For me, White Drama was too easily understood, the concept too clear.
Although Ms. Kawakubo's summary for her show was "white drama," its virtue was that it was open to interpretation.
What emerged most strongly was Britten's mastery of this demanding art: time and again one marvelled at the way his arrangements serve, celebrate, and intensify the poetry, and never more powerfully than in his great 'Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac', which these wonderful singers and their excellent accompanist James Baillieu turned into white-hot drama.
Other critics argue that film noir is but an arbitrary designation for a multitude of dissimilar black-and-white dramas of the late 1940s and early '50s.
Not only the film's director, Robert Mulligan, but also its screenwriter, Horton Foote, and its producer, the future director Alan J. Pakula, came to the movies from the world of 1950's live television, and "To Kill a Mockingbird" has something of the feel of the urgent, naturalistic black-and-white dramas of that period.
Director Derek Cianfrance made a promising debut in 1998 with his rather stylised black-and-white drama Brother Tied.
This black-and-white drama, set in Naples and employing documentary techniques, stars Rod Steiger as an unscrupulous property developer who gains control of the city's planning department.
This year, for instance, Alexander Payne's Nebraska - a bleak black-and-white drama about a doomed dreamer in recession-hit America - finds itself bracketed in the comedy/musical section.
The outcome was "Twentyfourseven," a moody black-and-white drama starring Bob Hoskins as a homeless man who resuscitates a moribund boxing club for aimless teens.
"Gunsmoke," which began in 1952 as a radio show with William Conrad, landed on the CBS television network as a half-hour black-and-white drama set in a raw Kansas town in 1873.
Shot on a modest budget of $60,000, that film was an abrasively chiaroscuro black-and-white drama about a maths genius pushing his intellect to the limit and suffering nightmare delusions as a result.
