Firstly, if you’re here because Ms. Frizzle (the 90s one!) coerced you onto her school bus, shrunk you down, and drove you into the data stream of this page, or if you’ve suddenly come to wearing nothing at all except for a name-tag that says “Hello my name is Ryan Seacrest” while seated at a computer at the public library after hours, let me kindly direct you to the About page.
Is memory the substance, the conglomerate and individual contents, or is it the structure that cradles the past?
In Faces Places, Agnès Varda, the locus of my vocal idolatry, describes the urgency behind her impulse to see people photographed. She states that it’s an act of preservation of both the people on film and her ability to remember them—so they don’t “fall down the holes of my memory,” she says. This statement caught me off guard because I had for so long thought memory to be only a collection, something reliant on its content to exist, without considering that it might be more of a corral, something to house things inside of it—an empty house is still, after all, a house. We often say “I have a great memory” or “not to my memory,” statements that imply degrees of reliability and matters of fact, systems by which the present calls upon something written into the past. But—and get ready for this one—what is “the past”? Is it really such a stable entity?
“[T]he past is only past because there is a present,” writes Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past—or more accurately, pastness—is a position.”* Positionality, then, becomes the necessary methodology for reflection. So how do we relay our past to someone who will never see it from our vantage? How do we articulate memory so that it becomes communicable?
Is memory an archive?
It would be difficult to enumerate the various designations that memory has earned, as it is so often a subject of fascination, a specter we will never shake. Does remembering mean to gaze down from an “immense edifice,” risen to unfathomable heights?* Or is remembering better described as a “multi-sensory labyrinth,” a series of paths never witnessed all at once?** We tend toward structures in our descriptions, something built to be big enough to house us and big enough to get lost in: an archive, perhaps not in the Foucauldian sense (drag me), but just as metaphysical. These designations give memory language so that one can communicate what something so deeply interior might resemble in a shared tongue.
In order to write about memory, one must attempt a paraphrase of every word ever heard or spoken. Here, I could string together a quote or two, an elaboration or an embellishment so that my own history’s ineffability is made accessible for a reader in a way that it is not for me. I could write ten hundred more posts and still not describe the way my eyes aglow with the flutter of film cuts a decade ago might have changed the course of a moment, a moment that might have changed the course of a life. This is the immensity of memory, the multi-sensory flood of it, and we bear it without assistance.
Each of us houses our own archive, and much like an archive that exists in our shared world—even that which may seek to render indelible things both tangible and formless—we can only ever hope to make sense of it fragmentarily. We must trace fractal lines through incompleteness, threading together memories, sensations, and facts until our own mercurial narratives have been spun. The vastness of a personal archive, that of one’s memory, can often rival that of any compiled by a (power structure of) collective humankind because our individual swaths of remembering are pulled from our own experiences as well as those of a world which we have continually bumped up against; we have experienced ourselves, the world, and ourselves in the world. The reality, too, that the unreliable nature of memory necessitates an ever-shifting presentation of truth means our archives will take numerous forms throughout our lifetime, drawers reordering and shelves shifting—a labyrinth, indeed.
Is memory conclusive?
One of the intentions behind this project was to create a piecemeal, indexical memoir, one that points between here and there until displacement becomes a home. I wanted events of my personal history to be threaded together with the act of watching a movie, but the latticework of memories is not straightforward, never sequential. Although something might have taken place in the context of watching one thing, that substance may generate other ideas, other experiences altogether, or maybe even very likely something happening in tandem with the moment of my reflection. Thoughts are often described as scattered, but memories can be scattered too—and maybe they should be.
This newsletter is my memory, or at least a part of it, condensed and notched by the the slice of each film so that I could unfold it and reveal something dazzling (is this a word you, too, would choose?). And much like two snowflakes are never exactly alike, memory is never constant; each musing has been in some way colored by the instance of my writing it. In attempting to communicate myself through the vocabulary of cinema, I’ve written a whole new language. In crafting this observation into my archive, I’ve constructed a whole new wing of it—remembering will always, I’ve found, beget more to remember.
*Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 15
**Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 47
***Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body (Columbus: Two Dollar Radio, 2020), 20
The Wolfman
dir. Joe Johnston, 2010
In the same way that one can be certain the moon glowing behind wisps of clouds is still the moon, I am almost certain I saw this in a theater. The only explanation for this is that I was accompanied by a parent since this movie is rated R and I would have been under eighteen, which prompts the question: why was I taken to see this picture, which in turn prompts another questions: why did I request to be taken to see this picture? A surprising amount of memories surface from this—a courtyard, a flashback about childhood trauma, a tomb with chains, a burning mansion, all duly desaturated into near-grayscale to accommodate the fact that it is England, it is ominous, and everyone is repressing something.
I know I have written here about my tendency to come undone in the narrative presence of an allegorical wolf, perhaps due to a nightmare I had in my youth, but peer-reviewed studies have found that this does not apply to werewolves.
The Wolverine & X-Men Origins: Wolverine
dir. James Mangold, 2013; dir. Gavin Hood, 2009
The thing about the movie The Wolverine is that I watched it at my aunt’s house. She loves to objectify Straight Actor Hugh Jackman, which always induces the attending men in my family to agree that he is doing good things to and with his body, because to acknowledge this as reality precludes you from insinuating anything about fantasy, surely. The Origins one was on TV every hour of every day, and maybe still is. I remember back in my comic book days reading about how Wolverine had his skeleton coated(?) in metal and it made me uneasy—I don’t have a fear of needles/injections, necessarily, but I don’t want anything near my bones, thank you.
The Woman in Black
dir. James Watkins, 2012
I watched this one night with my sister, I think, but more importantly, I saw this stage production in London’s West End and one of my dear friends is still traumatized by its visceral jump scares. At once point, the titular Woman in Black appeared in the back of the audience and screamed at full volume, which is something that did not happen when I watched the film adaptation starring Daniel Radcliffe. Similar to the above comments surrounding a febrile masculinity rooted in incessant, paranoid evaluation of how to present that masculinity as anything but those things, men love to pretend they are unafraid, or to admit that they were only made to fear—for just a second!—as the result of some technical prowess in the craft that is generating fright. Let’s raise our sons to be scared!
This film features a causeway that floods over and prevents travel depending on the tide, a convenient plot device featured elsewhere, and one that interests me for reasons that may or may not be akin to my other tendency to flush at the depiction of water filling large spaces it shouldn’t. The genre of horror really is sensuous, if not sensual.
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
dir. Pedro Almodóvar, 1988
This film laughs in the face of genre film, but maybe doesn’t laugh hard enough. It’s amazing to me how the color red can be like this. I ate gazpacho within a few weeks of watching this and not even on purpose.
Wonder
dir. Stephen Chbosky, 2017
My mom insisted on seeing this in theaters, and my sister had to pee very badly during it (if this is not true she will read this and let me know).
What is it about the need to disfigure actors, famously the most beautiful among us? I’m sure there are essays about the moralistic playground that is knowing the countenance beneath the makeup and prosthetics is immaculate, and the imperfections are simply play, an experiment without stakes, an ugliness that has no longevity because it’s confined to the fantasy of the film. What license does this give us to perceive and accept aberrance, I wonder, when we encounter it as participants in a spectacle of the grotesque?
The Wonders
dir. Alice Rohrwacher, 2014
The other day, my lover inquired if I could get Italian citizenship (I think the answer is yes, but I’d have to do some bureaucratic hoop-jumping). If I were to relocate to the Old Country I would ask, kindly, that Alice Rohrwacher depict my own life for me there, frame by frame.
Wonder Woman
dir. Patty Jenkins, 2017
Part of me wants to believe I watched this on a plane, but I think in reality I watched it on the couch in my family home accompanied by those who live there. Has Gal Gadot said anything about the apartheid?
The World
dir. Jia Zhangke, 2004
I’m forgetting in which undergraduate course I watched this film about the buzzing mundanity of keeping an amusement park up and running, but it swept me away. While I remember very little about the plot, I recall a lot of long takes, which are the easiest way to get lost in a film if you care enough to be drawn in.
