“Editor’s Note [Colour]”
by Narcisse Pelletier
Shots and Angles: The Bulletin of the Toronto Amateur Movie Club, Vol. 3, no 4 (1 May 1937): 1-2.
Our minds conceive beauty. There are certain forms of beauty in chaos. The blues and
the warm browns of our earth can form beauty, or one can take the tumbled-down shacks in some of the older quarters of any of our cities and be amazed at the colours that form combinations to delight artists and cinematographers, who can compose and realize these many forms of beauty. Nature has the odd habit of producing beauty in places where a very casual observer might say - “How ugly!” We agree. It depends on the time and under what conditions, and how our minds respond to the things we see… They may be old grey houses that seem bare and cold… with a dreariness that makes us sad, and possibly on another day we might see a low sun embracing these same houses with colour that our minds could never have conceived…. With our amazingly fine new colour film a person could continually find beauty in projections… We might contradict ourselves and say that there is beauty in the ugly when we consider objects that do not meet with more conservative ways of reasoning. I believe that if one set out to make a film of old houses that tell tales of hardship, one would cause more interest than by showing a street of prosperous homes, for it is a peculiarity of Nature that it often-times does not combine orderliness with interest. Perhaps it is because we, as human beings, can never successfully duplicate that which Nature creates.
We came across a poem in a book called “Contrasts”, by Lauren [sic] Harris. It seems to apply to the things that we mean.
A NOTE OF COLOUR
In a part of the city that is ever shrouded in sooty smoke, and amid huge, hard buildings, hides a gloomy house of broken grey rough-cast, like a sickly sin in a callous soul.
Streams of wires run by it wailing in the murky wind.
Two half dead chestnut trees, black and broken, stand wearily before it, subdued by a bare rigid telephone pole.
The windows are bleary with grime, and bulging, filthy rags plug the broken panes.
Torn blinds of cold judas green chill whatever light sifts through the smoky air.
Dirty shutters sag this way and that like dancers suddenly stopped in an aimless movement.
But the street door smiles, and even laughs, when the hazy sunlight falls on it –
Someone had painted it a bright gay red.
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