colour film

William Blake, imagem de O Livro dos Los

The first surprise was that she had used colour film, for she had always favoured black-and-white. Then there were the photographs themselves. They might have been taken in a field hospital in wartime, or in a casualty ward in a defeated and devastated city. There was an old man with one leg gone below the knee, a thick line of sutures like the prototype of a zip fastened traversing the shiny stump. An obese, middle-aged woman was missing a breast, the flesh where it had been recentely removed all puckered and swollen like a giant, empty eye-socket. A big-bosomed, smiling mother in a lacy nightdress displayed a hydrocephalic baby with bewildered look in its otter's bulging eye. The arthritic fingers of an old woman taken in close-up knotted and knobbed like clusters of root ginger. A boy with a canker embossed on his cheek, intricate as a mandala, grinned into the camera, his two fists lifted and giving a double thumbs-up sign, a fat tongue cheekily stuck out. There was a shot angled down into a meal bin with gobs and strings of unidentifiable dark wet meat thrown into it - was that refuse from the kitchen, or the operating theatre?


John Banville in The Sea