Well, here I am having to promote Channel One (Russia’s main state TV channel). But seriously, make sure to watch it at 11:50 p.m. on June 12 — they’ll be showing Parfyonov’s fantastic film *The Color of the Nation*.
I went to a screening a few months ago and enjoyed it immensely. It’s genuinely patriotic cinema. You watch it and keep saying to yourself, “Wow, this is incredible.”
The film is about the photographer Prokudin-Gorsky, who invented a method of color photography before the Revolution. The technique turned out to be a dead end and was never further developed, but Prokudin-Gorsky traveled all across Russia, and now we can see what things really looked like in those days.
Take peasant children, for example: even in their dress clothes, we imagine them as drab and gray, in little faded dresses bleached by the sun. In black-and-white photographs, that’s exactly how they look. But here’s what they were really like:
How on earth did they dye fabric such intense colors? Must have been shopping at KENZO, no other explanation.
So yes, definitely watch it. And thanks to Leonid Parfyonov for reminding us that Prokudin-Gorsky is ours.
People