Here is an interesting footnote to one of the great documentaries of the second world war era – The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), William Wyler’s study of the B-17 Flying Fortress aircraft, which flew hugely dangerous daytime raids into Germany from RAF Bassingbourn in Cambridgeshire. Wyler himself went with them and took the same risks as the combatants. Erik Nelson’s film recounts the discovery and subsequent digital restoration of the fascinating overlooked footage that Wyler and his crew shot.
There is a succession of poignant images: very often of that piercingly blue sky – the hostile “cold blue” – in which the Memphis Belle and the other B-17s flew their missions. Perhaps the most arresting material is that showing civilian life in the ruins of Berlin in the summer of 1945, and the paradox is that seeing film like this in colour, rather than black and white, means that for a disorientating moment, the images seem less authentic, less visibly of the historic “past” (which we have been trained to see as a matter of distant monochrome) and more as if they had happened yesterday, or now, enacted by people who have dressed up in historical costume. But this effect only makes it more absorbing. (Peter Jackson achieved something similar in an artificial style in his first world war documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, by colourising monochrome film stock, although it is fallacious to think of either monochrome or colour film stock as being “realer” than the other.)
