The angel is standing on top of a building in Berlin, watching people on earth. Everything is in black and white. That‘s how “The wings of desire” commences. Later on, he falls in love. He blinks, and as he opens his eyes, the world is colorful.I lived a good portion of my life in a beautiful dream, dominated by this visual poetic perception, Wenders has created.
Now, after years and years, I still refuse to believe that the notion is too unrealistic, too dreamy or even too poetic to be true, but what life forced me to believe is, the colors won’t last very long. It’s not too poetic but it certainly is much too momentarily. In a quite unpleasantly non-poetic example, I may say it’s like an old color TV. Sometimes it does what it should do, but all of a sudden, right in the middle of an important football match, it loses the colors and turns into a stupid black and white TV. You can smash it on the head occasionally and you might even get some colors back for couple of minutes, but you’ll lose them again soon, guaranteed!
There’s a technique, used to bring old black and white movies to color, and it simply is to colorize every frame, one by one! Maybe it works in big Hollywood studios, but in real life, manually colorizing every frame is not an option. It’s much too time consuming and the final result always looks disgustingly fake!
A good alternative would be to enjoy life in black and white. The reality is, most of the masterpieces in photography, and to some extend in cinema, are in black and white, where there is no color to distract your eyes from the beauty of the shades, shapes and the compositions. In fact, sometimes you have to manually get rid of the colors and that’s when the colors are weak, unappealing and simply don’t worth to be kept.
You select your poorly-colored picture and then select, Image-mode-Grayscale from the menu! Photoshop will ask “you’re going to lose the color information, are you sure you want to continue?” you pause. You think. You look again. You see that pale blue sky and those unflattering colors, covering your potentially nice image. You remember how unsuccessfully you tried your best to edit the colors. You exhale and click “YES”!
You blink and as you open your eyes…Voila…it’s Black and white.
