Here are some color tests from the nineteen twenties. Much like the first time color footage from world war two was revealed, these give a strange new vitality to a time that has been relegated to having always been the past.
Four minutes and thirty four seconds of chicks posing. These images also serve to remind the subjectivity of beauty, that what is considered culturally desirable is also very much dependent on social fashions. Beauty in the twenties and indeed that described in paintings of antiquity for that matter are vastly different to the beauty of today. Living in these times as we do we might be tempted to think that we have arrived at the end of such evolutions and that our current sense of beauty is absolute. Of course I am sure the Romans said the same thing. They were a highly civilized people, let us not forget the vomitorium, The room every well to do household is in need of, after all one has truly separated himself from the beasts when one eats not just for the base needs of nourishment but for the gastronomic pleasure. That room was surely proof that they had arrived to the destination of culture.
I digress, suffice it to say that all of our beauties will crumble and all that is ugly is but a matter of education or miseducation. Do not be tempted by the apple it’s seeds are filled with poison.
Here is an extract of a Werner Herzog’s documentary ‘Herdsmen of the Sun’, Narrated as always by Herzog himself and backed by the last official Castrato of the Vatican Alessandro Moreschi. Here we see the men participating in the annual Gerewol festival in a kind of beauty pageant. showing lots of teeth and the whites of the eyes, also being particularly tall is considered especially beautiful. That accounts for the undulating rhythms up and down and the continuous pulsing of the eyes and mouths.
