If you’re an even mildly enthusiastic filmgoer, these two shortcompilations from The Solomon Society will get your life flashing before your eyes. They transport me to my ninth birthday screening of The Nightmare Before Christmas; my VHS viewings of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at home sick from school; the obsession with Blade Runner that put me on the road to cinephilia; the thrill I got in high school from aesthetically daring yet cineplex-screened major motion pictures like Fight Club and The Cell; my induction into auteur cinema through Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, 2001: A Space Odyssey (seen at Seattle’s space-age Cinerama in the actual year of 2001), A Clockwork Orange, and The Shining; the surprise public debut Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master — which happened to follow a revival screening of The Shining.
Of course, you’ll experience a flood of different movie-related memories than I did. Maybe these videos will bring back the exhilaration of seeing Quentin Tarantino’s PulpFiction, or even Reservoir Dogs, back in the nineties. The story of my own cinephile life could hardly be told without reference to early Wes Anderson pictures like Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums.
But perhaps you’ve felt more of an impact from the later, even more visually intricate work of his that appears here, like The Darjeeling Limited or The Grand Budapest Hotel. Or you could be a movie-lover of a different stripe altogether, for whom nothing satisfies quite like a classic blockbuster, be it the original Star Wars or a long-acclaimed drama like The Shawshank Redemption.
The second of these videos begins with a clip of an interview with no less an auteur than Orson Welles. Asked where he got the confidence to make Citizen Kane, he replies, “Ignorance. Sheer ignorance. There is no confidence to equal it. I thought you could do anything with a camera that the eye could do or the imagination could do. And I didn’t know that there were things you couldn’t do, so anything I could think up in my dreams, I attempted to photograph.” It’s safe to say that none of the dozens upon dozens of shots collected here could have been captured by filmmakers overly conscious of the impossible. But however striking they look individually, they’re all even more powerful in their proper context: their context within not just the film, but also the life of the beholder.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
