Black and White Film
I love black and white (b/w) film – the dream-like, yet oddly documentary aura. In her novel Fosterling, Emma Neale observes that the ‘yearning’ feeling of b/w film is ‘The melancholy recognition of how inaccessible and mysterious the past is.’ It’s those deep shadows in b/w movies that charge the atmosphere – watch Night of the Hunter – because it’s the unseen that fires our imagination. Perhaps the effect also applies when we read text (which is black and white) – the brain is encouraged to imagine what the words describe. The early Dr Who had a huge influence on my imagination. The opening theme had me pressed into the sofa in happy terror. Here are the creepiest five seconds of TV ever (electronic music by Delia Derbyshire):
Tags: movies