AFTERTHOUGHT
JOHN WELLS
Leafing indolently through someone else's copy of the Second World War in Pictures on Sun- day morning, I found myself fascinated by a photograph of German armour advancing on Stalingrad. The picture in itself was not par- ticularly remarkable: a tank with a number painted on the side and two soldiers crouching on the back, moving forward through deep grass with more soldiers taking cover on either side of it. What made it remarkable was that it was in colour. The tank and the soldiers' helmets were a dark metallic blue, the number 363, painted on the turret, was a rusty red, there were red regimental flashes on the field- grey uniforms and brown macintosh capes rolled on their backs. The grass was a pale yellow-green, and ahead, beyond a smudge of lamp-black smoke, a pale blue mountain rose into a paler blue sky.
What gave the picture its final strangeness was that, being in colour, it looked almost exactly like a still from a war film. The brown waterproof capes rolled on the soldiers' backs as they advanced through the grass could have been given that slight air of conscious dis- array by a painstaking costume supervisor, the thinning smudge of black smoke drifting across the sky in front of them could well have been a smoke effect, and the sweat gleaming on their pink elbows could have been make-up. There was nothing to suggest that the grassy plain and the blue mountain in the distance were, in fact, in Russia rather than in Spain or Turkey, and yet, given the photograph, even out of the context of an illustrated history of the war, it would, I think, still have had an indefinable aura of authenticity about it.
A great film director, admittedly, could probably have thproduced an equally authentic atmosphere from quite different elements. Artists in the past have succeeded in re- creating the fear, the military might, the unspoken yearning for the blue mountain beyond the smoke, and the naked danger of the picture in words or paint with no reference to any actual event at all, drawing purely on their own imagination. But they have been great artists. Why then, apart from our natural sympathy at any poor bastards being shot at, should we feel our imagination gripped and hurt, as it is by the imagination of a great artist, as we look through the lens of a war photographer at the authentic image of a real German armoured division advancing through
the grass of a real Russian steppe, with a real Russian shell bursting in front of them, and real Russian bullets cracking through the authentic Russian air just above their heads in 1942?
The clue, I think, lies in the heightened sense of detail in the colour photograph. In black and white pictures of the war our attention is only held by easily legible details : print, black lines showing the suffering on a face, the cracks in buildings. Only in images of total horror, like those of atrocities, of corpses, or of bodies at the moment of death, is our interest sufficiently powerfully gripped to make us look for details, as we do in a poetic text or in a painting, and to make us try to suffer detail by detail with the subject as we do when we are interpreting or appreciating a work of art. Even then, in a black and white photo- graph, we can only find the outline of details —whether there were leaves on the trees beyond the barbed wire, whether the sky that day was clear or overcast—and never the real details themselves. We shall never know what colour the leaves were, or the brightness of the dawn sky above the horizon.
With colour films, on the other hand, the reporter of those events that bring us into a dramatic confrontation with death, inspiring the most fundamental human reactions and emotions, can from his own imagination'—in the sense of his conscious selection of camera images—make a document as subtle and as powerful to stimulate the imagination of- others as a great work of art. It obviously is not a great work of art, in that the extent of the photographer's imagination was to select that particular image and snap it. It is also wrong to suggest, as some have, that the technical ability of the maker of photographic docu- ments to trap actual movements of suffering or beauty in any way invalidates the work of the artist who dreams a dream and then creates the image of it word by word or frame by frame. But there is still a painfully close rela- tionship between the subtly detailed photo- graphic reaction to danger or death and the sensitive human reaction to death or danger in the imagination.
It is, in a sentence, the inevitability of the details. In the details of a great work of art, the sub-characters in a Shakespearian tragedy, the corners of a Griinewald painting, there is always a masterful inevitability that isolates such works from inferior imaginative efforts. These details may at first sight seem out of place or discordant, but they can all, like Lear's button or the deformed creatures in Grilne- wald's Temptation, be seen to reflect, directly or paradoxically, the main theme. Like end- less vistas of diminishing mirrors, these details show only the infinite inevitability of an imagined central event that was, and always will be, infinitely right.
A different kind of inevitability produces the details in the war photograph. Put there not by the sympathetic imagination and power- fully concentrated mind of the artist, but by the equally powerful mind of developing reality, they also have an inevitability of their own. They cannot be tinkered with by the tentative water-colourist or the interfering property mistress. They happened. The smudge of black smoke drifted across in front of the distant blue mountain in 1942. It was at the time and in the event inevitable. Now the black smoke will always drift across in front of the blue mountain. It has become infinitely in- evitable and infinitely right.
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