Black and White and in Color
Some early commentary on encountering the new medium, film (via):
What follows is the astonishing outpouring of a great writer’s first impressions on encountering a new medium. Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) saw a program of Lumière films at a Russian fair and published this article in a local paper a few days later, on July 4, 1896. It is written on a completely clear slate, by someone who had not already been taught how to regard the cinema by a thousand other writers, and the newness of it all leaps from the page.
Onto the actual piece by Gorky:
If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Every thing there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, It is not motion but its soundless spectre.
Here I shall try to explain myself, lest I be suspected of madness or indulgence in symbolism. I was at Aumont’s and saw Lumière’s cinematograph—moving photography…
This mute, grey life finally begins to disturb and depress you. It seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sinister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim …
And a modern perspective on this:
Yes, indeed: completely remarkable. Those last few paragraphs, to be sure, but then as well the whole notion—a complete revelation!—that the thing people back in the late 19th century first found so unsettling about cinema was that it was in black-and-white and so unnervingly silent.
