A tweet this week reminded me exactly when I feel hopelessly in love with movies:
The beginning of my obsession with movies right here. 40 years ago this summer. https://t.co/z3AilVPewV
— MaryAnn Johanson (@maryannjohanson) August 27, 2021
I was 12 years old, and I was irretrievably hooked by movie magic. I have earlier memories of exciting movies, but Raiders of the Lost Ark is the movie that cemented my adoration.
Your turn:
What is your seminal movie? Define “seminal” however you like. Or perhaps you have a seminal movie experience or movie moment, not a film itself but a moviegoing experience or an association that made you fall in love with cinema.
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I don’t think I have any one movie that served as an epiphany and turned me into a lifelong cinephile. And anyway, I like to divide my attention over literature, various music genres, theatre, opera and cinema, not necessarily in that order. However, I do have some vivid recollections: watching Disney’s Snow White with its scary queen/witch and haunting soundtrack before the 1967 Christmas holiday when I was six; The Jungle Book on its first release when I was seven and too young to join the Cub Scouts or to have read the Kipling books, which are much darker and more layered; seeing The Godfather in the auditorium of my secondary school, something I shall never forget, mostly due to the horse’s head; and I learned the Once Upon a Time in the West soundtrack from an LP at home way before I ever got around to seeing the film. (I still haven’t seen it in a real cinema. The blu-ray is quite nice, though.) Other vivid memories, from the eighties (my twenties), include discovering Tilda Swinton in Sally Potter’s Orlando, David Thewlis in Mike Leigh’s Naked (“Look, pizza delivery man!” he said, pointing at a discus thrower statuette), being amazed by Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table and being dumbstruck by the final scene of Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice with the burning house and Bach music.
I’ve a voracious reader, and I love theater to the point where I volunteered with a community theater company for years. It never occurred to me that being a movie lover meant to you had to exclude other forms of art/entertainment!
This is a tough one. I think that probably it would be the original King Kong (1933) and Godzilla (1954). Growing up my family had no money, everything was dented canned green beans and 2nd hand clothing – except for one thing: Technology. My father was fascinated with computers back in the late1960’s, back when the average computer took up a huge room and had multiple reel-to-reels running 24 hours.
He worked at a University in their then-nascent computer department and was paid absolute dirt, but he did meet a lot of techie people, and one of them had some connection to the movie business. He gave my dad a projector (can’t remember what kind, but I think it was bigger than 8mm) and copies of couple of old movies — including King Kong and Godzilla. I was probably 6 or so when he held our first family movie night. Hung a big white sheet on one wall, set up the projector and we all sat on the floor of the living room watching in absolute awe. We had a small black-and-white TV but back then nothing was really on anyway, certainly nothing like those movies. And seeing them so big on the wall! Those two movies scared the living hell out of me and I LOVED it.
Much, much later, I saw Jaws. Mind you, it had been years since it premiered and of course I had heard all the hype about it, but I assumed it was just a crappy movie (and not even a King Kong – just a shark, big whoop) so I didn’t ask my parents to take me to see it when it came out. Skip forward to my early 20’s and it was showing at a revival theater on my day off and I figured what the hell, at least it’ll be air-conditioned.
That movie completely surprised me. I thought it was just going to be a junky horror movie. Instead it was extraordinarily well written, with really amazing actors, and the shark itself was SO not the point. I have since watched that movie countless times. It is by far one of my favorite movies of all time and it made me think about scripts, plot development, the way scenes are shot, and most importantly that sometimes it’s the anticipation and fear of what you CAN’T see on the screen that is the most effective.
i was just talking to MaryAnn about that movie… i watched it again for the *umpteenth* time and i continue to be impressed and amazed and even a little frightened…. and so taken by the amazing performances of Schnieder, Dreyfuss and Shaw.
I can’t remember a time I didn’t love movies, but if there ever was a defining moment, it probably involved Muppets.
I saw films as a child, but they were just a thing that was there, like books. I think Return of the Jedi was the first time I noticed that, no, hang on, there’s an actual person back there rather than just a plastic celebrity, and the reason Luke looks completely different from the way I remember him is that it’s three years later and Mark Hamill has got older.
Not sure I really count as a cinephile even now but I do try to find out the story behind a film, why it ended up this particular way, what films might have happened instead. (George Lucas’s 16mm Apocalypse Now filmed in Vietnam against the actual Tet Offensive. David Lynch’s Return of the Jedi. Close Encounters starring Steve McQueen. Jaws starring Robert Duvall.)
