One evening, in the late 1970's, a young woman was in her bedsit, stirring her cheap dinner while the television flickered in the corner. Then, something caught her eye, something on the television; perched on the arm of the sofa, still holding the saucepan and stirring it's contents, she stared at the screen. Before she knew it, two and a half hours had passed, the saucepan was still on her lap, and dinner was far from ready. That young woman was my mum and, that evening, her culinary attempts had been frozen in their tracks by the majesty of Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In A West.
My mum had switched on the television merely to shake up the despondent feeling of being on one's own, a bit of background accompaniment to her cooking, but the living room, the dinner, all this had faded away when sweeping camera shots of cowboys in dust jackets had drawn her in, enthralling her, and forever solidifying a time and a place in her mind, an association, a sensation, a feeling. And so my mum can never watch Once Upon A Time In The West without remembering this moment, where she was, what she was doing, the very fact that I am able to recount this story is because she recalls it so strongly. These associations beautifully blend the cinematic with the everyday in our memory; a film becomes highly personal, indistinguishable from our very being. This is something everyone can relate to (I hope), but for how much longer?
One of the body blows the digital age has dealt to celluloid is to crush films' lustre, it's saturated, murky organic beauty, simultaneously it has also broken down the way we watch them. I was scouring the terrestrial channels last Sunday night, that most sacred of nights, being as it is the last station of cosy comfort before the daily grind of Monday begins, in search of a decent film. What I got was Blood Work, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. Let's just say this was not one of his best efforts, or let's just say that it was rubbish. Released 2002 it felt like it had been made in 1992, a strange anachronistic wash lay over it, the dialogue was awful and the cinematography was exceptionally bland, looking as dreary as Eastwood's polo shirts; trying to find a striking composition in it was like searching for a shred of decency in a Michael Bay film. I was in tawdry L.A. hell; the level of believability in Blood Work was a veneer so thin I stopped concentrating as soon as it clicked that Jeff Daniels was the rampant killer (why else would such a big star have such a seemingly small part?). Following on from this limpid stain of a film, Channel Five coughed up something called Half Past Dead from the arse end of it's vaults. Seeing as I had more important things to do (like sleeping), I went to bed.
'Quickly, Quickly! It's Starting!'
When I was younger, the British terrestrial channel programmers held gems in their hands. Many an old film, from decades gone by, would I stumble across: In The Heat Of The Night, Midnight Run, McCabe & Mrs Miller, If..., Videodrome, Goodfellas, 12 Angry Men, The Terminator, Manhunter, Braindead, Breaking Away, Lost Highway, The Shining, (clearly I didn't have the patience to read subtitles at this stage), these are but a few that I watched on a Saturday or Sunday night, occasionally a weekday. Each of these films carries a memory with it, of people, of evenings, of life. Films on TV were something special; they were fleeting, if you missed something, the opportunity to see it was lost. 'Come on! Come on, quickly! It's starting, it's starting!!' These words really meant something back in the day, had a real urgency; they remind me of spilling Ribena as I rushed back to the living room during an advert break in Star Wars, coursing with an excitement, a holding of breath at the imminent unfolding of the plot. Likewise when Jurassic Park had it's terrestrial premier I didn't want to miss a single frame of dino-action, I awaited it's post-watershed screening with baited breath. These are enduring childhood memories, forever ingrained in me along with such classic episodes as my mum slamming a car door closed on my finger and being chased by a hound down an Irish lane while on holiday. Because of their appearances on television during my formative years, films like Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Candyman are like old friends, because catching them live, as it were, was a special event. Nowadays we can pause a film and wait as long as we like, and with the availability of films to download, pirated or paid for, and TV channels spreading like a virus, terrestrial programmers have given up broadcasting good quality films at reasonable hours. Although the frightening amount of channels technically offer us more films to watch, the laborious channel sifting necessary to find these films leaves our thumbs aching (who really remembers channel numbers now? There are far too many). With four channels we were more limited, and less likely to let a film slip through our flexible, still sprightly, fingers unwatched.
