Lucidno       


Childhood memories of films
resist the restoration process

An overhead shot of a bald man sitting in a large armchair in the midst of a spacious ante-room. There is a huge swastika on the wall. The camera moves in, and we see that the man has a bullet hole in his head. Crowds roar outside. Someone comes into the room and opens a door that leads to a balcony.

This sequence is all I remembered from a film I saw as a young child and which, for some reason, left an indelible impression on my mind. It kept recurring in dreams until I began to wonder whether the film ever existed, but had been a dream in the first place. Over the years I tried to find out the title of the film by describing the scene to anybody who would listen. Recently, I desperately Googled by putting down random words like "bald Nazi shot head film". There was a time when I thought that the dead man in the film might be Erich von Stroheim. So I Googled "Stroheim Nazi", but I remained none the wiser – that is, until a few nights ago.

I was watching a film on television when suddenly there was that very scene, almost exactly as I remembered it all those decades ago. It came as a great relief, a sort of expurgation. No longer would I wonder where the scene came from. No longer would it haunt my dreams. Yet, at the same time, I was rather disappointed that the sequence was less impressive than I had thought.

I know I'm not alone in having seen a film that made such an impact in childhood, only to find that it is impossible to "recapture the first fine careless rapture". Still, this does not prevent us from going on a Proustian search for lost time. Like Scottie (James Stewart) in Vertigo, we desperately try to change Judy (Kim Novak) into the Madeleine (as in the cake) we once loved and lost. It is inevitable that the rediscovery will always compare unfavourably with the initial experience. But the memory lingers on.

Not a day goes by when somebody, on some film website, asks if anyone can help them trace the name of a film they remembered from childhood. Because I have a longer memory than most, I recall films from my childhood that predate most people's consciousness of cinema. But the relative temporal distance does not seem to alter the gigantic gap between the way a child perceives the world and that of the adult on the other side of the watershed. There is no difference between a 70-year-old who saw Pinocchio on its first release or a 20-year-old who vaguely recalls The Little Mermaid.

Stan Brakhage, in his four-part film, Scenes from Under Childhood (1967-70), examines the differences in perception between children and adults. Brakhage believed that as adults "our sense of sight has been tutored away from the wonder and magic the world actually contains". 

Perhaps it is the "wonder and magic" of films we remember as a child that is missing from our more rational approach to cinema. Were those credulous spectators of 1895, who fled their seats in terror when the train entered La Ciotat station, the last adults to see cinema as a child does?

It is a question of identification as analysed by Christian Metz in an essay from The Imaginary Signifier that separates the child and the adult's view of the cinema. Like Jacques Lacan, he makes the distinction between the imaginary, the symbolic and the real in the child's changing perception of the world. I now realise why seeing a man with a bullet hole in his head on screen was so powerful to my young mind. I believed it was real. I had not yet developed the objectivity required of an all-perceiving adult spectator.

Like a film by Georges Méliès, memory plays tricks. I remember believing that I had seen the 1941 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and that it was in Technicolor. In fact, it was in black and white, and there was no way I could have seen it as a child because the horror genre was forbidden to pre-teens. I had probably confused the film of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with the lurid Classic Comic version.

By the way, the film which contained the scene that had haunted me for so long was Margin for Error (1943), one of Otto Preminger's earliest Hollywood films, with Milton Berle, Joan Bennett and a shaven-haired Preminger as the Nazi.

What are your only swimmingly remembered childhood films? And have they proved disappointing when seen through adult eyes?

Ronald Bergan
http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2009/jun/15/hitchcock-preminger-vertigo-childhood-memorie