I lived in the time of cinema, I will say.
Wordsworth didn't.
It changed our eyes:
how could i imagine the dawn view from Westminster Bridge
without having seen in a fair few movies
tall ships crowding the Thames, the atmospherics
of sails and slaves, trading beneath the mean light
of whale oil lanterns, pre-Pasteur dirt et cetera,
characters presented in large for us to care about,
actors reacting to the wrenching rigging?
How?
Consider the size of screens.
A little history knowledge has informed my view of movies:
St Paul's a mere hundred years old glistening
in young Wordsworth's dawn along with the other architecture
of the reconstructed city following
The Great Fire of London.
A little history
has sharpened my critical enjoyment of film,
but what i'm trying to get at is
i really cannot see the non-present world without a 35mm camera frame.
The accident of birth in a certain age.
Gen X with the television eyes,
gen Y with their little screens
and buttons and interactive graphics:
what do I know about how they will see the world
in their imaginations.
Since we have had magic windows looking out on definite unreality,
how do we see looking in? How do you, my little Joey boy,
understand my childhood of the Saturday matinee,
the joy of Jaffas bouncing down the thin-rugged wooden stairs in the dark
of the old Matthew Flinders theatre in their clinking orange glory, the thrill of interval
coming between the cliff-hanging serial and the one movie of the week?
It is part of the DNA of my adulthood, the cinematic stories priming us for the brilliant burst of Moral, Philosophical dilemmas, amazing European, post-Nazi war and American guilt over its Vietnam engagement , which we, Generation Open Mouth, drew in like breaths of fine fresh air, the politics of discussion, fed by the visual appreciation of the world around us,
which my mother didn't have as she roamed the hills reading the Romantic poets.
How do you see
the wind-dance of leaves in the breeze?
2 comments:
Screens have all but dominated my life. One of my earliest memories was watching the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne on our new television. Memories of Saturday afternoon at the pictures - that little piece of black licorice in a bag of sherbet that kept us happy for most of the film & later (because we lived in Wangaratta) going to the Drive-in movies was a Sunday night, rather than Saturday adventure. When I was younger, very young I would travel to the country by train. I almost always saw the window out of which I looked, as a screen - the world passing & changing, the flow of time altered.
Yes, and you have a camera eye as well. I know people who do not see much at all. I don't know where their eyes are but they've missed the obvious. Seeing is as hard as listening - the balance of imagination and reality, heh?
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