Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.
OH, IT’S YOU AGAIN
Scene: The imaginary consulting rooms of an
imaginary psychotherapist, as he deals with one of his more obtuse clients. The
door opens and the client enters hesitantly. The psychotherapist, looks up,
sighs, and motions the client towards his couch, where the client lies, deeply
troubled.
SHRINK: Oh, so it’s you again.
ME: I’m very, very sorry to trouble you. It’s the old
problem.
SHRINK: [sighs once
again] Don’t worry. I’m here to help. Perhaps this time we might deal with
it. You have been watching too many old films on Youtube once again, haven’t
you?
ME: Yes. I’m sorry. I really am sorry.
SHRINK: No, no, don’t be sorry. In these cases, guilt is not
a very helpful impulse.
ME: But I am sorry. I’m sorry I’m wasting so much time when
I should be doing something more productive. And I’m sorry that I’m sitting in
front of my computer screen watching these ancient images when I can hear wife
and younger children moving about in the rest of the house and I should be
joining them and…well… taking part in life. And I’m sorry that…[voice trails off]
SHRINK: You’re sorry that you keep boring the readers of
your blog by writing long and redundant accounts of the films you’ve watched,
in those “Something Thoughtful” sections. That’s a major part of the problem,
now, isn’t it?
ME: [voice rising
hysterically] Yes. Yes.
SHRINK: And you fear that nobody actually reads your long
analyses of things like [he consults Reid’s
Reader on the computer screen he has opened] Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby and Fritz Lang’s Fury – I see your blog index tells me you dealt with them under the headings
‘Time Stumps the Best Intentions’ and ‘Two Courses of Fury’. And above all
you fear that you will end up looking rather stupid and making a public fool of
yourself?
ME: [breaking down
into sobs and moans] Oh yes. Oh God, yes.
SHRINK: [producing box
of tissues] Wipe your eyes, now. I’m sure we can deal with this. Your
condition isn’t unique, you know. I don’t think psychiatry has yet invented a
name for the addiction to really old movies, but that is the condition you are
suffering and I have dealt with other cases. I must admit, though, you do seem
to have a rather extreme form of the ailment.
ME: [sniffling and
gurgling inarticulately]
SHRINK: Perhaps it would help if I reviewed your case with
you. I have your file here. I see you were a film reviewer for thirty years,
from 1974, when you were still a university student, until you moved for a year
out of Auckland in 2004. The biographical details you put on all your books say
that you wrote “the first detailed analysis of the revived New Zealand film
industry”.
ME: [residual pride
momentarily overcoming hysteria] Yes. A
Decade of New Zealand Film, John McIndoe publishers, Dunedin 1985.
SHRINK: Quite. Surely, then, your addiction to old movies on
Youtube is easily explained. You haven’t been a film reviewer for the last ten
years, so you are simply getting the equivalent of all those viewings to which
you were accustomed for thirty years.
ME: [now controlling
the odd sniffle] No. I’m sorry. That doesn’t cover it. You see, since I
stopped film reviewing I haven’t missed it, and I only rarely go out to see a
new film. I know finance has something to do with it. In all those
film-reviewing years, seeing previews of two or three new movies a week, I
floated on a sea of complimentary tickets and press screenings. I rarely paid a
cent. When film festival time came around, I would get free passes for about
thirty movies in the festival fortnight and go punch-drunk watching them all.
So money is one reason I now pay to see only four or five new movies a year.
But you must understand, since I ceased film reviewing, I don’t hunger to see
all the latest releases. This… affliction concerns old films. And I mean it
concerns really old films. Most of
them made before I was born, and I am in my early sixties now.
SHRINK: I must stop you there. You seem to be obsessed with
something from before your birth. Could it be…
ME: Oh please, please, don’t impose something Freudian on
me.
SHRINK: Very well, then, please explain what you
think the genesis of your condition is.
ME: I have thought about it. Of course I have. I think it
started with the type of books that were lying around the house when I was a
kid.
SHRINK: Books? Wouldn’t that fact make you an addict of
books?
ME: Yes, it has done that too. But you see, among his many
other activities my father was one of the committee directing the New Zealand
Federation of Film Societies and he was also a film reviewer on a daily paper
for some years, although not for as long as I eventually was. So a minority of
the books on his shelves were illustrated books of film criticism – not to
mention the copies of Films and Filming
and Sight and Sound and Films in Review and even the Sovexport Illustrated Film Newsletter
that came regularly into the house.
And even before I could read very well, I would spend hours looking through the
illustrations and stills in things like the Penguin
Film Reviews from the late 1940s and early 1950s, and Paul Rotha’s The Film Till Now and Ernest Lindgren’s The Art of the Film and Roger Manvell’s Film and Film and the Public. I got to know those images so well that they
still stay in my mind long after the texts of those books have been forgotten.
I’m sorry to descend to clichés, I really am, but some of those images have
become iconic to me. For example Jean Gabin walking the foggy street in Quai des brumes and Victor McLaglen
clutching his shot gut in The Informer and
that tilted camera-shot of the morning after in Un Carnet de Bal and….
SHRINK: Um, I think I get your point. I am sure you would be
able to list a lot of “iconic” images for me. But remember our time is limited,
and this doesn’t quite explain your addiction. All young children look at the
pictures before they can read the text, but this doesn’t make them obsessive
about something.
ME: [sighs] Yes, I
agree, but perhaps I should elaborate on the context a little. Remember, this
was pre-video, pre-DVD, pre-internet. To see a film, one was at the mercy of
local film exhibitors and (once I moved into adolescence) whatever was
scheduled on few-channel black-and-white television. I very quickly understood
that I would never see many of those iconic ancient images in their moving
form. They were, in a sense, unattainable. I gradually formed the impression that
it was both a very great privilege and a rare treat to actually see those
movies that were illustrated in the books and publications lying around the
family home. Looking back on my adolescence and young manhood, I see I adopted
some rather strange habits because of this.
