Tristana (Luis Bunuel, 1970)
"After all, life isn't as dark as many believe. It's snowing heavily. But we're warm in here."
I'm a child and I'm eating fried bread for the first time. It's hot, and greasy, there's an initial crunch followed by a softer texture that is not entirely pleasant. I feel like I should like this. I know that we have nothing else to eat, and usually I'm able to make myself enjoy whatever it is that I'm given, but a sickly feeling is welling up inside me, and I don't think I can finish this. There's a brief hot flash of shame, and the sensation that I'm a disappointment. But I can't finish this.
Years later, and I'm working on my first feature film, Benny Loves Killing. We had intended to make another film, but we ended up taking a different script and going in a new direction. I'm reviewing the script now. We've been all over London, looking at different locations, and I'm rewriting it based on these locations. The story of the fried bread comes back to me, and I decide to include it in the script. It's nothing more than dialogue, a footnote, but to me those few words spark off the entire memory in full: taste, texture, smell. When it comes to filming the scene itself I get the sensation that this memory is mixed into the moment we're filming: an imagined recreation of a shifting, changing memory. Or something. If you think that cinema is all about story, well now... I should hope that we all know what I'd think of that opinion by now.
Now that I'm an adult I'm quietly curious as to what I would make of fried bread. I'm older, and my tastes have changed. Hey, all our tastes change. We find ourselves enjoying things that we used to hate, and vice versa. But here's the rub: part of me is scared of going back, down old corridors that I've visited before. What I'd rather do is lock the door and lose the key, and simply live with the memory. But maybe this avoidance tactic is something I should combat? It's hard to tell what the right thing to do is.
That's one of the great joys of writing and making films. You get the opportunity to play out thought experiments for 'real' (*spoiler* they're not real). You get to put people in a room and have them do something you did once, but you can change the details. And you really don't need to change much before the entire thing becomes extremely difficult to recognise, even for the people who were directly involved, and suddenly anonymity is regained, and you're left with something entirely new.
This might be difficult for you to understand. Let me explain it another way.
As a young man, my friends and I would visit the town of Toledo every week. There was a structure to this: we would drink, eat, talk, and 'play' characters who were not us: Priests, Policemen, Soldiers, whatever we liked. Years have past now, and those trips are nothing but a memory. But I would place money on the certainty that if you were to put any of those old friends of mine in a darkened room and show them a projection of the city they would be incapabale of having the word 'Toledo' pass across their lips as though it were a prayer on the wind. So strong are those memories that they create an ardour in the present, even though the object of our communal affection is long dead and buried.
Under the cover of night, we all steal to the cemetery, armed with shovels and pickaxes. We're here to dig the body up again. To bring something from the past into the present. To face it head on, and to live in the past and the present at the same time. Toledo is, paradoxically, much quieter now than it once was. And it's at this point, as the sound of metal tools strike against hard cold earth, that I find myself quietly contemplating whether I've lost a part of me, or whether it was never there to begin with.
I'm a child and I'm eating fried bread for the first time. It's hot, and greasy, there's an initial crunch followed by a softer texture that is not entirely pleasant. I feel like I should like this. I know that we have nothing else to eat, and usually I'm able to make myself enjoy whatever it is that I'm given, but a sickly feeling is welling up inside me, and I don't think I can finish this. There's a brief hot flash of shame, and the sensation that I'm a disappointment. But I can't finish this.
Years later, and I'm working on my first feature film, Benny Loves Killing. We had intended to make another film, but we ended up taking a different script and going in a new direction. I'm reviewing the script now. We've been all over London, looking at different locations, and I'm rewriting it based on these locations. The story of the fried bread comes back to me, and I decide to include it in the script. It's nothing more than dialogue, a footnote, but to me those few words spark off the entire memory in full: taste, texture, smell. When it comes to filming the scene itself I get the sensation that this memory is mixed into the moment we're filming: an imagined recreation of a shifting, changing memory. Or something. If you think that cinema is all about story, well now... I should hope that we all know what I'd think of that opinion by now.
Now that I'm an adult I'm quietly curious as to what I would make of fried bread. I'm older, and my tastes have changed. Hey, all our tastes change. We find ourselves enjoying things that we used to hate, and vice versa. But here's the rub: part of me is scared of going back, down old corridors that I've visited before. What I'd rather do is lock the door and lose the key, and simply live with the memory. But maybe this avoidance tactic is something I should combat? It's hard to tell what the right thing to do is.
That's one of the great joys of writing and making films. You get the opportunity to play out thought experiments for 'real' (*spoiler* they're not real). You get to put people in a room and have them do something you did once, but you can change the details. And you really don't need to change much before the entire thing becomes extremely difficult to recognise, even for the people who were directly involved, and suddenly anonymity is regained, and you're left with something entirely new.
This might be difficult for you to understand. Let me explain it another way.
As a young man, my friends and I would visit the town of Toledo every week. There was a structure to this: we would drink, eat, talk, and 'play' characters who were not us: Priests, Policemen, Soldiers, whatever we liked. Years have past now, and those trips are nothing but a memory. But I would place money on the certainty that if you were to put any of those old friends of mine in a darkened room and show them a projection of the city they would be incapabale of having the word 'Toledo' pass across their lips as though it were a prayer on the wind. So strong are those memories that they create an ardour in the present, even though the object of our communal affection is long dead and buried.
Under the cover of night, we all steal to the cemetery, armed with shovels and pickaxes. We're here to dig the body up again. To bring something from the past into the present. To face it head on, and to live in the past and the present at the same time. Toledo is, paradoxically, much quieter now than it once was. And it's at this point, as the sound of metal tools strike against hard cold earth, that I find myself quietly contemplating whether I've lost a part of me, or whether it was never there to begin with.