Cinematic Memory

Struck by Burgin's The Remembered Film, I was reminded of my own early cinematic experiences. My father is a school teacher, so he would always have the school holidays off. In my infancy, several times of the year it was precisely as if I had a live-in parent. As any good parent with a wee lad would do, my father took me to the movies.
My most vivid memory of the cinema of my youth is Who Framed Roger Rabbit, specifically Eddie Valiant opening the blinds of R.K. Maroon's office to reveal a stream of light ... and Dumbo, flying outside the window. I remember, sitting at Beverly Hills Cinema, the princely age of three, and being surprised by the suddenness of the appearance that had caused Eddie to drop to the floor.



Who Framed Roger Rabbit sticks with me to this day. My uncle gave me the DVD for my eighteenth birthday and, while much of it was a revelation to me, the Maroon scene was exactly as it ever was. Now, thinking of Dumbo at the window (perhaps a movie concept to rival Enemy at the Gates?), I can extrapolate the entire movie. It's a great genre film, period piece, and still impressive as it ever was in the field of special effects. Reflecting on the Roger Rabbit scenario, I realise that environment is a huge part of the cinema going experience: a hermetically sealed world.
Unless you're watching a movie from your home theatre, increasingly becoming a bunker laden with technology designed to block the outside world entirely, you're going to be seeing things on different screens. I'm probably unique in this (and, if I'm not, I'm probably one of the few who cares), but I store in my mind cinema, screen, seating, and with whom I saw a movie.
Obviously it works most effectively for the last few years; my most frustrating memories are of Masters of the Universe, which I have a clear idea of venue interior, but I've no idea of where it was, and I'm pretty certain it wasn't a cinema but it was in the dark with a lot of people. Similarly, I saw High Fidelity on George Street, when the cinemas there were a Hoyts, a Greater Union and a Village next to each other. Now that the three have combined into Greater Union alone, I can't locate that screen. Where I think it should be is the lousy boxy cinema of Chicken Little, A Scanner Darkly and the second time I saw Brokeback Mountain.

The problem is this: if I can't reconcile one cinematic memory, how can I expect the rest of my memories to be accurate? In the instance of Roger Rabbit I can break out the DVD - but of course in doing so I overwrite my previous memory and refresh it, or find it utterly dashed down. This is the problem with nostalgia: in revisiting something, you may find that your memory doesn't hold up, that what you're watching isn't as good as it used to be - although, of course, the material hasn't changed; you have. Youth mixes memories, and it takes your growth to differentiate and compartmentalise these memories. While you can lose an awesome movie, you can gain so much more to see things with new eyes.

The interconnected nature of memory allows me not only to jump not in cinema five of George Street from 40 Year Old Virgin to The Holiday to Harry Potter & The Goblet of Fire to Borat to Knocked Up ... but also to jump from March 21, 2006, Cinema 14, George Street: Match Point, Woody Allen's migraine inducing disaster ... to March 23, 2007, Cinema 14, George Street: Scoop, Allen's screwball comedy "redemption" (or near enough).

Coincidence? No, my friends, that is cinematic destiny.