Films I Have Watched Many Times
-------------------------------

Christina, ever the source of great phlog ideas, asks "What
films have you watched over and over again?" [1]

It was long ago, yet still I remember ... watching films
over and over, is something I mostly associate with my late
teens and early 20s. I came of age just as "Cinephilia,"
that post-war cultural phenomenon, was dying out, but its
epitaph had not yet been written. Susan Sontag summed it up
nicely in her 1996 eulogy "The Decay of Cinema". She pegged
the origin of Cinephilia to the mid 1950s, when

    going to movies, thinking about movies, talking about
    movies became a passion among university students and
    other young people. You fell in love not just with
    actors but with cinema itself ... Its temples, as it
    spread throughout Europe and the Americas, were the many
    cinematheques and clubs specializing in films from the
    past and directors' retrospectives that sprang up. The
    1960's and early 1970's was the feverish age of
    movie-going ... [2]
   
By Sontag's reckoning the decline of Cinephilia had been
underway since the mid-70s, several years before it claimed
me. But that wasn't surprising, seeing as how I was living
out in the Back End of West Nowhere (otherwise known as
Edmonton, Alberta) and it took a while for cultural trends
to travel from the centres of civilization outward to us
hicks on the periphery. In fact, it was only in 1978 the old
Princess Theatre began its great 18 year run as a repertory
cinema, following a few years where skin flicks (whatever
remnants were left of them, after the Ontario Censor Board
had done its work) were its stock in trade.  

I haunted the Princess, going multiple times a week,
sometimes with friends, other times just by myself.  Cult
films, American classics, foreign films, even a few Canadian
features ... taking it all in, for a time, it seemed like
the supply of captivating celluloid dreams was
inexhaustible.

It was not, of course. Films would come and go, and
sometimes maybe a few months or a year later, would come
back again.  And some of them were films I would return to
watch over and over again, as they came around in the
rotation. The films that I most liked to rewatch, it turned
out, were generally films with more landscape than plot ...
preferably, landscapes as different as possible than the (as
I perceived it at the time) safe, sterile suburbia I had
grown up in.

Being a somewhat arty and pretentious young man, I was drawn
to European art-house cinema, often of the sort that Pauline
Kael so ably skewered in her 1963 review, "The
Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties: La Notte,
Last Year at Marienbad, La Dolce Vita." [3] Admittedly, I
didn't get much out of "Marienbad," but the other two - "La
Dolce Vita" in particular - were right up my alley.  The
characters, by and large, may have been vapid, empty
shells. But they looked so good, tooling around crumbling
European cities in their sports cars and classic 60s
fashions, one could hardly hold that against them. I loved
Antonioni's "The Red Desert," its toxic yet oddly beautiful
industrial landscapes so much more poetic than the plastics
factory where I worked for several summers. But then, any
landscape, no matter how bleak, would look poetic with
Monica Vitti standing in front of it.

Not all my favourites were European, of course. I loved the
short films of Maya Deren, typically shown in an anthology
format. You can watch her classic "Meshes of the Afternoon"
at the Internet Archive [4], but in doing so you will
completely miss the experience of sitting in a darkened
movie theatre, staring up at the screen in the comforting
presence of total strangers. If Cinephilia is a kind of
religion, which it isn't, then watching films at home is
solitary prayer, and watching them in a shabby old movie
theatre with worn upholstery is like going to mass.
Substitute the smell of stale popcorn for incense.

Although at the time I was trying to distance myself from an
earlier obsession with science fiction (obviously, I
failed), there were a couple of art-house sf
films I numbered among my favourites: Godard's "Alphaville,"
wherein hard-boiled secret agent Lemmy Caution defeats Alpha
60, an all-controlling computer played by a light bulb, and
in so doing restores love, anarchy and death to the
world. And then there was Solaris, Tarkovsky's masterpiece
about a deeply troubled psychologist wandering about a
failing space station, in orbit around a distant and
unknowable planet. It was not until just now I realized
these two very different films share a common conceit
... just as Tarkovsky substitutes an extended shot of
travelling down a Japanese freeway for a long journey
through space, so does Lemmy Caution travel between the
worlds in his Ford Mustang, dubbed a "Ford Galaxie" in the
movie. 

But I digress. Tarkovsky turned out to be another one of my
favourites, and I long ago lost count of how many times I
watched "Nostalghia."  The internal struggles of its morose
protagonist drew me in far less than the haunting, autumnal
Italian scenery through which he travelled, ever so
lugubriously (leading me, some years later, to seek out
Piero Della Francesca's "Madonna del Parto" in an
out-of-the-way chapel near Arezzo ... which disappointingly,
turned out not to be the gloomy Romaneque crypt where
Tarkovsky situated the fresco in his film).

I could go on, but you probably get the idea. My recovery
from Cinephilia was slow, but by the late 1980s I had
substantially curtailed my movie-going habit. Wim Wenders'
"Wings of Desire" (1987) was probably the last film to get
inside my head in that particular way.

In the years and decades since I have gone back and
rewatched these films every so often, but it's just not the
same anymore. I still like some of them, but they no longer
speak to me the way they once did, and their attitudes and
assumptions have grown ever more dated and remote. It seems
I no longer want to live in these worlds, no matter how
seductive the images flickering upon the screen.


References
----------

1. Christina, "Five Questions October"
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~christina/2025-10-5Q.txt

2. Susan Sontag, "The Decay of Cinema", New York Times Magazine, 1996
https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/decay-of-cinema-susan-sontag

3. Pauline Kael, "Come Dressed as the Sick Soul of Europe
... ", 1963
https://www.neugraphic.com/marienbad/marienbad-text15.html

4. Maya Deren, "Meshes of the Afternoon," 1943
https://archive.org/details/Meshes_Of_The_Afternoon_Maya_Deren

Sun Oct 12 17:05:51 PDT 2025