Cinema and photography are technical arts that emerged in the 19th century but truly came into their own in the 20th. Walter Benjamin argued that cinema strips the image of its “aura” — its uniqueness and irreproducibility — replacing it with the effect of shock. This shock resembles something military: suddenness, rhythm, the destruction of the old world. Cinema shows the masses as movement, as rhythm from above — columns, cities, machines. Eisenstein, Rodchenko, Vetrov built their frames as a sequence of “heavy bodies” — palaces, ships, crowds. This is the rhythm of mass advance.

But there was another pole — radiance. The old aristocratic world seemed to be fading, yet it migrated into cinema: into the cult of film stars, into scenes from the past, into black-and-white splendour. Black-and-white cinema became a space of wonder, fairy tale, and reverie. A world where actresses look like living jewels, and colour — when it does appear — is perceived as the shimmer of gemstones. It is no coincidence that the film The Stone Flower was awarded for its colour at Cannes.