Overheard in a pub:
Man 1: 'Open the pod bay door now, Hal.'
Man 2: 'I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that.'
(from 2001: A Space Odyssey)
There's something fascinating about record collector minds, hoards of quotes shared and dealt like cards, lines traded, images bought. It's a more private and difficult thing to describe complex emotions; easier to slip into character: 'Are you looking at me?' The line, proffered by Travis Bickle, in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, is shorthand for a psyche much more difficult to articulate.
Through this shared experience we can spar, compete, bond, identify, even threaten. We can be De Niro for a moment (right). This line has become one of the definitions of cool machismo (as so many of Scorsese's lines have). Yet we forget all the great lines from the bad films. We also forget the sound, the ghosts that pulled us sideways but we remember all the songs from The Wizard Of Oz.
Whatever we take from a film - personal, public, private, subconscious - a list can only contain moments that are often a key to the recognition of something more complex. This is the case with the above quote from 2001. The monotonous dialogue is not the most interesting thing about the scene. More menacing is the ingenious use of silence - there is no sound in space. I find it difficult to write with reference to the most memorable moments in film, when for me the best moments in films are truly irreducible. I walked out from the last film I saw, sat down somewhere, had coffee, and I'd already forgotten where I'd been for the previous two hours. When I walk into a cinema, I want to leave with an experience unrepeatable, unquotable and indescribable. For this to happen at all is a small miracle and the measure of a great film is how long that feeling will last.
For example, the final scene in Mouchette by Robert Bresson (which is one of my most memorable moments) carries a vast emotional power. In the film, 14-year-old Mouchette, burdened by responsibilities beyond her age, becomes more and more of an outcast in a small village full of petty-minded hypocrisy.
In the final scene we see her for the first time as a little girl playing a simple game of rolling down a grassy verge. Then we realise she is at the edge of a lake. Three times she rolls down the hill towards the water. What is playful to start with quickly becomes unnerving. She rolls out of frame. We hear the sound of her slipping into the lake without struggle. We see a shot of the still water. No words can really describe how it makes you feel. It has no dialogue. It's so simple, compelling, dreamlike.
Lynne Ramsay is currently working on an adaptation of Alan Warner's novel 'Morvern Callar'.