life into the beautiful colors of Victor Fleming’s adaptation.

It’s weird, then, that many modern directors’ greatest film making achievements are in black and white.  One benefit of it, besides the beauty you can capture without color, is that it may be hard to tell which decade a movie came from.  It can make a movie timeless, which is good when you’re talking about subjects like WWII and the Holocaust.  To celebrate 100 posts, here is a look back at movie history at directors’ ventures into a world without any vivid color, and how it paid off for them.

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