Sarah's Key or Elle s'appelait Sarah is one of the best films I have seen in recent years, and yet, along with almost all the other films I've seen, I have no particular desire to see it again. How different from the days back in the 'fifties when my brother and I would cheerfully sit through successive sessions of the same western film at the British Army's Globe Cinema near Mönchengladbach (as it is now called)! I don't quite know why I no longer feel inclined to sit through a film, however good, a second time, and I don't know whether this is a feeling shared by others. It's not that the quality of films has declined - quite the opposite in most cases - and I don't think that it is simply a question of saturation.
I wonder if it has anything to do with a theory evolved by the film star James Stewart to the effect that we don't so much remember films themselves as specific moments in them. Stewart said that a good director seeks above all to create a "moment" that will live forever in our minds. Such moments may in fact occur in otherwise humdrum films, but more often they become a sort of shorthand for films that have really impressed us, and in a curious way replace the need or wish to see them again.
Perhaps one of these days I will attempt to draw up a list of such "moments".
Stewart's observation (thanks for that — I've never seen it before) is amazingly close what Umberto Eco says in his essay on Casablanca: "I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole."
ReplyDeleteThanks for that, Michael. Stewart is in good company, then!
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