La vie en noire et blanche

"What was the world like, Dad, when you were little and the world was black and white?"
- Young son of a colleague after watching a black and white movie on TV.

When I was a young intellectual snob, I'd only see films if they were in black and white.

I remember sitting for long hours in the cinema, pretending that I fully appreciated and understood the works of Bergman and Godard. Eventually I came to my senses when I admitted I didn't like Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad", and was somewhat relieved when Sam Peckinpah produced "The Wild Bunch" and watching films in colour, even calling them "movies", became acceptable.

I think a lot about colour. I read somewhere that one's ability to see color decreases with age; that we never see colours as vividly as we do as children. I stare at flowers and wonder what the older me is missing, and remember as a child in the Australian bush, marvelling at the many different shades of green that I could then still see.

I love the colours of Copenhagen. Of all cities it appears the most colorful to me. Although Sydney with its sparkling skies contrasting with the crisp eggshell white of the Opera House has to come a close second. Even rain-drizzled Melbourne I remember as having flashes of green and yellow-grey sandy beaches. London is in my memory a brown and grey city, but even so, it is dotted with red busses.

And New York? Like the old movies, to me it will always be a city of black and white and the many shades of grey in between.

A friend told me today that New York has black squirrels as they have adapted to blend into the colors of the city. Even the birds here are colour-coordinated with the buildings. I wonder, is that true of the human inhabitants too. Could that be the reason that black is always the colour of the season, and that the "rule" of not wearing white except between Memorial and Labor days is so regularly observed?

Every now and again the papers here feature articles analyzing the lack of colour in the clothes of New Yorkers. A number of explanations have been put forward - New Yorkers are too busy to bother about colour coordination. Black and grey go with each other so it you stick to that, buying clothes is simple. The city is dirty and dusty and grey is easily maintainable. New Yorkers, like the squirrels want to blend in. New Yorkers are chic, and so on.

But maybe the real reason is that we are all so exhausted with the daily grind of work and the stress of living with so many millions of people in such a confined space. Maybe we are all prematurely aged and so far from the child within, that we can no longer really see, colour.

Kate Juliff
New York
July 2002