1975

“Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once.” - Woody Allen When I was much younger, previous decades seemed so distant, so far away. To me these older and impossible decades existed only in cinema from their time. Cinema, the older I get, the more it becomes a source of time measurement. “The Seventies! How great the Seventies would have been!” Nineteen-Seventy-Five, the year that Jaws came out, Nashville, At Long Last Love, all those great classic films that I now love... One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest... Nineteen-Seventy-Five, in truth, was only Ten years before I existed. Not that long a stretch. Ten years... It was Ten years ago that we had Finding Nemo, Pirates of the Caribbean, Return of the King, all those big family films... Does it feel that long ago? The Last Samurai, I almost cried, I saw Kill Bill twelve times, Lost In Translation, Old Boy, Last Life In The Universe, The Cooler, Ten years ago, Two-Thousand and Three. It is not that far gone. Twenty years ago. Nineteen-Ninety-Three, a great year of personal cinematic discovery. At this point in time my favorite director was Don Bluth... Films of his I watched, The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail (”There are no such things as Cats in America!”), The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven and Rock-a-Doodle. Nineteen-Ninety-Three. It was a good year. Films like Jurassic Park, Naked, Schindlers List, Short Cuts, True Romance, The Thing Called Love, all those brilliant directors, telling great stories. I was too young to appreciate any of them or see them... That year I enjoyed films like Super Mario Brothers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Three (the one in Japan), The Nightmare Before Christmas and Hocus Pocus. I hated Free Willy, my favorite film was called Heart and Souls and on a few occasions I managed to sneak in a viewing of Hot Shots: Part Deux and Falling Down on VHS. Twenty Years ago I began to curiously follow cinema, Ten years ago I was immersed, incurable, Melville, Goddard, Kurosawa, cinema from other countries and other decades... Ophuls, Cassavettes, Pabst, Sokurov, Powell, the list of artists goes on and on... Nineteen-Seventy-Five, I never knew you, I know your cinema. Cinema, I know you, I know your decades, I know your writers, your photographers, your directors... alas, the excitement is not the same. The measurement of time is upsetting... So long Don Bluth, thanks for the memories.