A curious thing happened when I turned thirty a few years ago. My ability to remember in lucid detail extended filmic moments began to erode - almost as if someone had flipped a switch. It was a particularly disturbing debilitation considering my profession as a film studies academic. In a way, I felt like a conservatory trained pianist unable to recall key passages in a sonata, or worse, like an amnesiac who's compelled to pull out old photographs to convince himself that he once had a history.
I first became conscious of this during a film theory seminar that I was teaching at the time. Attempting to describe the blouse Monica Vitti wears in L'Avventura when she and Gabriele Ferzetti stop for a tryst in the grass, I hit a total blank. Now admittedly, this is a pretty innocuous memory lapse. But when I first saw the film when I was twenty, the moment left an inexplicable imprint on me. Something about the contrasting textures: the weave of her blonde hair on grass flattened by lovemaking, and the stylish assertiveness of those tiny white polkadots and the sharp "V" of her neckline. Of course, there's nothing immediately profound about this observation, but for some reason, the image stuck and it's the one that always comes to mind immediately when I think about the film. Obviously, my students didn't really care about this lapse (and thankfully, one of the more fashion-conscious of the lot bailed me out), but it threw me for a loop. During casual conversations about new films I had only just recently seen, I began to become more and more conscious of a growing inability to recall such detailed moments. I began to resign myself to a bleak future of film viewing (akin to my experience of literature, ironically): fully cognitively present in the moment of engagement, but damn if I could tell you much about the engagement a week afterwards.
Hence, this blog.
I would like to start committing some immediate impressions about films to writing. This is not a substitute for careful criticism, or even cursory "reviews," but an act of journaling that serves as a kind of memorybank. In many ways, it is both rescue act and preservation.
On one level, I do sympathize with Stanley Cavell when he writes in The World Viewed that "a few faulty memories will not themselves shake my conviction in what I've said, since I am as interested in how a memory went wrong as in why the memories that are right occur when they do." On another level, though, it is not that I'm afraid of misremembering films, but barely recalling them at all. Too many films that I professed to love at the time of reception have already "disappeared," so to speak. I'd like to ward off future dissolutions as much as possible with these writings.
To that end, this blog will not just serve as a mnemonic enterprise for its own sake, but will also serve as a series of informal and impressionistic responses to the current cinema. I'm hoping to post some notes on memorable forms of filmic engagements on a weekly basis if possible. "A list of things that quicken the heart," to borrow from Sans soleil, if I may. Somewhat in the spirit of Pauline Kael's dynamic rush to judgement (she was never one to linger over a film), my priority will be on immediacy in the hopes of responding in kind to the movement, energies, sensation and spirit of the movies I watch. Criticism here (I hope) will serve as an attempt to discover forms of permanence amidst the dissipation that haunts our engagement with all art.
It's my ambition that this project will simultaneously help solidify my own critical priorities, and in so doing, will also speak to you cinephiles out there engaged in your own ongoing search for the new, the visionary, and the momentous: cinematic instances that leave a trace, or an imprint - not unlike the crush of flattened grass that marked the idle dalliance of L'Avventura's two lovers.
I hope that you'll find these occasional musings helpful in your own acts of virtual film preservation, and I'll always be happy to hear your own thoughts as well.
Many thanks for joining me along the way!
