of the U.S.S. Missouri, my eyes kept straying back to the color photograph of the event. It occurred to me that in all the years I have seen references to that famed event—either in photographs accompanying text or in film documentaries—I had never before run into a color photograph. I chose it from among the better known black & white images when it turned up on a Google images page. As a recent PBS series, something titled “World War II in Color”, makes clear, there is something eerie, almost alarming, about seeing color photographs of the war when one has spent a lifetime with thousands of embedded black & white images chronicling the war. The PBS documentary reveals that the color footage of the war was largely suppressed, or more accurately, “classified”, until recently. In fact, alone among the services, the Marine Corps battles were shot exclusively in color but then released only in black & white versions. War strategists in Washington may have decided that color just made war too real. Of course, they were right, as all that color footage from Vietnam broadcast on new Sony Trintrons in the 1960s would later prove. And as the highly censored images from our post-Vietnam battlefields continues to prove.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
MacArthur in Color
Upon re-reading my post of November 1, the text of General MacArthur’s radio broadcast from the deck
of the U.S.S. Missouri, my eyes kept straying back to the color photograph of the event. It occurred to me that in all the years I have seen references to that famed event—either in photographs accompanying text or in film documentaries—I had never before run into a color photograph. I chose it from among the better known black & white images when it turned up on a Google images page. As a recent PBS series, something titled “World War II in Color”, makes clear, there is something eerie, almost alarming, about seeing color photographs of the war when one has spent a lifetime with thousands of embedded black & white images chronicling the war. The PBS documentary reveals that the color footage of the war was largely suppressed, or more accurately, “classified”, until recently. In fact, alone among the services, the Marine Corps battles were shot exclusively in color but then released only in black & white versions. War strategists in Washington may have decided that color just made war too real. Of course, they were right, as all that color footage from Vietnam broadcast on new Sony Trintrons in the 1960s would later prove. And as the highly censored images from our post-Vietnam battlefields continues to prove.
of the U.S.S. Missouri, my eyes kept straying back to the color photograph of the event. It occurred to me that in all the years I have seen references to that famed event—either in photographs accompanying text or in film documentaries—I had never before run into a color photograph. I chose it from among the better known black & white images when it turned up on a Google images page. As a recent PBS series, something titled “World War II in Color”, makes clear, there is something eerie, almost alarming, about seeing color photographs of the war when one has spent a lifetime with thousands of embedded black & white images chronicling the war. The PBS documentary reveals that the color footage of the war was largely suppressed, or more accurately, “classified”, until recently. In fact, alone among the services, the Marine Corps battles were shot exclusively in color but then released only in black & white versions. War strategists in Washington may have decided that color just made war too real. Of course, they were right, as all that color footage from Vietnam broadcast on new Sony Trintrons in the 1960s would later prove. And as the highly censored images from our post-Vietnam battlefields continues to prove.
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