World War Z
dir. Marc Forster, 2013
Saw this in a theater with family and maybe friends, but definitely a cohort the specifics of which I do not recall. I read this book and thought it was formalistically very engaging (I never would have put strung these words together in the early 2010s), and found the movie to be lacking a lot of that innovation. The only detail I can bring to mind is blood in a lab-like space, probably “the CDC,” and the zombies climbing over the wall, which I think is only because of the movie poster.
Wreckers
dir. Dictynna Hood, 2011
I watched this almost exclusively because it starred Claire Foy and Benedict Cumberbatch whose marital bliss is disrupted by psychological warfare. The impact of this film was admittedly almost negative.
Wreck-It Ralph
dir. Rich Moore, 2012
Saw this as a special program at the Syracuse International Film Festival (SIFF?) with my mom. I liked it more than I expected to, but still not enough to say anything of value about it here.
X-Men, X2, X-Men: The Last Stand, X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past, & X-Men: Apocalypse
dir. Bryan Singer, 2000; 2003; dir. Brett Ratner, 2006; dir. Matthew Vaughn, 2011; dir. Bryan Singer, 2014; 2016
It’s not breaking any ground in the cultural conversation to say that within a plethora of superhero content, X-Men is lending the heaviest hand to queerness with its positioning of otherness as both central and marginal. A vague history outlines how the (anti)heroes were inspired by the civil rights movement, but as far as the ideological rifts between the polar patriarchs go,* as well as the fact that the characters live in a world where bigots fear that anyone around them might be concealing their tainted and biologically reprehensible mutant-ness, drawing parallels to the queer rights movement seems more fruitful. (I want to take a second to go out on a limb and note that liberation for one is liberation for all.) As is the case with many cultural artifacts which may seem like founts of LGBTQIA+ signposting, actual queer issues, themes, or characters, in my knowledge, are not neatly addressed within the mainstream of this universe, especially not when I was tepidly tapped into it in my youth—the importance of locating these spaces as sites of departure for identification is nonetheless paramount. This is not to hail the superiority of metaphor over representation, nor to laud representation in lieu of real social change; it’s simply to say that queer readings are readings, and texts have always functioned as lenses through which we learn to see the world.
Where would I be now, I wonder, if I had not recognized the outsider status as reputable and noble? If I had not seen the ability to cultivate family outside the traditional structure? If I had not been keenly interested in the character Gambit and the fact that his lover can’t touch him, or the scene from The Last Stand where the Angel character is shirtless, blond, and (forgive me) a straight-up twink in belted denim in a scene that we had to rewatch at my neighbor’s house because someone arrived late? (The bards are in a huddle, amping themselves up to put on the biggest show of their lives.)
*Traditionally, we are meant to empathize with the side that argues for acceptability and harmony, but some points are being made by the opposition…
Xingu
dir. Cao Hamburger, 2011
It took months before I finally conjured up the title of this film. I knew I’d watched a movie for a college class on Brazil about men going into the Amazon to prevent some sort of infrastructure and as a result come to know the indigenous tribe effected, but this was not enough—even with my expert googs, the title kelp alluding me. Finally, I ordered the words in just the right away that it clicked like a picked lock and here was this film, so I could at last log it and eventually write about these happenings here, to you, reader, in this newsletter.
XX
dirs. Jovanka Vuckovic, Roxanne Benjamin, Karyn Kusama, Annie Clark, 2017
My college roommate, who has been my dear friend since high school and introduced me to St. Vincent, managed to wrangle an illegal stream of this anthology of short horror films directed by women, one of whom is Annie Clark. Hers was the best of the bunch despite her amateur status, and I am not biased at all by the fact she was the only reason we sought out this film. Although it became something I would hear many more times from many more sources, it was from St. Vincent that I first heard the advice: if something isn’t working creatively, work on something else, and that has provided invaluable. For example, I started this newsletter.
Year One
dir. Harold Ramis, 2009
Saw this in theaters with a friend or friends. There are a lot of murky memories of theater-going and company had in the posts this week— it’s almost like sitting in the dark and being consumed by the outsized luminescent maw of cinema can make it easier to forget who’s there with you. As an added bonus, maybe, I’ve forgotten this movie, too.
