But we feel like Jake is being jealous, making this a tense moment between the two. The pace is slow and the lighting is low-key. There was this sequence showing Jake and Vicki La Motta in their bedroom cut to a boxing scene between La Motta and Tony Janiro. Scorsese also used Eisensteinian visual collisions in editing.

For additional trivia though, its director, Martin Scorsese has stated that he “decided to film it this way at least in part because fellow director Michael Powell, who happened to be viewing the initial (color) footage of de Niro as LaMotta, pointed out that the gloves the actor was wearing were the wrong color for the period.” (1) The movie is entirely in monochrome, except for the opening billboard and the sequence of home movies shot in color. Thus, black and white captures the mood of the period because it shows the way many people visualize that era and the movie also had fight footage inserts in it. RB recounts the story of boxing champ LaMotta between the 1940s to the 1960s.

The absence of color in film is also an artistic and psychological convention of taking the viewers back in time.

Raging bull black and white