Perhaps you already knew this, but the reason for the snow monster attack in Empire Strikes Back is because Mark Hamill had a terrible car accident after Star Wars, went through the windshield of his car. The monster attack was to explain in-story why his face was a bit messed up. He looks different after SW not just because he got older.
Yeah, when Return came out there was talk of an accident and major reconstructive surgery, but I had a look in Wikipedia before posting and apparently his face wasn’t injured at that time.
I saw THE WIZARD OF OZ at a Saturday afternoon matinee in 1954. When I returned home, wary of flying monkeys and witches, I learned that my mom had given birth to my brother.
Is he a good witch or a bad witch?
It’s often best for me to wait till I see what others write, since I don’t always get an answer right away. Like this time. Anne-Kari made me think of when I was really little and how my family used to go to the drive-in on Saturday nights. Got nostalgic pictures in my head. I’ve said many times, I slept through most of the best movies of the Fifties in the back seat of the car at the Hampton Road Drive-In. And thinking of that, I remembered some of the scenes, including a number of Bible movies like The Robe, The Silver Chalice, David and Bathsheba, like that. Then it came to me: These movies were showing me something that (purportedly) actually happened, but I could never have seen for myself. That’s cool.
Now, this is something I already knew about myself – that I’m fixated on somehow having a personal grasp on other places, other times, how things outside my little world looked and felt and smelled like when I wasn’t there to see for myself. Even my own life, actually. That’s why I want a time machine, so I could go back and have a look, you know, there aren’t any old gas stations left, or the fabulous Jefferson Avenue Library that’s not there any more, my grandparents’ houses. Just have a look, really, I don’t have to live there. Just curious.
And back in history before me, absolutely! How did it/we/I get from there to here? Any number of times, places, people – how did they really dress every day, when we only have drawings of their clothes, and they look so complicated and awkward? (Pick your era.) I’m not the only one. There are people studying how things were done all the time. There are YouTube videos of how Renaissance ladies got dressed and made up in the morning, and how many things Victorian women had to wear.
So you see, it looks like I developed my thing for movies very young, when it showed me stuff I wasn’t able to see anywhere else. Even though much/most of it was fictitious, it was a way for me to fix ideas in my head, to grasp the world. (Ooh, even beyond! – see The Martian! – oh, yes, Star Wars was a brain explosion. Woo-hoo!) There are times when I get into some subject or other and then see a movie that covers it, to pull in more data or at least ideas. And don’t get me started on how the movies have developed over time to be insanely more accurate and better made or we’ll be here all night.
I grew up in the Philippines and don’t have very many vivid memories of going to movie theaters there. From what I remember, the entry rules were VERY lax: you could buy a ticket and go in any time during the movie, sit through the end credits, stay in your seat while the movie started up again so you could catch up on what you missed, and then leave at the point you came in. My childhood memories of movie theaters are mostly of adult moviegoers’ silhouettes coming and going across the bottom half of the screen. (I do remember seeing Krull and being confused by how extremely in medias res the story was; it turned out the projectionist had played the second reel first.)
I fell in love with movies not by going to theaters, but by watching them on Betamax tapes rented from local video stores, run by entrepreneurs who obtained staticky bootleg copies and hand-wrote the titles on the sticker labels. (Sometimes they weren’t very accurate; a tape of “Mickey Mouse” adventures turned out to be Tom and Jerry cartoons.) That’s how I discovered films*: cropped and pan-and-scanned, on a TV-Betamax combo wheeled in on a cart, in an air-conditioned bedroom in the heat of tropical summers. Peter Pan, Fantasia, The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins. Star Wars, Spaceballs, Cocoon, 2010. Conan, Time Bandits, Fire and Ice, Hearts and Armour. Robocop, Rambo, Police Academy (I through Bazillion). Jackie Chan’s early films, which all seemed to feature extremely skinny actors, narrow doorways, and needle-thin trees (because the widescreen films were compressed, not cropped, to fit the TV screen). If I had a favorite film from those days, I’d say it was probably Starman, which I rented over and over and over. Karen Allen was a childhood crush, and that’s the film I knew her from (even before I saw Raiders). And Jeff Bridges was (and is) an acting genius.
*(There was and is, of course, a Filipino film industry, and the fact that I grew up mostly on Western films has a lot to do with “colonial mentality” and Western imperialism and a whole can of worms of other stuff that I wasn’t aware of at the time and am still trying to figure out—and unlearn—now. Still loved those films, though.)
