Time out of mind

When did I discover "old movies"?  Sometime during elementary school - into - junior high years, there was a sort of dawning realization that there was a whole treasure-trove of movies -- in the world -- and that you didn't have to be limited to whatever film turned up in your local Something-Plex.  There was other stuff out there -- but you couldn't get it, you had to wait and see if it would be on TV sometime, late at night, or during the day on "UHF" channels -- (very smushy and snowy usually, and hard to see // hear....)

I could read about it -- from local library, I took a couple of big, thick books which told you about history of the movies & had black-and-white photographs from the movies.  I experienced the iconic images in still-photo form, years before getting the opportunity to see the movies -- first on big screens at second-run theaters in Boston, then on classic-movie channels on TV, & videoes, then DVDs....

I still haven't seen all of the movies that I want to see.  There's like an unending -- well not unending, because there are only so many movies, but on the other hand, there are --
SO - MANY - MOVIES! -- that the potential for future pleasure and enjoyment and inspiration and discovery seems endless.

It's like a vast, thick, luxuriant Wealth of Life Richness and Cheer and Fun and Meaning and Fashion and poetry and Music and...it's available to just about Everyone on earth, now, with technology.

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I don't watch a movie because it is new, or because it is old; I watch because I think it is going to be good.  The writer E.M. Forster, in his book Aspects Of The Novel, writes about what he feels is the necessity of removing chronology as a way of looking at literature:

{excerpt}-----------------Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.  A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west.  The reader must sit down alone and struggle with the writer....

That is why, in the rather ramshackly course that lies ahead of us, we cannot consider fiction by periods, we must not contemplate the stream of time.  Another image better suits our powers:  that of all the novelists writing their novels at once.  They come from different ages and ranks, they have different temperaments and aims, but they all hold pens in their hands, and are in the process of creation.

Let us look over their shoulders for a moment and see what they are writing.  It may exorcise that demon of chronology which is at present our enemy and which...is sometimes their enemy too.  "Oh, what quenchless feud is this, that Time hath with the sons of men," cries Herman Melville, and the feud goes on not only in life and death but in the byways of literary creation and criticism.

Let us avoid it by imagining that all the novelists are at work together in a circular room.  I shall not mention their names until we have heard their words, because a name brings associations with it, dates, gossip, all the furniture of the method we are discarding....

All through history writers while writing have felt more or less the same.  They have entered a common state which it is convenient to call inspiration, and having regard to that state, we may say that History develops, Art stands still.-----------------------------------{end excerpt}

He says it for literature -- and I say, Same for movies.

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{Aspects Of The Novel, by E.M. Forster.
Copyright, 1927.  Harcourt, Inc.
Orlando, Florida.}

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