“Photography is truth. The cinema is truth twenty-four times per second.”
These were the words of legendary French director Jean Luc Goddard and in my opinion, he couldn’t have been truer. (One might argue the quotation is invalid in today’s scenario when improvement in technology has increased the frame rate. But that’s a pretty humorous take on the saying, if you ask me.) Anyway, I’m talking about what an incredible experience I have had with the movies and how the passion for movies have left an undying impact in my life.
I did watch movies during the childhood on Saturdays on Nepal Television and later when the cables came in, on various foreign channels too. But I don’t have much to remember about them. During the early days of my movie watch, “Lord of the Rings” trilogy is probably the one I think I can vividly remember. Lagaan, Empires of the Sun, Black, Honey I Shrunk the Kids were probably the others which I remember as having watched and liked and to some extent knowing what happened in them, during my childhood. The love for movies became profound when I was in the ninth grade. The first movie that I can consider as having liked to a great extent and having kick started my journey with movies was Forrest Gump. Some might consider the movie as too much dramatic and rather implausible one. But the unforgettable character of Forrest, its portrayal of life as “a feather in the wind”, as well as infinite joy it carried had a lasting effect of movie on me. Around that time, the favorite movies I watched were Cast Away, Appocalypto, No Country for Old Men, Toy Soldiers, 300, The Simpsons movies and others.
This movie watching activity became less intense when I entered the tenth grade, owing to the colossal force called SLC. But it revived as soon as I came over it. And how wonderful days those were. I still remember the fun, the joy and the happiness of those days. Before I started high school education, I spent a whole lot of time watching movies. I watched several movies during that period which I admired a lot that time and still do today such as Slumdog Millionaire, Malena, Basic Instinct, A History of Violence, The Lives of Others, Scarface, Godfather I and II and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The journey with movies took a new step in the eleventh grade when I became obsessed with watching movies that were listed at the top of rankings by AFI, IMDB, Time and other such means. Some of them I liked and some I didn’t but still the experience was really fulfilling one. The favorite ones from that period are A Beautiful Mind, Once Upon a Time in the West, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Braveheart, The Great Gatsby, Kramer vs Kramer and others. Later I watched with great joy foreign language films such as The Bicycle Thief, Children of Heaven, Seven Samurai, Rashomon and Tokyo Story. Moving beyond the boundary of Hollywood, Bollywood and in some way Kollywood too was a very enriching experience. Later I also watched the art movies of Bergman, Fellini and others like The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, 8 ½, The Virgin Spring. To be honest, I haven’t fathomed all of these movies but the ones which I have, I think they have given me a new experience.
From Forrest Gump to The Seventh Seal and from Peter Jackson to Federico Fellini, the intimate bond with movies has brought me great joy and bliss in life. I don’t consider myself extremely prolific viewer of movies but I have had a fair share of them. I still haven’t watched many which I had planned to watch years ago. But the ones I’ve watched, I think they have made my life thriving in many ways. With movies, I have been to the magical world of Lord of the Rings and to the one close to where I live in Loot. I have shared the feelings of the juror from Twelve Angry Men and a blind and mute but in many other ways remarkable girl from Black. Knowing so much differing characters and being to places so varying, which is quite unimaginable in my real life, has shaped the way I live and altered the observation through which I look at life. Although the journey has a long way to go, the path it has travelled up to this point in my life has, in many ways, been an incredible one.
nabindenepali 