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Arts and Culture

Movies and Memory

Films seen long ago meld with personal dramas, making the mind one weird Cineplex.

Dorothy Woodend 8 Jul 2011TheTyee.ca

Dorothy Woodend writes about film for The Tyee every other Friday. Find her previous articles here.

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Vanessa Redgrave as Isadora: horrifying.

Movies and memories are interchangeable in my family. Not only do memories, embellished and embroidered, reworked and redesigned, turn into movies after a while, but movies themselves become part of the great tapestry of family remembering. The epic Armstrong family adventures such as The Time Great Grandpa pulled The Cougar's Tail, or the eerie ghost story, The Demonic Entity That lived Upstairs in the Green House, probably won't be coming to a theatre near you any time soon, but they have both earned a hallowed place in family lore.

By being repeated enough to become more than fact, they have become legend.

So, too actual films take on mythic proportions. My brother Naiches, a consummate bullshitter (he comes from a long line of them), maintains that seeing Star Wars in 1977 changed his entire life, despite the fact that he was three years old at the time. I was nine, and can legitimately remember the actual events surrounding the film. It was an all-day excursion, a ferry ride to Nelson, hours waiting for the film to begin, and then the opening scene, where I literally felt my mind crack open like an egg at the sight of the spaceship, so huge it ate the screen. As fast as the dialogue came, I committed it to memory, knowing that precise recitations of the banter that took place between Han Solo and Princess Leia would be worth its weight in gold on the playground. Damned if I wasn't right.

In Creston, the closest town to the farm where I grew up, there were two places to see movies -- the Tivoli (also called the Tiv') and the Valley Drive-In. The Tivoli is still in operation, but the Drive-In went to the great big show in the sky in 2002. We never called it by its actual name. It was always just the Drive-In, the only one around. The set up was rudimentary, a big white screen, with cherry orchards on either side, and a series of posts sunk into the ground, each equipped with a squawking radio that you hooked through the car window, half rolled down for that exact purpose. The Drive-In was a seasonal attraction; it opened when it was warm enough to outside without a parka, and closed when snow started falling.

Part of the joy of the place was sneaking in as many people as you possibly could without paying. Kids hid under blankets in the back of station wagons, giggling in hushed hysteria. Since we could barely afford the cost of admission, we brought enormous brown grocery bags of popcorn from home, spotted dark with grease. Kids sat on the roofs of cars, or on blankets spread out on the ground, a scant few feet from the screen. The Drive-In Nazis patrolled with flashlights, trying to ascertain who had paid to get in and who hadn't. A great deal of time was allocated to running back and forth between your car, and other people's cars, but especially for visiting the snack bar. Since we only had enough money for one treat each, it was critical to actually get the right one, which necessitated a great deal of consultation with other kids, intensive scrutiny of candy offering, periods of intense deliberation and thought, and finally a purchase. Somehow I always ended up with black licorice.

Family weep-a-thons

The movies were almost beside the point. The Drive-In itself was entertainment enough. Between the garbled announcements blaring out about snack bar treats, and various warnings about people leaving their lights on, or being paged to come to the phone, it was difficult to actually pay much attention to the screen.

During the penultimate moment of E.T., when the wizened alien raisin has seemly breathed his last, our family weep-a-thon was interrupted by a bored flat voice interjecting, "The snack bar will be closing in 10 minutes." It was the cinematic equivalent of being yanked from a dream by a bucket of cold bilge dumped on your head.

The Drive-In films were mostly B-movie '70s fare, all apparently starring Kris Kristofferson and Karen Black, preceded by trailers for exploitation fare that no one under the age of 45 should have been exposed to. I recall plots and scenes in gauzy fashion, but what I remember most clearly is the feeling of stretching on tiptoes to understand what was actually happening.

Kris Kristofferson was a particular bafflement. What was about his grizzled mug that everyone seemed to like so much? It took me until I turned 42 to finally get it, a process not unlike developing a taste for ripe Brie or briny olives. While flipping across random TV channels, I happened across Semi-Tough (1977) a film I'd seen as a young whippersnapper and scratched my head over at the time. Watching it again as a full grown female, I thought, "Oh, I get it! That big old piece of cheese is damn sexy."

Nihilism for beginners

Of all the films we saw at the Drive-In, there are a few that remain in my heads, mostly because they traumatized the hell out of me. Like hunks of granite, embedded in soft sand, they endured, craggy, difficult and hard.

There is a peculiar flavour to '70s style cinematic nihilism, with its penchant for "fuck you endings". No tidy resolution here, these films often seemed whacked off at the end, like someone took a sharp blade to them. They left me staggering, dizzy, and disorientated. To this day, I don't know if it was a good thing or a bad thing to see adult films as young kid. They often filled me with impotent fury or terrible sadness, but I still remember them. Or more correctly, I remember the process of trying to make sense of them, to rewrite the narratives so that there was a happy ending.

One film in particular stands out.

Isadora, about the life and times of Isadora Duncan, scarred me quite unlike any other. The film starred Vanessa Redgrave, who picked up multiple awards for her portrayal of the infamous dancer. I recall it so clearly, from the Vaseline soft-focus cinematography, to the multiple sex scenes, to the final horrifying moment when the Isadora was practically decapitated when her long flowing scarf got caught in the back axle of the sports car she was riding in. The image of the dancer's neck bent at a right angle, her bug-eyed corpse still seated in the car was bad enough, but it was an earlier scene in which Isadora's two young children died in a freak accident that was even worse.

The film was based on genuine events, and Duncan's children did indeed drown when the car they were traveling in rolled off a bridge into the Seine River. The scene has stayed with me all these many years, silently screaming kids, the model-T moving in slow motion into the dark water below. Or at least that's how I remember it. Memory being a singularly unreliable thing, it's sometimes better to let something live in your head, instead of dispelling the myth with boring old reality.

After we saw the film, I spent days afterwards, re-imagining it, so that the kids lived, reworking the details to ensure that their watery death never came close to materializing. But it never really worked. I tried the same process with A Star is Born, not the Judy Garland/James Mason version, but the much hairier remake starring the dueling perms of Barbara Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. That didn't work either.

Homecoming

The old adage that you can never go home again isn't true in the Kootenays. Coming home to the farm where I grew up feels as if I never really left. When I walk down the road that leads to our beach, I am constantly bumping into earlier versions of myself, little kid, teenager, twenty-something, thirty-something, all replete with different needs and wants. I'm not alone, shades of my entire family, generations of people, who have done and continue to do exactly the same thing, year after year, are here too. It's one long continuous film loop.

You remake your own life, honing stories so that they fit better with the rising and falling rhythms of narrative. What you end up with after this process is your own film cache, reels unspooling all the time, faded, flickering images of parties, feuds, ghost stories, dinners, holidays, endless summer evenings, times long past. At the end, that's all you will have, a private movie show that lives only inside your brain. Admission is free, but you still have to buy popcorn.  [Tyee]

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