SHRINK: Such as?
ME: Well there was a lavishly illustrated book – a
pretentious and badly-written compilation I now think – called Classics of the Foreign Film, put
together by the American critic Parker Tyler. At least in the 1962 edition that
I still have, it’s a book that lists and gives very brief analyses of 70
non-American films the compiler considered “classics”, starting with Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in 1919 and
ending with Antonioni’s La Notte in
1961. I used to diligently tick off, on the table of contents, each film when I
had got to see it, congratulating myself on having conquered each. But I was
always dissatisfied. I always hungered for the films listed in the book that I
hadn’t seen. By my late teens, I would make long journeys to out-of-the-way
cinemas to catch up with them on the extremely rare occasions they were
screened. And it upsets me that after all this time, I have still seen only 53
of the 70 movies Tyler listed.
SHRINK: You are being melodramatic. That doesn’t sound like
an obsession to me. It sounds like a harmless hobby.
ME: Tell me then - do you sometimes wake up in the
middle of the night in a cold sweat or screaming, because you never have
managed to catch up with Poil de Carotte
from 1933 or The Dybbuk from 1938?
SHRINK: No, that sort of reaction does sound a little
abnormal.
ME: You understand the depths of my problem and my
obsession, then. So when, by some miracle Youtube comes along, it fulfils my
childhood fantasies of a machine upon which I could watch, privately or with
one or two chosen companions, any film whenever I wanted to.
SHRINK: I understand. But aren’t there moves afoot to make
it less easy to do that? Isn’t copyright nibbling away at your freedom of
access to old films?
ME: [visibly jumping
at the use of the word “copyright” and now breaking into a cold sweat] I
know. I know. This is part of my problem. I’m desperate to see as much as I can
before the curtain comes down. Why, in the last year alone I have caught up
with films I last saw as a teenager when television still played old movies. I
mean the likes of the Ealing comedies A
Run for Your Money and The Maggie
and Frank Borzage’s Man’s Castle and
the 1951 original version of The Browning
Version.
SHRINK: Childhood nostalgia. Perfectly harmless
ME: And in the last year I’ve also seen John Farrow’s Alias Nick Beale and Carol Reed’s
woefully unfunny Night Train to Munich
and his pretty good Outcast of the
Islands and Billy Wilder’s A Foreign
Affair and William Wellman’s Yellow
Sky and Rouben Mamolian’s Golden Boy
and James Whale’s wonderful The Old Dark
House and his abysmal The Road Back
…
SHRINK: I understand, I understand you have…
ME:….and G.W.Pabst’s Westfront
1918 (my God! It really is better than All
Quiet on the
SHRINK: Please, you’ve made your point! You’ve made your
point!
ME:…and Launder and Gilliat’s 1946 Waterloo Road and their 1946 Green
for Danger and their 1948 London
Belongs to Me, and Julien Duvivier’s Flesh
and Fantasy, and Anthony Asquith’s silent Cottage on Dartmoor and Fritz Lang’s absolutely piffling Man Hunt and all
SHRINK: You’ve made your point. SHUT UP!!
ME: But don’t you understand? I’ve now seen every film
Hitchcock directed!! Every one!!! (Well, apart from his Waltzes for Vienna, and at least I’ve caught clips of that on
Youtube). And I’ve seen Jean Renoir’s Boudu
Sauve des Eaux and that underrated Italian movie The Girl With a Suitcase and Michael Winner’s surprisingly good The System from 1963 and Joseph Losey’s The Damned from 1961…
SHRINK: STOP IT!!! Stop it or I will have you restrained!!!
ME: But please. [rising
from the couch and now shouting] You don’t understand. I’ve seen all of
these on Youtube in the last year. I’m obsessed. I cannot get over the magic
and the miracle of seeing people walking and moving and sometimes talking in
films that were made when our grandparents or even great-grandparents were
young. And on such good, clean prints, too. Not like the chain-lined ones at which
we used to peer at film society screenings where the projector would break
down.
SHRINK: [gently
guiding patient back to couch] Please. Calm down. Calm down. Tell me
something that soothes you. Think pleasant thoughts.
ME: [sitting once
again] Well, I did watch recently on Youtube two silent gems I thought I’d
never see. There was Jacques Feyder’s 1920 Sahara desert epic L’Atlantide. What an
SHRINK: Perhaps we could break this addiction if you had
something to look forward to?
ME: But I do! I do1 I’ve just discovered on Youtube a full
and restored version of Maurice Stiller’s 1919 Sir Arne’s Treasure. I’ve always wanted to see that one…
SHRINK: I’m sorry. Time’s up. Do you feel you’re any nearer
a cure?
ME: Not really.
SHRINK: Do you want to be cured? Really?
ME: Um, I’m not sure.
SHRINK: Do you want to see me again next month?
ME: I suppose so.
SHRINK: What will we talk about?
ME: What I’ve been watching, I suppose.
They shake hands.
Client exits, relatively happy. Psychotherapist sighs loudly. Moves to
bookshelf, takes down a volume on voyeurism. Reads for a short time then shakes
his head emphatically. Again, sighs
loudly and returns book to shelf. Psychotherapist
moves backs to his desk, reactivates his
computer, spends some time watching a documentary on the mating habits of ants.
Finally he puts a call though to his secretary. “That last one,” he says, “Bill him double.”
That's a lot of movies.
ReplyDeleteYes, I'm Afraid it is. The temptation of having such easy access to them. And there are lots I neglected to mention.
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