Back in a 1979 essay on film noir, Paul Kerr wrote
[J]ust as the advent of radio in 1924 had provoked a cinematic trend away from realism until it was reversed in 1927 with the coming of sound to the cinema, so while colour originally signified “fantasy” and was first appropriated by “fantastic” genres, it too was recuperated within the realist aesthetic. Compare, for instance, the realist status of black and white sequences in The Wizard of Oz (1939) and If (1968).
Otto Preminger’s 1958 film Bonjour Tristesse strikes me as an interesting case study for Kerr’s hypothesis. The “mature” melodrama - about a spoiled daughter’s (Jean Seberg) intanglement in her playboy father’s (David Niven) love interests - was structured with a flashback between the harsh black-and-white cinematography of present and the Technicolor of the past. On some levels the contrast is literal, contrasting grimy Paris and sunny Cote d’Azur, tristesse and happiness.
At the same time, both of Kerr’s regimes of cinematic realism seem at play here. On one hand, the black and white scenes convey an expressionistic quality, in part because of the timbre and contrast of the cinematography, in part because of the emotionally pitched yet narratively ambiguous status of the action in them. On the other hand, the shift from B&W to color possesses a transformative quality not unlike that in Wizard of Oz. The past sequences are shot in a more naturalistic fashion (much more fill lighting, for instance), but the saturated colors do signal the narrative’s thematics of artificial happiness.
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