What about Antonioni?
The Red Desert is the worst of his films after The Cry [Il Grido]. The colour is pretentious, quite unlike Antonioni usually, and the editing is subservient to the idea of colour. It could have been a superb film, tremendously powerful, if only it had been in black-and-white.
If The Red Desert had been in black-and-white, Antonioni wouldn't have got high on pictorial aesthetics, he wouldn't have been so concerned with the pictorial side of the film, he wouldn't have shot those beautiful landscapes, or Monica Vitti's red hair against the mists. He would have been concentrating on the action instead of making pretty pictures.
In my view the colour has killed the feeling of truth. If you compare The Red Desert with The Night [La Notte] or The Eclipse [L' Eclisse] it's obvious how much less good it is.
Andrei Tarkovsky, 1964