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. 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.
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 news media lately have heralded the work of Melvyn R. 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. 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. Some of the film footage was recently shown on network television, drawing awed responses.
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.
Contra 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. 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. The preference for the more primitive format is more than a matter of nostalgia. 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.
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. Yoked to black-and-white, the past seems fixed and distant. Arrayed in color, it seems dynamic and close. Either way, the tonalities render a vista whose expression is not just optical but moral. 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.
As the event in 20th-century history most scrupulously documented by the celluloid moving image, World War II has always been motion-picture friendly. For purposes of morale building and intelligence gathering, all of the major combatants devoted enormous resources to capturing the war on film. Moreover, a surprising number of uniformed amateurs, working without official sanction and often in violation of direct orders, took home movies.
With the end of wartime censorship and the release of captured enemy footage, the raw material for the depiction of the war on film increased substantially. Bearing out the film historian Jay Leyda’s succinct epigram that “films beget films,” footage of World War II spawned a long line of documentaries, a still-proliferating genre that may have achieved its apotheosis in 1974 with the BBC’s landmark series The World at War. Imagine how sparse would be the programming options of the History Channel and the Arts & Entertainment Network without the grainy black-and-white footage, in the public domain, from Universal Newsreel and military photographic units.
Although the bulk of the wartime footage was shot in black-and-white, color films of the conflict were not unknown to wartime America. Popular additions to the motion pictures offered in home-front theaters included War Department documentaries shot in color, such as John Ford’s The Battle of Midway (1942), Darryl Zanuck’s At the Front in North Africa (1943), William Wyler’s The Memphis Belle (1944), and To the Shores of Iwo Jima (1945), produced by combined units of the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard.
Then, no less than now, an aesthetic debate swirled around the suitability of color for a spectacle as stark and brutal as battlefield combat. Technicolor, a three-strip emulsion process that gave celluloid color a bright, painterly texture, was associated at the time mainly with frothy musicals, splashy costume dramas, and zany cartoons. Even when rendering the most-harrowing combat scenes, the kaleidoscope of vivid hues (ocean blue, flamethrower yellow, jungle green, blood red) registered as a cascade of pleasant brushstrokes. Many moviegoers deemed Technicolor too frivolous for the lethal reality of war -- as if the home-front spectator, rather than be visually soothed, should endure the black-and-white severity of documentary realism as a gesture of respect. As a troubled reviewer for the Motion Picture Herald commented after watching a sharp 35mm Technicolor print of To the Shores of Iwo Jima, “The novelty of pyrotechnic display in exaggerated color makes war too pretty a picture.”
Taking this cue, the first generation of postwar Hollywood combat films eschewed color: Twelve O’Clock High (1949), Battleground (1949), and Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) were all shot in black-and-white. Not until the mid-1950s, with Battle Cry (1955) and To Hell and Back (1955), did the splendor of Technicolor and the wonder of wide-screen CinemaScope challenge the grittier shadings. As late as The Longest Day (1962), however, black-and-white was the medium for a respectable war film, even a big-budget, star-studded epic. Concurrently, postwar documentaries based on archival footage shot during the war reinforced the color-sensitive associations by juxtaposing black-and-white footage of World War II with commentary from veterans in the full-color present.
The cumulative impact of 50 years of wartime remembrance in black-and-white has been not only to render World War II as a monochromatic landscape, but also to relegate it to the remote past. Projected in the mind’s eye, the evolution of the moving image has tracked the visual memory of the 20th century: Silent, black-and-white film was associated with World War I; sound on black-and-white film with World War II; a mix of black-and-white and color with Korea; delayed color footage on television with Vietnam; and live color television with the Gulf War.
No wonder newly discovered color photography of a past that was documented primarily in black-and-white induces a shock of the new in many viewers. I find downright eerie the view of Nazi Germany in the BBC documentary Good Morning Mr. Hitler (1993). Drawing on amateur color footage of Hitler’s visit to Munich for an arts festival in July 1939, the film features pristine color photography that looks as though it was developed yesterday at Fotomat. Proudly awash in the florid pageantry of Nazism, a shimmering, sunlit Munich beckons as if in a travelogue vision. Tanned, their complexions flushed in the sun, Hitler and his henchmen saunter by in a sea of dappled color, vitally and impossibly alive. Similarly, Mein Krieg (1993), a documentary collection of amateur color footage shot during the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and shown in several theaters in this country, seems like the work of Hollywood cameramen sent back in H. G. Wells’s time machine, not the surreptitious home movies made by Wehrmacht troops. No denying it: The “fascinating fascism” of the Third Reich is all the more fascinating in all the colors of the rainbow.
