Black and White

There are black and white mono bands on my desktop. They're beautiful. Black and white spirals that make pretty bands when they're large, and go deeper and deeper inside the picture until they look like faraway monolithic machines with several legs and minimal intelligence. The 'legs' look like giant gyrating pipes that spawn more and more legs as they go down. And if you look close enough, there are diffused little circles of black and white. It's all rather pretty, actually. And artificial - it's too smooth a black and too smooth a white. If you stare deeply, you might get the sense that you're looking at something which you could encounter ordinarily. But there's always this sense of artificiality holding you back.

Not so with black and white movies. I once glanced up from the screen and saw my yellow wall with the UHU-tacks from old stickers, the marks of old scotch tape, the dust-covered connecting cradle on the desk and the colours, all the tacky browns and yellows and blues. The scene on the screen was a naturally-lighted shot of a window with Ingrid Thulin and Gunner Bjorstrand, in all their monochrome splendor. The simple, beautiful, almost austere light seemed magical in those few seconds.