(no subject)
Mar. 27th, 2006 02:30 pmI know it's become something of a standard practice for WWII footage, whether real or re-created, to be shown in black and white, sepia-tinted, or very desaturated tones. I never minded too much, because original footage should be left that way, and re-created footage...well, I knew it was just stylized. No big deal.
So I got a huge shock when I finally saw an actual shot of the bloody inside of an LST in the aftermath of D-Day. That one single shot--no bodies, no weapons, just the state of the walls and floor--disturbed me especially. The main reason? The photo's colors, for once, were very close to true. I hadn't seen so much of that bright red before. And it hit me in a visceral way that many other similar pictures of the war, despite the terrible events they showed, somehow had not.
Despite the fact that I knew, intellectually, that the real sights of the war could not have looked like those old/re-created shots, it took seeing something like that to jolt me out of the psychological padding afforded by half a century's separation.
So I got a huge shock when I finally saw an actual shot of the bloody inside of an LST in the aftermath of D-Day. That one single shot--no bodies, no weapons, just the state of the walls and floor--disturbed me especially. The main reason? The photo's colors, for once, were very close to true. I hadn't seen so much of that bright red before. And it hit me in a visceral way that many other similar pictures of the war, despite the terrible events they showed, somehow had not.
Despite the fact that I knew, intellectually, that the real sights of the war could not have looked like those old/re-created shots, it took seeing something like that to jolt me out of the psychological padding afforded by half a century's separation.