Connection Magazine


These articles are written especially for Ewell and Stoneleigh Connection, a free monthly magazine circulated to homes and businesses in the area.



In Colour
A unique attraction. Beautiful and instructive. Travel films; natural and national history films; educational films; wartime films shown in cinemas. Films sent to the front to entertain the troops; films to inspire the next generation. A combination of still and moving images. The type available to buy from the BFI, only now they are remastered and colourised. A fact I deplore. (I fear I am a Purist.) Herbert Ponting's The Great White Silence brought to you in colour; see Mallory and Irvine's fateful quest of Everest as they would have seen it. For me this is not a plus. Something to my eye always a little off. No tint given to skin, to clothing, to backgrounds quite right. Perhaps I just like black and white; admire its starkness, its definiteness. After all, I was brought up with it alongside colour. My dad sometimes still worked in black and white photographically; we kept a small black and white telly in the kitchen; and in the holidays I watched old films with my grandparents. Therefore I remain in both worlds, and fail to understand, or to appreciate, this trend in recent years to colourise images, despite learning this process is not new – they hand-tinted in the 1900s. The thinking is – I suppose – it appeals to a younger audience who only know life – recorded life – in colour; why can't their imaginations, I ask, fill it in?