THE WHITE NIGHTS OF LENINGRAD
Were this a movie, and in particular the sort of movie which makes people happy in wartime, it would have been set in the famous “white nights” of Leningrad, when Shostakovich lay in Elena Konstantinovskaya’s arms. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Moreover, summer happens to be a season expressly reserved for Aryans, so this Russian story finds itself compelled to take place in winter, when the nights of Leningrad, like most days, are black, black, black! How about a compromise? We’ll tell our tale in grey.
Once upon a time, when it was the twentieth century and my parents were still young, color had yet to enter the world. Light and darkness, black and white, sufficed my poor grandparents; by the time my parents were born, grey had been invented by I. G. Farbenindustrie. At first it didn’t seem good for anything except smudgy London fogs, but by the time the Blitz began it could express the smoke of burning cities quite nicely. Three days before the Führer broke off his monumental tank battle in Kursk, the U.S. War Department, having been apprised by a Zeiss defector that Hitler’s home movies were now being filmed in color, launched the top-secret Taos Project, in the course of which an ingenious boy scientist named Ansel Adams employed a hedgehog formation of photon-guns to fracture the firmament’s tonal scale into exactly ten zones, from the primeval black of Zone 0 to the perfect blank of Zone X. Contrast, cloud-cliff relationships, pearly-grey pine trees decked out with recesses of utter black, luminance and detail, mid-range gunmetal rivers banded by wakes of paler grey, these distinctions permitted our universe a greater number of adjustments than the earlier Gutenberg model had enjoyed; but it was not until Operation Polaroid that most citizens got to see colors for the very first time: primary colors in Phase One (we smile now, when we remember that until 1979, high summer foliage could only be yellow or blue); and then, once our American landscape had been suitably conditioned by the Adams Ray, the secondaries, the tertiaries, and finally the various infrared flavors which we enjoy so much in erotic situations. As I said, the Germans had stolen a march on us here, just as the Russians would in outer space; I cannot forbear to quote from the declassified OSS “appreciation” prepared by a certain Frank Voss, our on-the-spot U.S. operative whose real mission is to sniff around for secret weapons here in the ruins of the Führerbunker; this colorblind fellow who is now experiencing color for the very first time (indeed, the only time, since his final reel included capture, torture and liquidation in North Korea) writes that from the heap of steel cannisters in the well of rubble at the far end of a dank hall now guarded by no less than three Kalmuck machine-gunners (they were quite friendly, he reports, and also gave me the location of a Werewolf detachment which had created several nuisances in our sector) there comes a shining more pale than any Zone VII grey, which nonetheless partakes of Zone II’s dramatic inevitability; Frank Voss, who at one time was a divinity student, speculates that to the sentries, whose sophistication in his opinion leaves much to be desired (their ideology, he sadly writes, compels them to see in black and white), this indescribable light may be as sacred as the star on the pale forehead of their revolutionary cruiser Aurora.—Yes, indescribable!—Defeated, Frank Voss withdraws to safer grey metaphors; reports of the atomic glow over Hiroshima now seem similarly off the mark. Nonetheless, in this episode he wins our hearts almost as much as does that flickering silver eminence, Bing Crosby; indeed, had it not been for the Cold War, our tense young American would probably have received the Order of Kutuzov for bravery, because, without fear or hesitation, he outdoes the daring of his Kalmuck allies: namely, he unscrews the top of the biggest movie cannister! And instantly, for a radius of perhaps twenty feet, the corridor gets colorized not by “red,” “blue” or “yellow,” for which he would have lacked the words anyway, but by their muted opposites, because the Germans’ first experiments with color involved negative film. After following Frank Voss’s strangely moving attempts to describe these hues on the basis of their estimated wavelengths, we reach this (partially corrupted) transcript of an attempt to contact HQ: Deeply regret unable to evaluate the phenomenon. Doing all possible. Please confirm immediately on emergency link whether destruction of these objects is advised before Soviet experts arrive. Voss then tries more desperately than ever to describe the magenta blush imparted to the ceiling by several thousand almost identical eight-millimeter frames of Eva Braun’s lips, but here the report has been CENSORED: APPROX. 300 WORDS DELETED. Well, isn’t it better that way? Mystical testimony achieves its maximum propaganda value when it shades off into inchoateness or even darkness. Besides, the Germans never intended for color to be enjoyed by anyone except the elite, and the rest of Europe remained awfully grey in those days, her best Zone 0 being blackout paper, which in museums subject to the penetration of the Adams Ray appears to be a weak greenish-black at best, while her most reliable Zone X can be no paler than a Nazi officer’s corpse staring up at the sky. This is the reason why Ansel Adams himself, that true American, never visited Europe until 1974, by which time he’d been projected into his eighth decade of life; he’d calculated that lighting conditions over there would be practically impossible, that high values would be blocked, for beyond Omaha Beach the entire continent remained divided into only two crudely differentiated zones (in which Adams explicitly counted the pearl-grey midnights of Leningrad); but he had to go just the same. In Paris his elongated shadow already lacked even a blue component; and when he got to Arles, on a conveyance whose engineers had advanced far beyond the futuristic blockiness of any armored train, he found himself lightly charmed by the swift-passing landscape (leaden-black earth; silver-grey grass-hairs; the Académie Française was now fiercely debating the introduction of certain sepias and russets) but bored by its rural sameness and the evidence of tired antiquity and modern industrial landscapes. In a word, I confess to acute home-sickness.
Well, who wouldn’t have been homesick, especially during the war years? (Imagine how dreary the spectators must have felt after Comrade Stalin’s alpinists had ascended the shining Admiralty Tower of Leningrad and camouflaged it with dull grey paint.) Not only was Europe more higher-contrast and greyer than ever—never mind the broken glass, cold and darkness—but, as period movie footage demonstrates, atomic structures were actually looser—hence the stippled grey cheekbones of starving Poles, the fuzzy almost-white of children’s skinny legs, the velvety irregularities of what should have been chiseled pillar-grooves in the facades of blurry department stores not yet bombed. The perverse argument of certain liberal “experts” that the film stock of the 1940s was inherently grainier than today’s has been disproven by a Central Intelligence Agency study which employed extreme magnification to compare nitrate-based Nazi-Soviet documentaries with today’s color features.47 As Adams demonstrated, grain is a fundamental feature of reality itself.
47
The finer detail of our Ortho-Mx projections is the result not only of a higher organized nervous sensibility and improved moral accutance, but, above all, of absolute technological superiority. The millions of colors and tonal zones which we Americans now enjoy look better than ever, thanks to the cooperation of private industry. Digital smoothing is now underway. Before the next war breaks out, we hope to entirely eliminate every intra-atomic space.