Another seminal moment came in the latter half of high school, in the States, when I first saw The Godfather and The Godfather Part II in their entirety (also on videotape, from Blockbuster). I’d seen bits of them before, as a kid, glimpsed when other family members were watching, but I found them incomprehensibly talky and boring. Finally understanding them—and being gobsmacked by them—was, I think, a moment of mental evolution for me. And the films sparked in me an Al Pacino obsession that lasted years. :-)
I’ll also always cherish the memory of watching The Little Mermaid in the theater, with my dad. It was our first year in the US. We both absolutely loved the movie, and then stepped out of the darkness into our first snowfall. I was giddy with wonder. We got into the car to drive home, and anytime the traffic allowed it, Dad punched it in order to make the snowflakes whiz past the windshield in elongated streaks. Just like hyperspace. A perfect evening.
I don’t really consider myself a cinephile; to me, it is one of many ways of telling a story.
But, the first movie I saw that wrenched my soul was Dersu Uzala. I lived in San Francisco during the school year as a kid, a city with (at the time, no idea now) a large number of art houses and revival theaters. Me AND my more mainstream classmates went to see all kinds of movies that probably a lot of people would have thought were bizarre for kids to bother watching.
Anyhow, I think I went to see Dersu Uzala with my step-father and I think it might have been my suggestion? He liked Kurosawa, tho’, so it might have been his. I think I was 12.
So — and here’s the hardest thing to explain, I have trouble putting myself in my 12 y.o. brain, too — I saw myself in Dersu. Note that I mentioned I lived in SF during the school year. Other times, I was with my father and we spent a lot of time in backwoods on canoing trips and had done so since I was really young. By the time I saw that movie, I had already solo’d for 2 days and daydreamed about when I’d be old enough to do it All The Time. (Disclosure: I don’t, I live in a city, and don’t get me started on life choices I have made.) I spent most of my days (when not keeping my nose to the grindstone in school) waiting to go back to the upper Midwest and then to the backwoods.
When he is dragged to the town “for his own good”, I was sobbing in that theater. And, I absolutely understood his choice to leave at the end.
Saw it again a few weeks later with some classmates for a birthday party (!!?!…) and got into a argument about what was the “right” way to end that story.
it wasn’t the first movie i ever saw, but one of the most seminal i guess. one rainy afternoon, my father dropped me and my brother off at a very small neighborhood movie theatre… the film was a russian animated movie of The Snow Queen… it was breathtaking (at least to me at 6 or 7 or whatever i was)… and to this day i love beautiful animation movies, the fairy tale of the Snow Queen, and had a bit of a thing for Russian folk tales, art, and language. i think the next full feature animation that moved me in the same way was Beauty and the Beast…
If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend Katherine Arden’s Winternight Trilogy, beginning with The Bear and the Nightingale. Deeply steeped in Russian folklore and culture and gorgeously written. (Terrifying in parts too, the way fairy tales used to be.)
excellent. i shall seek this out.
And so shall I. I had such a thing myself for a while, and read some of the classic fiction. At one time I had a beautiful book of Russian folk tales, unless it was a single story, and have no idea what happened to it. It’s one of those things that you wish you had a whole other life to pursue. (In fact just last night I was inspired to think, “I need to read the Odyssey and Ovids’s Metamorphoses now, it’s important.” Oh yeah. And I have a list several dozen titles on my library’s request program. I will not live long enough.)
Omg – that movie haunted me ever since I saw it as a child – later when I recalled it I wondered if it really existed or if I’d just dreamed it
same here! i do think it is available — at a pretty hefty price — in either dvd or old vhs… it is available to watch on something called Tubi, and i see a dvd on Amazon for $300+.
I like this question – it invites us to examine ourselves and not only the film itself
I have to say my seminal movie is Ran, from 1985, Kurosawa’s take on Lear
– I was already used to enjoying silver screen classics on TV with my family, and at that point in my life my young imagination was steeped in Lucas and Tolkien
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd-k9URvO0Q
– but this was something new – I saw how electrified Siskel and Ebert were just talking about it – and when I saw it I had never experienced this sensation of simultaneous trauma and staggering beauty – this film came and lived in my mind for years after – it changed my concept of what I might expect from cinema
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzaXtBr5210
And that same year I saw Mishima, from Paul Schrader – a very different film and a more abstract kind of experience, particularly with that Philip Glass score, and yet there was still this sensation of being overwhelmed by what was unfolding in front of me
At that point when I tried to grasp what had affected me so, I thought it had something to do with Japan – that stylized quality – and for some time afterwards I tried to learn more about Noh and Kabuki –
Many, many years later, I learned of a Sanskrit concept that seems to describe what I was discovering – it’s the notion of reflecting on and savoring my own emotional response to an aesthetic experience
Ran was the one that knocked me off my feet – and then with Mishima following close on its heels – from that point I realized that this would be a part of my life – seeking out new flavors to savor