Graf Oderland, thanks for the picture. However, it reminds of something that I thought about long ago, and that is how the cracks on the film really added some sinister look to the event. There is a lot of noise on the picture you placed as the header, and there is a strange feel I get from it. It is like in those dreams where you speak and the words come out distorted or with delay, or when you try to look at something, but the light is somehow too bright.
I found a video showing a footage of outer space taken from V-2 rocket in 1946. Our planet, that we are used to seeing as a pearl white ball with emerging blue and green, looks very sinister due to footage noise. What else to expect from a V-2?
Conversations between rimland and heartland, or something like that
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That's an very cool clip. I had no idea of its existence. And there it is, right on Youtube. "Kill The Wabbit" by Wagner - hysterical.
You're right. The qualities of "noise," as well as being in black and white, lends or else amplifies something unreal and potentially sinister to those particular images.
Why is that?
I bring up the term "amplify", because I think that low-fidelity representation/reproduction (and that's what black-and-white is - it simply fails to reproduce the color spectrum, right?) can do just that, that it can bring out and pump up whatever intrinsic qualities are embedded in the image. It can work in many ways, not just to inject a sinister quality, for example, but also an erotic quality in other situations.
I'll be subjective here; why are black and white films and images typically so much more alluring, more erotic, than color?
I've been thinking about this for a few years now, ever since I took JS's class in sexual representation. Because in that class we spent some time talking about the erotic image. And he also talked about the image as information, which I'm sure you've heard him talk about before. The image as information to be perceived and reproduced with more or less fidelity.
I'm no aesthetic scholar or student of optics, but I'm sure this has all been talked about before by folks that are; one part of the black and white aesthetic is that it is, literally, black and white. With less shadings available, basic contrasts come to the forefront, and contours are made much more visible. That seems pretty elementary to me.
But I am thinking of something a little more general, something indebted to the idea of image as information. I think there is something in this partial destruction of information (elimination of the color scheme) which lifts the imaged thing or person out of mundane "real life", and on to some other, unfamiliar plane. Somewhere outside of our lived-time and place. Somewhere visibly, obviously unreal to us (at least, those of us lacking the optical equipment of whatever animals - dogs? - that can't see color). And if I may stretch that point further, I would say we have to take part in some sort of perception-related transgression when faced with this unreal, distorted/degraded world. And transgression is the essence of eroticism.
Maybe this is why old movie and old glamour photographs can show so much less actual exposed skin than, say, a Playboy centerfold and yet seem so much sexier or erotic (those are two different things, but I'll let them coexist for now). And why a film like "Last Year In Marienbad" (I'm mentioning it because I showed a bit of it in JS's class as an example of the erotic image, and because I'm fascinated by it) is, for all its conscious, frozen formalism, more erotic than a porn film. Or why when Playboy (or any media of that sort) aspires to "art" in its pictorials, it does so in black and white.
Through this I imagine that I could easily take photos from the very same spots as Ansel Adams, in ultra-realistic color. But they would have nowhere near the impact, nowhere near the artistic quality to them.
The selective destruction of aesthetic information seems profoundly important, even necessary to me. Can our perceptual equipment only handle so much comfortably? I imagine so. Down with high definition!
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