Note: It has been some time since I’ve turned to this blog at all, and even longer since I’ve blogged about anything too substantive. But I realized that, while I have friends and family who I can confide in, I don’t always have a consistent outlet for sharing my day-to-day experiences, expressing my thoughts, or even just checking in about the random things that have piqued my interest. So, I figured I’d resurrect the blog and see how it felt.
It’s an interesting exercise, especially once one gets past the first hundred movies or so, and more digging has to be done in order to come up with a more complete listing of movies.
Some movies were more difficult to track down on a practical level, and involved scouring film festival programs from years past to try and figure out the title of a movie I recall seeing, when I can only conjure up some of the details. Many of these were from film festival movies or movies that were in limited release. For example, it took me a while to track down a movie I remembered seeing as part of an Indian American film festival at the ArcLight, where I remembered that it involved a schoolgirl, science, and forests for some reason, but where I could not recall any cast and crew or other specific details (I figured out that it was “Raspberry Magic,” but had trouble finding it because the movie was older than I thought). Other movies were easier to locate, simply by checking the filmographies of prominent actors and directors.
The exercise also raises interesting questions. Initially, I found myself thinking about classification, and trying to differentiate between what “counts” for purposes of the list, and what I decided not to include. Even if they’re on the site, I had to question whether I, personally, thought short films or miniseries should fit on the list; I accepted the shorts, but not miniseries.
As I racked my brain to recall movies, the question also arose as to whether any given viewing experience might be too “corrupted” to allow the movie to qualify as a “movie I watched.” Could I acknowledge a movie that regularly played on TV during my childhood, where I watched different sequences out-of-order, over a course of years, but where I never watched the movie in its entirety? If I remember the experience of going to a movie but also remember being asleep for most of it, should I write it off? Can I count a movie if I know I saw most of it but don’t know whether I saw the final minutes? Should I be more forgiving of children’s movies, which, on some level, were designed for short attention spans and intermittent viewing, particularly when some portions of those movies were vividly remembered? I did end up being more forgiving towards childhood viewing experiences, partially for those reasons, but also because I found it useful to have a record of those half-remembered kids’ movies that tend to leave a strong impression but are hard to locate and identify, or which you might suspect were only a product of the imagination. So, the 1980’s PBS Alice in Wonderland and the dark claymation feature about Mark Twain made the cut.
The more profound questions raised by the exercise involved the nature of memory itself. With some movies, especially ones that had not been screened in a long time, it could be hard to differentiate between movies that I could remember watching, and movies where I had just remembered the aggressive ad campaign. Or, I might remember that I had seen one of the Up movies, or one of the Bourne movies, but I could not figure out which of the movies I actually saw. It might take a little while to recall a piece of information or scene that gave me the confidence to state that, yes, I had watched that movie. Sometimes, memories about the circumstances surrounding the viewing experience were more vivid than memories of the movies themselves. It was pleasant to remember times spent with frequent movie-watching companions, or times at outdoor screenings and film festivals, that I hadn’t had occasion to think about for a long time.
Of course, even though I was able to remember seeing a large number of movies, there were a handful that I believed that I must have seen, but could not firmly state that I had seen, and it was depressing to notice the (likely) moviegoing experiences which apparently left no impression on me. I suppose that is the nature of experiences; it is a gamble as to which ones will leave a mark, and which ones will pass through your mind as if they never happened.
Interesting, eloquently put together Jenny. Memory is a tricky thing, even the brain rewires connections during the process of trying to remember. At a certain level it makes us question the accuracy of our own past. If you are interested in the topic there are some fascinating studies involving eye witness testimony where memory of events is show to be rather malleable.
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