Then and Now
Jun. 29th, 2018 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_cameraSpring and summer so far this year have been glorious: temps in the 70s, dew points low. But all that is about to change starting today. Temps will hit the 90° today and may hit 100° by Sunday. And the humidity! Like you’re displacing your own weight in water with every step!
So I went running this morning at – ulp – 6:30, which is every bit as awful as it sounds.
But I can’t do anything outside when the temps are much above 80°, and I gotta exercise.
I saw wild turkey chicks! I’ve seen wild turkeys before, but never the chicks:
And the goats were out!
Leetle goat-s-s-s-s-s.
###
Last night, I watched Les Quatre Cents Coups for like the billionth time. It doesn’t age, that film.
The film tells the story of Antoine Doinel (who is really François Truffaut), a cocky 12-year-old boy who ends up in a reform school after a series of minor misadventures. One day, Antoine runs away from the reform school because he’s always wanted to see the ocean. The film’s very last moment is a freeze frame of Antoine looking away from the ocean while complicated emotions – reverence, longing, fear – play across his face.
The freeze frame device subsequently became very popular with American filmmakers – think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; think Thelma and Louise – but Truffaut was the director who invented it.
I always think about my mother when I see Les Quatre Cents Coups because she turned me on to it. In fact, she turned me onto the entire French “New Wave” (which, of course, is “Ancient Wave” now.)
Despite her nuttiness, my mother was the one person you really wanted to go to the movies with so you could have someone to talk about the movie with afterwards who really got it. My mother was extraordinarily good at analyzing art of all kinds but particularly brilliant when it came to cinema.
“It’s funny,” my mother told me some years after she first took me to see the film. “When I first saw the movie, I identified with Antoine. But now, I identify with the mother.”
Uh-huh. So much so, in fact, that one of my mother’s favorite lies was that she had dubbed the part of the mother into English.
Me, I continue to identify with Antoine.
In fact, the older I get, the more akin I feel to my own 12-year-old self. Almost as though everything that happened to me between the ages of 12 and 66 is inconsequential in some larger, cosmic sense.
Though, of course, that isn’t any truer than my mother’s lie.
Antoine was – thanks to the magic of cinema is – just the most enchanting kid imaginable.
So, when I ran across this photograph, Jean Pierre Leaud (the actor who played Antoine) as he looks now, I felt like I was looking at the picture of Dorian Gray or something. It filled me with horror.
We get old.
There’s nothing we can do about it.
So I went running this morning at – ulp – 6:30, which is every bit as awful as it sounds.
But I can’t do anything outside when the temps are much above 80°, and I gotta exercise.
I saw wild turkey chicks! I’ve seen wild turkeys before, but never the chicks:
And the goats were out!
Leetle goat-s-s-s-s-s.
###
Last night, I watched Les Quatre Cents Coups for like the billionth time. It doesn’t age, that film.
The film tells the story of Antoine Doinel (who is really François Truffaut), a cocky 12-year-old boy who ends up in a reform school after a series of minor misadventures. One day, Antoine runs away from the reform school because he’s always wanted to see the ocean. The film’s very last moment is a freeze frame of Antoine looking away from the ocean while complicated emotions – reverence, longing, fear – play across his face.
The freeze frame device subsequently became very popular with American filmmakers – think Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; think Thelma and Louise – but Truffaut was the director who invented it.
I always think about my mother when I see Les Quatre Cents Coups because she turned me on to it. In fact, she turned me onto the entire French “New Wave” (which, of course, is “Ancient Wave” now.)
Despite her nuttiness, my mother was the one person you really wanted to go to the movies with so you could have someone to talk about the movie with afterwards who really got it. My mother was extraordinarily good at analyzing art of all kinds but particularly brilliant when it came to cinema.
“It’s funny,” my mother told me some years after she first took me to see the film. “When I first saw the movie, I identified with Antoine. But now, I identify with the mother.”
Uh-huh. So much so, in fact, that one of my mother’s favorite lies was that she had dubbed the part of the mother into English.
Me, I continue to identify with Antoine.
In fact, the older I get, the more akin I feel to my own 12-year-old self. Almost as though everything that happened to me between the ages of 12 and 66 is inconsequential in some larger, cosmic sense.
Though, of course, that isn’t any truer than my mother’s lie.
Antoine was – thanks to the magic of cinema is – just the most enchanting kid imaginable.
So, when I ran across this photograph, Jean Pierre Leaud (the actor who played Antoine) as he looks now, I felt like I was looking at the picture of Dorian Gray or something. It filled me with horror.
We get old.
There’s nothing we can do about it.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-29 08:11 pm (UTC)You can run.
I can lift.
We can both complain.
Hm. Your're right. There's nothing we can do about it. lol...
no subject
Date: 2018-06-30 01:58 pm (UTC)I want to stay health enough to have adventures, you know? :-)