Here's Looking at You, Kid: More About Romance in the Movies
I'm indebted to Tracy for her Valentine's Day post about romance in historical movies, which afforded me a week of delicious meditation on some of my own most romantic movie moments -- historical or not. Or should I say historical AND not? Because when considered over my own lifetime of film-going, even a movie as utterly, aggressively of its own historical moment, like Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless , becomes a document of that moment, an opening to an era as heady as the 1960s when I careened into precarious adulthood. But then, movies are always this combination of historical and not, because they're always simultaneously documentary and imaginative. Reality, as Godard has famously said, twenty-four frames a second. When we're watching a movie (though NOT a DVD), for most of the experience we're sitting in the dark: the time slices between the frames are longer than the time it takes for the frames to flash by us. What's happening at the movies is that for