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Comment by tgv | Hacker News Reader

> Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.

This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?

So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no argumentation. None.

And (IMO), the whole point of "They shall not Grow Old" is that something like WW1 can happen again, and you, yes, you personally, will suffer if it does. Everyone has to realize that the people in that old footage are just like you and me, and Peter Jackson's film manages to effectively bridge the gap that blurry, jittery, B&W footage has, precisely by making it look recent.

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>> Colourisation does not bring us closer to the past; it increases the gap between now and then. It does not enable immediacy; it creates difference.

> This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?

Probably because the colorization can be misleading. With a B&W images, it's clear the color data is missing. With a colorized photo, a red building could be shown as blue or gray, and someone could leave with the false understanding the the building was really a different color than it actually was.

How does that increase the gap exactly?

> So I checked the source of that quote, and there is no argumentation. None.

Yeah, these quotes all seem like ad lapidem, just unsupported vague claims. I'm not even sure I agree people can be "closer" or "farther" from the past when looking at an image, it's a poetic way to look at the difference but not precise, and seems like it would evaporate if we tried to find any quantifiable measurable effects.

I can't believe they're shitting on "They shall not Grow Old". The whole point of it was to give an emotional and immersive experience of one of the worst wars humanity has seen to modern audiences. There can be other goals than absolute historial accuracy. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of my favorite books and not because it's the most exhaustive and accurate history of WW I.

Because a photograph is already a lossy simulation of some real situation. But then, even though we don't know what WW1 or Marilyn Monroe really looked like, we know what the artifacts look like. Upscaling is yet another level of simulation. What it says beyond the immediate impact is more about the early era of deep learning than it says about WW1. But it also entices us to mistake this Disneyland WW1 for something that's supposedly behind the original artifact (which did have some reference to the real battle). This is what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal.

> This really makes me wonder. How does it increase the gap, in comparison to B&W pictures? How is the difference not there already? And why is that bad?

It increases factual distance and reduces emotional distance. When just "distance" is used, some people assume one, some people assume the other, and everyone values each differently.

I don't know what you mean by factual distance. Those buildings and people were definitely not black, white or gray. Now they've got a color which is (in most cases) much closer to the original. The original recording was probably also distorted in other ways as well.

You might say you're not looking at the (probably) only reliable source of information for that particular scene, but that's an entirely different proposition.

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