Maybe we both changed...

"Movies, like any other works of art - or presumptive art - don't change. DVD "director's cuts" aside (and there are, I think, legitimate debates to be had about them), most movies are destined to live their lives in the form in which they were first released. But the people who watch movies do change. They grow up - or at least older - and their perceptions of a particular movie change. Movies we loved as young people sometimes seem less lovable when we revisit them years later. The opposite is also true; sometimes we need more experience to appreciate fully the subtlety of movies we saw for the first time in the distant past."

- Martin Scorsese, from the foreword to Scorsese by Roger Ebert

I brought this quote to the blogorium for two reasons:

1) It addresses directly the question of "are movies malleable?", at least from Martin Scorsese's perspective. For Scorsese, the answer is no; George Lucas (among others) believe that films are "never finished, they merely escape".

2) The second point, which I circle around periodically when writing: that just as important as the idea of a film "changing" is the way our relationship to a film changes with time.

There are movies that I will admit I did not "get" the first time I saw them. I liked Touch of Evil when I saw it in high school, but I did not "get" it, even in its truncated VHS version, I did not appreciate Evil or many of Welles' other films until I was older. I enjoyed Blade Runner when I saw it for the first time, but I didn't understand it. It took me years to fully appreciate what Francis Ford Coppola and Walter Murch did in the opening of Apocalypse Now. Taxi Driver - to bring in Scorsese - was something I thought was cool when I was 17, but it meant so much more when I was 28.

What interesting is that the two movies I mentioned first were films that did "change", one to a restoration that approximated a director's vision and another that went through a few passes before seeing a "Final" version. Admittedly, the first time I "got" Blade Runner was during the era of the so-called "Director's Cut"*, and the "Final Version" released two years ago was further proof of what I saw the second (or third) time through.

I think this can represent a hybrid opinion of the possibility that films can "change" and the certainty with which our opinion about movies can (and will) change with time. Not knowing Scorsese's exact position on "Director's Cuts", I will not engage that part of the quote directly. On the other hand, we can turn this notion of a changing position on the viewer's part back towards our earlier discussions.

Perhaps the attachment to the ratty, ragged prints of films has something to do with the way I (or many of us) first encountered them. I can't speak for the rest of you, but I never saw Eraserhead on the big screen. Or Night of the Living Dead, or the long rumoured "extended" cut of 2001 that Kubrick gutted after a preview screening. Most of these and other films I love were introduced on home video, particularly VHS. In those I came to understand film in a "square" format; movies were "panned-and-scanned" to fit the 4X3 screen, and for a long time I had no idea that movies should look any different. Even going to see them in theatres, I never made the connection about aspect ratios.

Laserdiscs changed the way I understood movies. It was with the laserdisc (and the player we rented from Video Bar) that I learned what "letterboxed" meant, and that films were shot in a rectangular manner. For the first time, I could see the whole picture in movies like Aliens and Raiders of the Lost Ark. It was a small shift that came to mean much more as I engrossed myself in cinema.

(I realize this is primarily related to the idea of film in a technical sense. For personal anecdotes about specific films, I will include older entries and update section with links soon)

Another key shift happened with Laserdiscs: I discovered that I could not like a film presented in a "director's cut". After spending four or five years with the theatrical cut of Aliens, the experience of watching Cameron's "preferred" cut was at first intriguing but ultimately underwhelming. I felt that the longer version over-explained plot points, rendering parts of the movie redundant or robbing them of their impact. For example, not knowing what the colony looks like before the Marines arrive increases the suspense for audiences. If, on the other hand, we get a full "ride through" of the colony and meet Newt's family, we know where the Marines are geographically and any sense of discovery is nullified.

That wasn't the last time my opinion on a movie would change, but it's the first one I remember clearly. The "Special Editions" of the Star Wars trilogy had similar effects, positively and negatively. To this day I wrestle with how I feel about some of the changes to the film and whether they reflect the films themselves or how I've changed over time.

Someday I will do more than just "appreciate" Wild Strawberries. I imagine as I get older, the film is going to resonate in different ways, just as something as seemingly trivial as Dazed and Confused grew more endearing. Dazed moved from what I wanted high school to be like to a film that reminds me of the ways that time of my life echoed parts of the movie, just not in the nostalgic way you'd expect. The boredom, the sense of "something more" that permeates the film resonates with me more than the hijinks or the potheads throwing a party. As I got older, a film like Dazed and Confused captures a period in my life where I was very much like those characters, in a way that Ghost World continues to echo my early twenties.

Maybe films don't change. Perhaps we do. I think there's room to say that a movie is slightly more flexible than Scorsese claims, but I understand his point. If movies are focal points around which fans of cinema can orient themselves, then it might be more important to look at how we change in relation to films than how they "change" to entice us or surprise us.

At any rate, this topic is far from put to rest. Feel free to chime in with your own anecdotes.




* I say that because the 1992 Director's Cut represents Warner Brothers staff working with Ridley Scott's notes to recut Blade Runner. Scott was off filming Thelma and Louise during much of the process, which took place between 1990 and 1991.