The films began in black and white, and in the first decades of their existence they were entirely produced in that format. In fact, the phrase "gray screen" is derived from those early days, when the bright black and white images became synonymous with this medium. Currently the vast majority of films are in color, but some directors still use black and white for aesthetic purposes and moviegoers love the unique aspect that this type of film provides.

Cinema in many ways is based on photography, and when the medium just appeared in the early twentieth century, there was no real method of creating color images. Each film was black and white, although the images could sometimes be painted with colors to provide a certain thematic impression. As the cinema became more sophisticated, the directors based their aesthetic choices on the "limitations" of black and white, and in the process created some of the most impressive works of art. The German Expressionists, in particular, brilliantly used black and white in films such as "Nosferatu", "Sunrise" and "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari".

The process of making color films began in early 1906, but it was not perfected until the 1920s. Technicolor, a method that broke the black and white film into three separate ribbons of red, blue and green, finally deciphered the code. The 1917 film "The Gulf Between" was the first to use Technicolor, and the first 100% color film was the 1928 "The Viking."

Despite the technological advance, Technicolor had a slow process and was often much more expensive than black and white films. It was mainly used to give a feeling of entertainment to a certain movie, the musicals such as "The Wizard of Oz" and the epics such as "Gone with the Wind" were the most benefited. Films that were less expensive or that did not require such an attractant remained in black and white. In fact, many black and white films made after the arrival of color are considered some of the most beautiful films, including the masterpiece of Orson Welles "Citizen Kane" and the black film movement of the 1940s .

By the mid-1950s, black-and-white films still comprised about half of the total films produced. In 1952, a new color process, Kodak Eastman Color, began to supplant Technicolor. It made the color films much less expensive and from that moment the black and white films suffered a slow decline. By the mid-1960s they had disappeared.

Although still a minority, black and white films continue to appear from time to time as part of a director's vision. In many cases they try to evoke the past as Steven Spielberg did in "Schindler's List", which narrates the holocaust, or Kenneth Branagh's "Dead Again", a tribute to black cinema. In addition, film fans rigorously defend the purity of the first black and white films - especially in the 1980s when Ted Turner made a controversial effort to "color" black and white films such as "Casablanca." The results were considered disastrous and eventually he abandoned the project.

The color arrived at the cinema before the color film appeared. Initially all the frames of a film were colored by hand, a task that was complex because of the small size of each frame, and because of the large number of frames that formed a film, in an hour film more than 90000 frames. In 1905 Pathé introduced the mechanical medium coloring process, but this did not oversimplify the task. Due to the work involved in coloring a complete film, it ended up coloring certain sections of frames to create environments (gray and dark for the night, red for fires, etc ...). And other color systems were also used, which avoided having to manually color the frames, such as tacking or overlapping different frames each of a color. In 1906 the first tests with the color film began, but these first systems of two colors, suffered the same fate as the beginnings of the sound film, since not finished to enthuse the great public. But the great revolution of the cinema to color will come from the hand of Herbert Kalmus founder of Technicolor, that patented a system based on the subtractive synthesis of the colors. The color film evolved until the colors were printed on the film, the colors used were the three complementary colors (cyan, magenta and yellow.) The first film shot in Technicolor was Rouben's The Vanity Fair (1935). Mamoulian.