![]() ![]() While as scholars we can embrace the vivid new pictures of the past, we need to be sensitive to the way in which the colors of film shade meanings and shift our perspectives.Īs the event in 20th-century history most scrupulously documented by the celluloid moving image, World War II has always been motion-picture friendly. Either way, the tonalities render a vista whose expression is not just optical but moral. Arrayed in color, it seems dynamic and close. Yoked to black-and-white, the past seems fixed and distant. To the extent that World War II is remembered by way of moving images, our affinity for color or black-and-white confuses questions of history with those of aesthetics. As a filter for World War II history, black-and-white film retains its allure for two reasons: It is faithful to the way the war generally was seen at home at the time, and it is an apt medium for a conflict whose moral stakes still seem starkly black and white. The preference for the more primitive format is more than a matter of nostalgia. Yet for many still photographers, documentary film makers, and World War II historians, black-and-white continues to possess a special emotional weight and instructive value. Reporting on the D-Day find in a recent article in The New Yorker, Douglas Brinkley, director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, praised the search for color footage as the best way “to see the Second World War as it truly looked.” He celebrated Paisley’s desire “to turn victory in Europe into color, which is the way it was fought.” Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, with its graphic color shots of the Normandy invasion, displays a similar allegiance.Ĭontra Orson Welles, the new aesthetic among some film enthusiasts and scholars seems to be that color, not black-and-white, is a better reflection of the past. Some of the film footage was recently shown on network television, drawing awed responses. In partnership with the film collector Lars Anderson, Paisley has unearthed priceless reels of history, most notably color footage of the D-Day landing photographed under the supervision of the director John Ford, then a lieutenant commander in the Navy. Paisley, a World War II combat veteran and former Assistant Secretary of the Navy who has made the discovery of color footage of World War II his life’s mission. The news media lately have heralded the work of Melvyn R. Yet after a half-century of viewing that war through a monochromatic lens, a historical re-visionism of the most literal kind is under way: Its aim is to see the black-and-white war in color - not, thankfully, via the dread deceptions of computer colorization, but by uncovering heretofore unknown color footage. The remark applies in spades to the film footage of World War II - almost all of it black and white, every frame seeming to glow with the aura of historical truth. In the obituary of the press magnate that opens Citizen Kane, Orson Welles commented on the counterintuitive relationship between film and reality: Although life is in color, black-and-white looks more realistic.
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