Colouring in the gaps

FRANCES GRANT talks to the researcher for a television documentary series which uses colour film footage to tell the story of the Second World War

The bright red car almost hurts the eyes. Beside it a woman clutches two girls. The sunlight bounces off the bewildered faces of the children. The red glare of the car reflects their fear and confusion.

It was a clear, fine day in 1940 when this film footage of refugees fleeing the German invaders of France was shot. Strange, you don't think of the sun shining during the Second World War.

The documentary images of the war we are most familiar with have a long-ago, archival look. We're used to thinking of the global conflict which tore a hole through the middle of last century as something which happened in dingy black and white.

But colour footage from the period exists - enough to create an original project: a British television documentary series, Colour of War, which begins on TV3 this week (Wednesday, 8.35 pm).

Film researcher Adrian Wood first had the idea for a series on the war made entirely from material filmed in colour 10 years ago.

"Over the course of time and various Second World War projects I worked on I became aware that there was a relatively large volume of material," he says in a phone interview.

London-based Wood has worked on a host of series related to the period, including the compelling The Nazis: A Warning From History, which screened here two years ago, and two Oscar-winning documentaries, The Last Days and Anne Frank Remembered.

"By the late 80s I'd had an opportunity to go to the Soviet Union, and discovered the Soviets had colour film as well as the Americans, who were the largest users, the British and the Germans. So suddenly, a decade ago, I knew there was colour footage from four [major] participants in the war."

Colour film-stock was available, too, to amateurs who could afford to use it. Home-movie cameras also went to war with the soldiers for the first time.

Wood says he and the research team unearthed around 600 hours of colour footage in total.

Why have we seen so little of it before?

"By and large, it was easier to find the black and white film because people weren't looking for colour film," he says. "People's memory of that period is that it's a black and white period. Colour was used for feature films but not particularly for documentaries."

Sometimes it was there for the asking. Wood has lost count of the number of archives he's been to which have turned out to have colour footage they weren't aware of.

Once the footage was gathered, Wood sat down with the man with the difficult job of crafting it into a comprehensive story of the war, series producer Stewart Binns.

The pair knew they couldn't make a definitive military history of the war using just colour footage.

"We thought we could present a sense of what it was like to have lived through the Second World War or participated in it. And instead of using people's memories today to look back at those times, we wanted to have their reactions and feelings at the time the events were taking place.

"So we took the decision not to interview anyone, but to find documents and letters and diaries and have them read by actors and actresses of a similar age and nationality to the people who wrote them at the time."

In this week's first episode, we hear the thoughts of a German soldier, recorded in his diary, as we see that scene of the French woman and her children cowering in terror by the red car.

"The population are very afraid of us Barbarians," the soldier wrote. "A woman was throwing herself at my feet, imploring me not to kill her children. I told her in my broken French that we were only searching for weapons."

The programme is structured as a series of chronologically ordered snapshots of events which add up to a broad, collective experience of the war, he says.

"So you know what it was like to be in an Atlantic convoy, you know what it was like to be in a ghetto, to be in a concentration camp, to be part of an invasion force or a liberation force or to be a civilian when war broke out."

After years of looking at war footage in both black and white and colour, Wood says he is still surprised by the difference in effect between the two. "There's an emotional buffer that's taken away when it's in colour."

He predicts the shock and immediacy of the colour footage will be as strong for viewers, even those well-exposed to graphic scenes of war in colour from such movies as Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan.

"When you look at the real footage of D-Day that Spielberg looked at when he was making Saving Private Ryan, you see how amazingly authentic the movie is. It probably comes as close to a real portrayal of battle as I think exists.

"But when you look at the series, you first have to pinch yourself because you know it is real. When you see a corpse, you know it is a real corpse, and when you see blood on a tunic, that isn't something out of a Hollywood special-effects department.

"I think once you know you're watching a documentary and you know the colour is real - not colourised or recreated, it actually is as the camera recorded it - then I think it does take you back into that. It takes you back in time."

* Wood is looking for colour film footage for a further series on Britain during the same period. He is keen to hear from anyone in New Zealand who has colour film of their wartime experiences there. The Herald TV section has contact details.