Remembering

Just watched In A Lonely Place, a marvellously bleak film noir last night. Awoke this morning thinking about it. I wondered how much I would remember of the film when I next encounter that title. My thoughts turned to all the other films I’ve rented in the past year from Love Film and how much I remember of them. Here are their titles:

Boudu Saved From Drowning
In A Lonely Place
The Maltese Falcon
The Barefoot Contessa
My Man Godfrey
Key Largo
Stop Making Sense
Salo
Sonatine
The Shining
Dog Days
Shadows And Fog
China Town
Dolls
The Canterbury Tales
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Virgin Suicides
The Conversation
I Heart Huckabees
Coffee And Cigarettes
Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy
Vera Drake
A Matter of Life and Death
Persona
Arabian Nights
The Edge Of The World
Le Petit Soldat
Ten
The Amazing Adventure
Sleeper
Bananas
The Trouble With Harry
The Quiet Earth
The Magician (aka The Face)
In the Mood for Love
My Girlfriends Boyfriend
The Lady And The Duke
Look at Me (Comme Une Image)
Alphaville
Strangers on a Train
The Awful Truth
Tape
Days Of Heaven
Ghost Dog - the Way of the Samurai
Querelle
Shadow Of A Doubt
Mirror
Super Size Me
Down by Law
Orphee (Orpheus)
The Bishop’s Wife
Une Femme Est Une Femme

The first 27 are okay, but then I begin to stumble - Ten - what was that about? Okay, that’s a pretty anonymous title for a film, but The Amazing Adventure, The Trouble With Harry, Look At Me (Comme Une Image)? Film, like music, is an artform whose engagement with the temporal is absolute, yet unlike music we see the vast majority of films only once. Its patterns, rhythms, its emotions, thoughts and textures have much less of a chance to imprint themselves upon the memory, to stay with us.

Add some details to that title, In A Lonely Place - that the director was Nicholas Ray, that the film starred Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, even some images:

Ah, the wonders of metadata. Memories will be triggered by these details, but for how long? How vague will the recollection be in a year’s time? It doesn’t really matter of course, but it’s sometimes said that we retain everything we experience, only the access to our memories becomes problematic. We are our memory, without it we cannot function, would not know how to breathe or how to react to each event in our lives. (I’ve wandered from my original intention to comment - yet again - upon the limits of Apple’s iApps interface design when listing content only by title, but that’s just the reiteration of a point made previously.)