Yes God Yes
dir. Karen Maine, 2019
This quietly packs a punch, and maybe just because so much of its depiction of isolating ambiguous morality hit close to home. While watching, my lover asked me if I ever experience Catholic guilt and you have to laugh.
Yes Man
dir. Peyton Reed, 2008
I watched this with my family while staying with my cousins in London. Devoted readers will remember this is also where we watched Stormbreaker, the bad movie based on teen spy novels, after going to the Holocaust Museum. It was on this trip that I was reading a YA fantasy novel whose title I forget but the protagonist was named “Thirrin,” which is a great name. It was also in London at this time in 2006 that I began to fervently develop ideas for my own series of novels, with which I then filled up several composition notebooks for the next year or more. I used to think I would write creatively and now I mostly just write this.
I don’t feel like looking up if Zooey Deschanel is Jim Carey’s love interest in this movie, but I know I’m right—imagine the other ways my brain could be put to use.
The Yes Men Fix the World
dirs. Igor Vamos, Jacques Servin, Kurt Engfehr, 2009
An ethically complex but nonetheless uproarious account of the Yes Men, a group of pranksters/performance artists (if you’re willing to push the envelope). This was screened at Colgate as part of Alternative Cinema, which remains one of the best works of film programming I’ve yet encountered. In fact, all of Colgate’s film programming was such a treasure on that remote campus because it provided an inlet of creative, cultural, and academic rigor that I once thought was exaggerated by a lack of widespread vibrancy in the area but I now realize was simply exceptional. What I wouldn’t give to again doze off during a documentary about Smithson’s Spiral Jetty!
Young Ahmed
dirs. Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Luc Dardenne, 2019
Was troubled by this troubling film about a troubled teen. This is not at all comparable to a boy being radicalized by his religious elders into trying to stab his teacher more than once, but in eighth grade, a student accidentally punched my Spanish teacher in the face when the other student intended for the punch dodged it. The way our minds draw connections is the reason we have a society at all, ok?
Your Highness
dir. David Gordon Green, 2011
I watched this on TV in the middle of a summer day that rained and was maybe even foggy (I hail from a swamp). Ultimately, the thing to note here is that a well-endowed minotaur sodomizes a man and no one should watch this. I am finding now that Zooey Deschanel is in this, too, which I did not remember—this makes me feel a little better, and I like to think the space for that knowledge was freed up to house something more useful, like a memory with someone I care about or a character-building experience.
You Were Never Really Here
dir. Lynne Ramsay, 2017
Plugged my McAir into my family’s TV to watch this and was not entirely convinced. Was this Taxi Driver? I don’t really remember it. I was not deterred from continuing to seek out Lynne Ramsay, though.
Y tu mamá también
dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2001
I liked this hot and heavy road/buddy film immediately upon watching it, but only began to love it months after, more and more every time I thought about it. This feels like the overture to an opera never sung, instead hanging in limbo even as time spills by around it. There are moments in life when time stands still, which is the perfect subject for cinema, the only time-based art object there is, never existing in completion all at once. If I were ever going to take the Criterion Collection up on its offer to sell me some discounted DVDs I would never watch, this would be one I would purchase.
Zama
dir. Lucrecia Martel, 2017
I read or heard a review of this somewhere in 2018, maybe even NPR, and decided to watch it. I didn’t not like it—sometimes I do this thing where I am tired, but start a film anyway because I feel that each time I have a couple free hours and I don’t watch a movie, it’s an opportunity lost, one of the reasons I’ve built up this catalogue of films that I don’t remember or don’t care about, but want to prove is nonetheless important through this project called I’ve Seen Parts. Martel’s other film, La Ciénaga, I liked a lot better.
Zathura
dir. Jon Favreau, 2005
A classic film from the Cinema of My Youth, even though I only saw it maybe twice. This is—correct me if I’m wrong—just Space Jumanji with Kristen Stewart, but that makes it much scarier (the space part). I would never go to space, but I would go to space before I went to the bottom of the ocean.
A Zed & Two Noughts
dir. Peter Greenaway, 1985
Dualities and duos abound in this, and in typical Greenaway fashion, I think you could take anything and nothing from it depending on your predisposition. We as humans will never stop trying to unravel the very things that tie us to life along with everything else, as if an untethered drifting through emptiness will allow us the freedom we deserve as authorities in the cognitive food chain—and maybe so.