Glancing back at this history on film, the wise motion-picture director manipulates the medium accordingly. Consider the mature work of Spielberg, the American director most drawn to the images and legacy of World War II. Besides subject matter, the wartime record dictates Spielberg’s choice of film stock. Shot in sharp newsreel shades, Schindler’s List (1993) evokes the high seriousness of the most widely known footage of the Nazi concentration camps. Saving Private Ryan takes the opposite tack. Playing against the distanced perspective and sanitized outlook of the official D-Day newsreels, Spielberg’s re-creation of the landing at Omaha Beach becomes more immediate and visceral in color -- better for beholding the full spectrum of grisly special effects.
In directing our eyes to the variable shades of history and film, military scholars, motion-picture archivists, and contemporary film makers deserve praise, gratitude -- and financing. However, the enthusiasm for color footage can also foster ex post facto tricks of visual memory. As the black-and-white war assumes colorful tones, we may tend to forget how limited, selected, and censored was the film footage screened during World War II. Struck dumb before the indelible images of the concentration camps, we presume that the Holocaust was similarly registered as vivid and verified from 1939 to 1945. We forget that newsreels with such footage were not shown until the final days of the war. Often, Americans who replay that footage today are bewildered that wartime Americans seemed oblivious to the reality that has increasingly come to dominate the popular memory of World War II.
In the same way, the color footage of Hitler, the eastern front, and D-Day discovered in the 1990s, when edited seamlessly into future documentaries on World War II, will render for us a wartime landscape quite different from the one apprehended on screen during the war itself. That matters, because such images shape not only our perception of history, but also our moral attitudes toward it. Cut loose from its wartime context, the new color footage makes World War II seem more vibrant and richly layered than did the black-and-white footage seen at the time. Most of us still think of World War II as Americans thought of it in the 1940s: an event with clear moral meanings -- a battle between good and evil, the Allies and the Axis, democracy and totalitar ianism. The graphic color footage may change that perception, providing more nuance and questioning of the unambiguous rightness of that war.
By perfecting the documentary based on archival footage as a transmission belt for cultural meaning, American history became a motion-picture pageant, apprehended mainly through the compilation and re-editing of moving images. As that film record grows, the past changes before our eyes. Fair enough: New footage means more information for all, and more raw material for film makers to mold into documentaries. But if one task of the historian is to see things as they were seen in the past, the new visual aids can blind us to the merits of the original releases. Both the black-and-white and the color footage of D-Day are authentic documents of June 6, 1944. But the black-and-white footage strikes me as a more authentic artifact of the time. In what it shows, no less than what it shields from sight, it is a better expression of the values and vision of wartime America. The world of America at war needn’t be embraced uncritically to be appreciated on its own terms.
Not incidentally, in teaching undergraduates -- many of whom find World War II as distant as the Punic Wars -- the original newsreels and combat reports offer direct access to a strange environment, with its own unique outlook. By examining the contemporaneous wartime record, students can recapture a sense of the original moment and weigh the moral calculations of that era, not this one. For a generation weaned on computer images and displays of light and magic, the historical imagination may be better exercised by screening the wartime images in black-and-white, as they were seen at the time.
Ironically, the man who photographed the Battle of Midway and the D-Day landing in color always felt that a director could do more with black-and-white photography. “There are certain pictures, like The Quiet Man, that call for color,” John Ford told Peter Bogdanovich, speaking of his romantic comedy showcasing the emerald splendor of Ireland, “but black-and-white is real photography.” Of course, Ford was talking about cinematic artistry, not documentary reality. Nonetheless, just as the blizzard of white noise on the color-television screen seems to echo the chaos and dissonance of the Vietnam War, the black-and-white prism of the newsreels seems to suit the stark polarities and moral clarity of World War II. Color may be truer to the experience of the participants of that war, but not to the cultural memory of it -- which may be why, when looking at pictures of World War II, the right colors seem to be black and white.
Thomas Doherty is an associate professor of film studies at Brandeis University and author of Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (Columbia University Press, 1993).
http://chronicle.com
Section: Opinion & Arts
Page: B4