Our favourite movies are never shown out of competitions at Cannes or the London Film Festival. They are the ones that have you hopping beside yourself, waiting impatiently for the special edition DVD box sets to be made available for your private delight and entertainment. They are the ones which become your guilty pleasure. The ones you always recommend to a friend and lover when you are asked what film he should watch and you cannot, you simply cannot believe it when he admits he has never watched or even heard of this movie that you’ve loved all your life. They are the ones that if someone told you they didn’t understand their appeal, it occurs to you that their refusal to understand is simply incomprehensible, a wilful obstinacy on their part, and the tempting thought surfaces unbidden: you would love to terminate the friendship right there on the spot. They are the ones that make you feel that those on the screen will always remain with you, their fables and struggles always identifiable with yours, and that they are always right there to remind you about life’s lessons.
Our favourite movies are the ones that explode through the doors of perception, rendering all that you once thought familiar strange, the once comforting turned utterly topsy-turvy and the strait-jacketed moral compass rendered askew. And didn’t you eagerly welcome their wild explosive entry into your world. Nothing remained the same after you welcome them into your life. They become the very fabric of your being, an element of your essence. You learn from them, your masters, understanding how to see the world otherwise. You welcome this.
You gradually build a memory palace to house your beloved favourites. It gradually becomes a repository, housing all those you secretly and obsessively hold dear to your heart. You begin to realise that your favourites, who remain forever unchanged and always with you, share an easy familiarity. You start noticing family resemblances. They have that stranger wildness, a quixotic complexity and intensity that is cultivated from gazing upon a world obsessively cataloguing it in all its banality and contrary wonder. A leit motifemerges. Not a single one of these occupants are interested in the rational or the social universe belonging to the respectable world of suburbia. They are not tame.
Memory palace in an alchemical illustration
They share an obsessive thrill in documenting the lurid, burlesque, baroque and deviant excesses of human life in all its wondrous glory. Their movies howl upwards with enraged wildness, angered at witnessing the indignities that man is capable of. Their oeuvre betrays how hell bent they are on relentlessly erasing the fine line between cinematic fiction and lived ‘reality’. Yet, in spite of outward appearances, under all that carefully cultivated bravado, this lot combine visionary intensity with old-fashioned humanism, “Le plus terrible dans ce monde c’est que chacun a ses raison”. And in an increasingly cynical anaemic world, you love them. You truly, madly, deeply love them for wearing their naked hearts on their sleeves.
And who are this lot, the singular ones who share these strange family resemblances? You know them. They are David Lynch, Sam Peckinpah, Abel Ferrara, Roman Polanski, Werner Herzog, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ken Russell, John Waters, Lars Von Triers, Jan Svankmajer, Kubrick and Oshima Nagisa, to name but a few.
To be continued…..