Zeitgeist: The Movie
dir. Peter Joseph, 2007
My dear friend with a refined pallet for conspiracy proselytizes this whacky-ass film better than the whacky-ass film proselytizes its arguments about how 9/11 is tied to a world-domination/ideological homogeneity campaign. I have never watched this completely sober and that is for the better.
Zero Dark Thirty
dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2012
Watched this with my dad. Jessica Chastain is still, after all these years, someone I feel I am getting to know as a viewer. What was this movie about other than war?
Zodiac
dir. David Fincher, 2007
I watched this on Netflix via my McAir in bed and couldn’t wait for it to be over. I don’t care about the Zodiac Killer, but I also don’t care about the true crime genre in general. I understand this film is more than that, and it was made by David Fincher after all, but I was bored and probably tired (see “Zama” musing above).
Zola
dir. Janicza Bravo, 2020
Let the record show that this was the first film I saw in a theater after seventeen months and I didn’t cry (laughed though).
I read the Twitter thread after watching this and, as they were licensed to do, Bravo and (Jeremy) O’Harris took some liberties with the end—including one or two that suggested a troubling agenda to transform the otherwise consistent adaptation of A’Ziah’s tonally irreverent, critically nonplussed, and dynamically aghast (re)telling into something more sobering (and traumatizing).
Zombieland
dir. Ruben Fleischer, 2009
Sensationally the film my family watched together right after my parents told my sister and I that they were divorcing.
Zootopia
dirs. Rich Moore, Byron Howard, 2016
I watched this with my then-bf one night in his minute room in the early months of summer. I’ve been thinking about that period of my life a lot, not in a way that could be called dwelling on the past or even passive nostalgia; it’s been something like reciprocity with a past self. At the risk of sentimentality—a risk we ought to be taking more—I was in love then—no caveats, qualifications, or justifications—and I am in love now. When I think back, it’s like I’m exchanging happiness between hands, a metaphysical trade route that deals in understanding and acceptance. The love I feel now sanctions the love I felt then, in the same way that love I felt then helped to carve out, like the tireless beating of the sea, the cavernous space that is filled up with love as I write this. This is not confined to romantic love, naturally; it extends well beyond.
I’m going to risk saying something outlandish, as this is, after all, the final standard entry into my I’ve Seen Parts diary: movies can be these vessels too. Above, I mentioned that the uniquely time-based nature of cinema makes it so that it demands you turn over a segment of your life, a sacrifice to some greater muse. It was Andrey Tarkovsky—a filmmaker whose work I have still, after all of this, not seen—who said:
What people normally go to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. They go there for living experiences; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances, and concentrates a person’s experience—and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer. That is the power of cinema: ‘stars,’ storylines, and entertainment have nothing to do with it.*
For time lost or spent of not yet had. Tarkovsky speaks of sculpting with time, of working with a medium that requires a transaction: your attention and presence for an experience, a few ticks of your precious clock for an entire journey, your kingdom for a horse, your time for even more of it. When we watch something our present moment protracts, ballooning who were are into something greater than the self we sat down with. A whole torrent of elements from the film may flood in, but there will always be plenty more space left. Everything you’ve watched has made space, and some of that is still waiting to be filled by some other you, one that sat cross-legged on the carpeted floor of your childhood home or one that hasn’t yet been created.
There, I’ve made a case for cinema and love operating under the same principle. I hope you’re happy, reader, just like I’m happy Pixar didn’t make the hot fox a cop in this.
*Andrey Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 63.
This is the end of the line, folks, but keep your eyes open for next week’s bonus post wherein I will chronicle the films that were watched only after I’d passed their alphabetic position in this process, as well as films I’d forgotten to log and therefore didn’t make the first cut.
Thanks Matt for enchanting our Fridays with your posts! Hope you’ll consider doing more like these
You have a real way with words Matty! I've enjoyed reminiscing over our shared childhood and learning more about your life post-high school when we no longer saw each other every single day. I will miss little gems amongst the spam that makes up my inbox. Excited for your next endeavor whatever it may be :)