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Movies are the stuff that Our dreams are made of, lucid fantasies of the collective consciousness. If a nation --a people-- function in many ways as a single entity, our movies are the manifestation of the subconscious of that entity, our known and unknown hopes and ambitions, our fears and our desires. In the movie house the lights even go down, as they do when we go to sleep, and as one, we dream. Our movies, like the dreams of individuals, reveal much more about who we are than what our words or intentions ever could – whether or not we recognize or understand the truth of what we have seen. In this regard movies are not just our natural selves revealed but our supernatural Self realized. Movies are kaleidoscopic apparitions made manifest by will, intelligence and creativity for the express purpose of altering those who bear witness, psychically, physically and spiritually. Movies are burgeoning spells of light and shadow given shape by story and intention, history and culture, talent and technique. The wand doesn’t look like a wand, the bubbling cauldron seems different than we remember it but a spell is being cast just the same. The fact of technology skirts the truth, that we know how they are made obscures the reality: movies are actual magic.
Margiana comes to me in a dream. It is not my dream but it might as well be. It is the dream of a man of myth, a hero, Sinbad the Sailor in the Ray Harryhausen film, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad. In his dream Sinbad sees a mysterious young woman dancing slowly towards him. She is a beautiful slave girl with a tattoo on the palm of her hand. The tattoo is an eye. When she reaches her hand out to Sinbad – to me -- the eye looks into me even as I look onto it. The eye knows more about me than I do; me, a small, six-year old boy with a head full of wonder. It knows who I am and from where I have come; is aware of dreams of mine I do not know and the man I will one day grow into. Inside me a seed is planted; a seed of mystery that blossoms into art, into romance, into anger, into desire. Desire, Tennessee Williams once wrote, is the opposite of death. It is the engine that drives us forward, that makes us strive, struggle, achieve. It is the single most powerful force in the human condition, so pervasive it can’t be properly classified. It flies us to our greatest victories and leads us into our most devastating defeats. In our lives we will know desire for food, for shelter, for safety. We will know desire for recognition, for stimulation, for money, for power, for God…for flesh. Margiana will teach me this too. When this dream comes to me I don’t recognize this new fire in the pit of my stomach as lust, the progenitor of life, my first claim on my humanity, I only know that looking onto the breasts and hips of a beautiful woman makes me feel different than I ever have, makes me aware of how I breathe, my body draws attention to itself in a way that it never has before, my mind is overwhelmed with thoughts and colors that it does not know what to do with. For years afterwards Margiana (Caroline Munro) was a symbol of my expansion, my burning welcome into a universe greater than me. I am more now than just myself. When Sinbad awakens both he and I know that he must find this girl and he must discover the secret of the eye on the palm of her hand. Within an hour and a half or so Sinbad’s quest will have ended but mine has just begun. |  |
I don’t even know that The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was the first important film experience of my life. Sinbad however, was the first movie that felt as though it was mine alone. Its particular treasure, its special magic seemed designed for me personally. I remember watching The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and being transported. I remember feeling like I was becoming something different while watching it, my perimeters dissolving. The real world fell away from me as I was entranced by a spell of epic romance. I knew no one like this, no one who talked this way, dressed this way, fought this way, loved this way. I basked in a dreaming myth where characters walked between God and Man, Life and Death, the Real and the Unreal. There were monsters and there was magic, there was wonderment and adventure. In distant lands and on the high seas, Sinbad sought the meaning of the eye on the slave girl’s hand. Every escapade, every mystery, every magic spell, every daring escape from danger seemed to burst in my eye like a firework yet seemed to echo some ancient memory from a thousand years ago.
| I love movies.
There are times when falling in love is an event, a moment dangling like an ornament, catching the light of your life and flashing playfully outward against the sky of who you are. Other times falling in love sneaks up on you as stealthily as sleep, on the liquid feet of a shadow and all of a sudden you find yourself enveloped in a dream. Still other times you find yourself in love and it seems you could never have been any other way; that it’s less about something that’s happened to you and more about your essential truth being finally revealed, about remembering who you really are. My love for film touches on all of these. It is a romantic love, played out over my entire life. If there was one moment when I fell in love with movies there were a thousand, my memory is spangled with such ornaments: The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, the ending of Casablanca, the beginning of Jaws, when the mother ship came out from behind Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when the mothers and daughters are reunited in Rabbit-Proof Fence, when Dash finds out he can run on water in The Incredibles…over and over again and always in a new and exciting way movies have touched me with their special romance of the spirit. |
Being in love with an art form is a type of discipline. When I became a teen-ager, I didn’t just see movies I saw a lot of movies, all kinds of movies. Besides seeing Conan the Barbarian, The Road Warrior and Purple Rain (every single night it played in the small town in England where we lived), I also wound up seeing Birdy, A Letter to Brezhnev, Stranger than Paradise and Amadeus (every single night it played in that same small town). I not only saw movies, I read about them. As a small child I was a voracious reader and movies were as exciting a subject as any I encountered. I can remember one book in particular, David Zinman’s 50 Classic Motion Pictures, that was written with such obvious passion and love I couldn’t help but get caught up. Later on I discovered Pauline Kael, the high priestess of American film criticism, who validated much of what I had begun to suspect, that movies were more than popular culture, more even than high art, but a symbiosis of the two that achieved something still greater…transcendence.
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