The emphasis is on the writing rather than the films. With these archival writing, my “tastes” are those of the eras and ages at which I saw particular films, which is how I have queued them. Instead of giving up entirely on lost films, I have prepared a prologue made up mostly of excerpts-not reviews-from older pieces of writing. A film from the 1990s viewed in the 2020s is catalogued in the 1990s but described in a 2020s’ perspective. I have arranged films by their own chronology rather than my chronology of seeing and writing about them. Once I established the genre, I put more thought and time each one, so they grew from squibs and “memorable scenes” into short essays. I posted my reviews, then added to them through the years. Personal websites and blogs were a robust new medium (much as substack is now). The growth of the internet between 20 made the right venue obvious. This embarrassing quirk got translated into Russian too. I had run into a similar dilemma in 2003 but didn’t catch the problem in time, putting my song-by-song discography of reggae singer John Holt into On the Integration of Nature: 9/11 Biopolitical Notes. I soon realized that I distorting my book, so I removed the piece and continued it as a separate work. Once I finished my “O” reviews, I began reviewing other films. I also used a conceit: “Three Memorable Scenes.” I started by reviewing films beginning with the letter “O.” Whenever the topic of one’s favorite films or “the best films I ever saw” came up, my candidates all seemed to begin with “O”- Outlaw Josey Wales, Ordet, Once Were Warriors, andJean Cocteau’s Orphée-so I was writing about “alphabetic synchronicity.” My original “reviews” were part of my book 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Dimension, which I was working on untitled. This compilation didn’t start as “Guide to Cinema” in 2009. Yet each was still worth living (or watching) at the time else why write Macbeth (or Hamlet and The Tempest)? Why go through the trouble of making a movie at all? Told by an Idiot, full of sound and fury, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player This phenomenon extends to one’s life as a surrogate movie-the converse of reality, as Shakespeare noted in The Tragedy of Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5:Ĭreeps in this petty pace from day to day,Īnd all our yesterdays have lighted fools Sometimes a preview pulls the movie back from amnesia. When I view our Netflix rental history and click on titles I don’t recognize-the majority of them-even the descriptions don’t help me remember. That’s far too many “brief reincarnations” to sort. Before that, we watched VHS cassettes and went to movies. The Netflix list assembled by my wife Lindy Hough and me shows that we rented almost 1600 DVDs, starting with Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound on October 6, 2005. Till then they were stored in my “unconscious” mind per Sigmund Freud. The moment I read them, their entirety came back, even aspects I didn’t write about. When I rewrote my own teenage novel Salty and Sandy into New Moon more than thirty years later, I recovered important childhood events I had completely forgotten. Each falls out of context-lives or films-while some fuse with others in the memory. With no tag, they are gone for good.Įlsewhere I wrote: “All movies are brief reincarnations.” You live each fully when you watch it, then forget it in pieces (like a past life if we, in fact, have sequential lives like films). In some cases, I have even forgotten their titles. I don’t remember many older movies well enough to review them. My selection of films is weighted by the list’s beginning and evolution. This is a book of movie reviews and cinema discussions.
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