I Miss Being Able To Miss
When talking about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, David Lynch said 'I never miss it when it's on cable'. And here we get to the crux of the matter: nowadays it's virtually impossible to miss something, because you can either pause it or watch it online. My mum's encounter with Once Upon A Time In The West is just one example of a personal experience that is becoming a lot less frequent if not downright extinct; this is because we needn't drop everything to ensure we reach a film's climax. Movie platforms have become so ubiquitous that I wonder whether the magic is slowly trickling out of the movies themselves. Their status in our lives is lessening; their overall impact on us as people is dwindling like a lost light in the night. The magic is ebbing away. Films on TV that I watched when I was young are monuments, great immovable totems. For another generation, these monuments are being toppled, split into pieces; broken up, paused, shrunk and skipped through; fading with our memories.
One of the body blows the digital age has dealt to celluloid is to crush films' lustre, it's saturated, murky organic beauty, simultaneously it has also broken down the way we watch them. I was scouring the terrestrial channels last Sunday night, that most sacred of nights, being as it is the last station of cosy comfort before the daily grind of Monday begins, in search of a decent film. What I got was Blood Work, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. Let's just say this was not one of his best efforts, or let's just say that it was rubbish. Released 2002 it felt like it had been made in 1992, a strange anachronistic wash lay over it, the dialogue was awful and the cinematography was exceptionally bland, looking as dreary as Eastwood's polo shirts; trying to find a striking composition in it was like searching for a shred of decency in a Michael Bay film. I was in tawdry L.A. hell; the level of believability in Blood Work was a veneer so thin I stopped concentrating as soon as it clicked that Jeff Daniels was the rampant killer (why else would such a big star have such a seemingly small part?). Following on from this limpid stain of a film, Channel Five coughed up something called Half Past Dead from the arse end of it's vaults. Seeing as I had more important things to do (like sleeping), I went to bed.
'Quickly, Quickly! It's Starting!'
When I was younger, the British terrestrial channel programmers held gems in their hands. Many an old film, from decades gone by, would I stumble across: In The Heat Of The Night, Midnight Run, McCabe & Mrs Miller, If..., Videodrome, Goodfellas, 12 Angry Men, The Terminator, Manhunter, Braindead, Breaking Away, Lost Highway, The Shining, (clearly I didn't have the patience to read subtitles at this stage), these are but a few that I watched on a Saturday or Sunday night, occasionally a weekday. Each of these films carries a memory with it, of people, of evenings, of life. Films on TV were something special; they were fleeting, if you missed something, the opportunity to see it was lost. 'Come on! Come on, quickly! It's starting, it's starting!!' These words really meant something back in the day, had a real urgency; they remind me of spilling Ribena as I rushed back to the living room during an advert break in Star Wars, coursing with an excitement, a holding of breath at the imminent unfolding of the plot. Likewise when Jurassic Park had it's terrestrial premier I didn't want to miss a single frame of dino-action, I awaited it's post-watershed screening with baited breath. These are enduring childhood memories, forever ingrained in me along with such classic episodes as my mum slamming a car door closed on my finger and being chased by a hound down an Irish lane while on holiday. Because of their appearances on television during my formative years, films like Terminator 2: Judgement Day and Candyman are like old friends, because catching them live, as it were, was a special event. Nowadays we can pause a film and wait as long as we like, and with the availability of films to download, pirated or paid for, and TV channels spreading like a virus, terrestrial programmers have given up broadcasting good quality films at reasonable hours. Although the frightening amount of channels technically offer us more films to watch, the laborious channel sifting necessary to find these films leaves our thumbs aching (who really remembers channel numbers now? There are far too many). With four channels we were more limited, and less likely to let a film slip through our flexible, still sprightly, fingers unwatched.
I Miss Being Able To Miss
When talking about Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, David Lynch said 'I never miss it when it's on cable'. And here we get to the crux of the matter: nowadays it's virtually impossible to miss something, because you can either pause it or watch it online. My mum's encounter with Once Upon A Time In The West is just one example of a personal experience that is becoming a lot less frequent if not downright extinct; this is because we needn't drop everything to ensure we reach a film's climax. Movie platforms have become so ubiquitous that I wonder whether the magic is slowly trickling out of the movies themselves. Their status in our lives is lessening; their overall impact on us as people is dwindling like a lost light in the night. The magic is ebbing away. Films on TV that I watched when I was young are monuments, great immovable totems. For another generation, these monuments are being toppled, split into pieces; broken up, paused, shrunk and skipped through; fading with our memories.
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