It is not possible to establish a theory of harmony for the colours, because in such a theory number is merely the expression of an infinite range of possibilities that are just systematically assembled. For each basic colour there is an octave through to a ninth, and so forth on an ever more diversified scale. The harmony of colour is a single thing within a particular medium; it lacks multiplicity, because it is undefined and exists only in perception. A theory of harmony is possible only in the transition from light to shade – that is to say, with reference to space.’

A Child’s View of Colour

‘Colour is something spiritual, something whose clarity is spiritual, so that when colours are mixed they produce nuances of colour, not a blur. The rainbow is a pure childlike image. In it colour is wholly contour; for the person who sees with a child’s eyes, it marks boundaries, is not a layer of something superimposed on matter, as it is for adults’.

‘Children like the way colours shimmer in subtle, shifting nuances (as in soap bubbles), or else make definite and explicit changes in intensity, as in oleographs, paintings, and the pictures produced by decals and magic lanterns. For them colour is fluid, the medium of all changes, and not a symptom’.

Thoughts on Benjamin’s writing on colour in relation to my film

The enjoyment that children get from the ‘shifting/shimmering’ nature of colour seems similar to my use of harsh black and white or the way I have blown out the colours in the old VHS footage – shifting and morphing the footage and exaggerating and distorting the colours and image quality.

My use of black and white and this ‘ugly’ use of colour feels something I could possibly link to how Benjamin writes about colour and it’s relationship to the imagination – ‘colour is beautiful, but there is no sense in producing beautiful colours’.

Reflections: Walter Benjamin. Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings

A Berlin Chronicle

‘… Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand – like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery – in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding. True, for successful excavations a plan is needed. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam, and it is to cheat oneself of the richest prize to preserve as a record merely the inventory of one’s discoveries, and not this dark joy of the place of the finding itself. Fruitless searching is as much a part of this as succeeding, and consequently remembrance must not proceed in the manner of a narrative or still less that of a report, but must, in the strictest epic and rhapsodic manner, assay its spade in ever-new places, and in the old ones delve to ever-deeper layers’.

THIS MIGHT CHANGE EVERYTHING

‘It is true that countless façades of the city stand exactly as they stood in my childhood. Yet I do not encounter my childhood in their contemplation. My gaze has brushed them too often since, too often have they been the décor and theatre of my walks and concerns. (…) For did I as a child really frequent the remote corner where it stands, did I even know it? I cannot tell. (…) although they were not young with us and perhaps did not even know us when we were children, they have much knowledge for our childhood, and for this we love them. But I should confront myself at that age in quite a different way had I the courage to enter a certain front door that I had passed thousands upon thousands of times. (…) My soles would doubtless be the first to send me word, once I had closed the door behind me, that on this word, once I had closed the door behind me, that on this worn staircase they trod in ancient tracks, and if I no longer cross the threshold of that house it is for fear of an encounter with this stairway interior, which has conserved in seclusion the power to recognise me that the façade lost long ago. For with its columned windows it has stayed the same, even if within the living quarters all is changed’.

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