You were our patron saint, yet still they blame us for only praying to be famous

[sovay]

Late last night, I discovered this photograph:



It's David Lean in 1943, on the set of This Happy Breed. I found the image unattributed on a site devoted to his movies; I thought it was a film still. I had never seen a picture of him before. He could have been one of his own leads. I wouldn't wish him out of his directing career—for all I know, he was a block in front of the camera—but that's a character actor's face if ever I've seen one. He looks like a very ascetic faun.

Comments

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

I keep wondering if it's the medium of black-and-white film that makes people look so distinct and interesting, or if people were just fundamentally more distinct and interesting before colour photography.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I've wondered about that as well. Maybe it's our reaction to black and white, or maybe it's that the photographs which are likely to be places where we see them are generally the best of the lot, but it certainly does seem as if there's something like that going on with the old photographs.

One thought that occurs to me is that it might not be B&W per se (I shot a fair bit of it, back in the day) but the specific films, or the cameras, or maybe the lighting or the lenses or even the paper they printed them on.

I know a couple of photographers who might have some insight into the subject. I'll try and remember to ask them.

It's ironic, actually--a friend of mine recently got a Thirties-era mandolin, of the sort that used to be sold through Sears-Roebuck, which sounds amazingly good, and we were having a similar conversation about instruments of that vintage. Is it the wood, is it that they built them well, or is it just that the bad ones mostly haven't survived?

[sovay]

I keep wondering if it's the medium of black-and-white film that makes people look so distinct and interesting, or if people were just fundamentally more distinct and interesting before colour photography.

I think there has been a change in the fashion of faces, and we are going through a boring patch. I continue to hope that popular tastes will weird up again. I also think there's a sorting process at work, in the same way as the 1930's and '40's produced some amazingly unremarkable movies, but no one bothers to rediscover them. That said, I really like black-and-white as a medium—because it is not (and cannot be) naturalistic, it may automatically transform its subjects into art.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

Reminding us of that evocative book title, taken from Sunset Boulevard.
They Had Faces Then: super stars, stars, and starlets of the 1930's By John Shipman Springer, Jack D. Hamilton

(snippet view only on googlebooks)