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?