Troy Jollimore
There will never be a complete catalog of varieties of human happiness, human desire, or human cruelty. Of happiness, we can say that it is by its nature unrepeatable. The thrill is that it happens only once. A performance, like the first taste of chocolate or a first kiss, cannot be preserved or repeated. At most we can hope for certain evidence that the event occurred: photographs, recordings, rumors, recollections that fade and grow steadily less reliable with each passing year, none of which come at all close to replicating the experience of really being there. The movies, though, are timeless: no viewing is privileged, no viewing comes closer than any other viewing to being a genuinely “true” or “real” experience (whatever, in this context, true or real might mean), and there is therefore no way to attach to a film a precise date and time. There is only the time when you saw it, and how it moved you then, how it changed you. Yet films are, if anything, even more poignant in the way they remind us of what has been lost and what we cannot recover, if only because the illusion is that they bring us so much closer to it in the act of watching, and because that illusion persists so much longer. Repeatable? Sure. But the actors have all passed away, or eventually will; the objects, if they were real to begin with, have all been destroyed, or at some point they will be; the very landscapes and places in which the characters are placed and carry on their affairs have, if they weren’t simply constructed sets from the start, been altered by the passage of time, most likely not for the better, in the years since the film crew planted their camera and captured their footage. The alluring sadness, for instance, visible in the eyes of Lea Massari in Antonioni’s L’Avventura in the scenes that take place just before she disappears— she is feeling a distance from her lover, Sandro, for reasons we, the viewers, can sense but can’t quite get inside, and which we find all the more compelling for our very failure to quite get inside them— reminds us that that world, that Italy, that cinematic moment, have vanished; even though it is there, in front of our eyes, larger, as we sometimes say, than life, it is in fact as finally and irrevocably gone as is Massari’s character, Anna, who disappears from the film without explanation. Which brings us back to cruelty. It is perhaps the cruelty of the world, or perhaps just the cruelty of art, which depicts and pretends to preserve the world, to keep this vanishing constantly in view, and at the same time gives us the illusion that it can be avoided, defeated, overcome, each image returned to without limitation, resurrected any number of times for our own reassurance and enjoyment, the film replayed and replayed, the PAUSE button always at the ready if we want to contemplate, at our leisure, the barren, virtually inhuman landscapes, or Sandro’s magnificent indifference, or Monica Vitti’s face, which always reminds me a little of the face of the first woman I made love to, which happened around the time I first saw L’Avventura, that first viewing still the most profound, the most shocking, as if I had discovered a new and unanticipated version of myself. I suppose the fantasy is that no one ever needs to die, that everything that happens survives somewhere, if not as an object then as an image or a thought, a strip of celluloid, or a matrix of digitized information on a hard drive stored in an underground vault underneath the New Mexican desert. Or, if not that, then in the sentimental fragmentary conversations of people who, for as long as they can manage, until advancing time gets the better of them, gather to relive and recollect their chosen slices of the past. After that first time, I walked home and, as I recall, the moon was full. What was it I’d located in myself? An unrecognized capacity for greed? For brutal passion? I had always desired the pleasures life offered, but in moderation; now I wanted them excessively, I wanted life itself, and also my desire for it, to be excessive, as if—it was a ten-minute walk back to my parents’ house, and because the night was frigid, the air was clear like music, Chopin or Satie, precise and far away, and the stars were tiny distant torches looking down—as if I’d be protected if I made myself someone whose desire refused to concede any limit, as if I could be safe and free and live forever if only I could empty myself, leaving nothing but an ache that ached to be filled, to be resolved, to find a way to be pure hunger, absolute. To be nothing but hunger. %CODE_MORE_INTERVIEWS%