My favorite site on the internet at the moment: Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer for Czar Nicholas II, made color (!) pictures years before World War I using an ingenious system of colored lenses and multiple exposures. They’ve been rediscovered and are on exhibit at the Library of Congress and its web site.
To me, anything before World War II has a definite black and white feel to it. To see color pictures of an era before color is simply bizarre—it forces a contemporary sheen back onto long-dead people and situations. Interestingly, it seems easier not to judge historical actions of black and white people; but take a color picture of them, and the morality of their actions, such as those of the Emir of Bukhara (above), become suddenly relevant.
Imagine a color photograph of Alexander the Great in an unposed moment, or a video clip of Vercingetorix. Would we think of them differently? We have such things of Hitler—does the banality of Hitler relaxing in a color documentary bring the magnitude of his crimes into even greater focus?
New York is being treated to a gem of a movie right now: Our Song. Set in deepest Brooklyn during the summer of 1999, it follows three teenaged girls—friends and fellow school band members—as they each grapple with the challenges of becoming adults.
But you can read the plot on IMDB; what I want to focus on is what is genuinely original about this film: It uses a documentary style of filmmaking, strongly reminiscent of Dogme 95 and its precursors (such as Varda’s Cléo de 5 á 7), but with an aim that is wholly different. Whereas Dogme films use the documentary style to heighten the emotional intensity of the story being told, I felt that Our Story is in fact a documentary that uses actors and a screenplay in an attempt to be even more realistic than a conventional documentary can be.
Filming a documentary can be like observing electrons: the very act of observing alters the reality being observed. Our Song circumvents this trap by meticulously reconstructing a reality, and it is done so convincingly and with so much humanity that I left the cinema convinced I have an understanding of what it is like to grow up in Crown Heights that no “real” documentary could give me. This makes it one of the best movies about New York I have seen to date.
