Faded Memories

…or more accurately, no memories at all.  The still-lovely Isabella Rossellini laments:

Rossellini admitted struggling with being known largely for her parents at first, but now she wishes more young people appreciated her parents.

‘I used to be introduced as “Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini’s daughter,” and it bothered me, because I would think, “I am my own person,”‘ she admitted.

‘But now, the younger generation doesn’t know them, and it breaks my heart. Their reputations outlived them, but fame is very brief,’ she added.

I’m keenly aware of this, because my own kids, all in their mid-thirties, have not the slightest interest in watching any movie — no matter how much I extol its virtues — if it was filmed in black & white.  They claim that they just can’t get past the “unreality” of the B&W monochromatic colors.

This is like refusing to read Shakespeare because it wasn’t written in modern-day English or in text-speak [spit].

What’s worse is that while there are a huge number of old movies that are, well, crap, there remains a body of work which is so much better than anything being released by the movie studios today that it scarcely needs an exposition — and that even allowing for the clunky special effects of those old movies which used them.

Side note:  That’s  not always the case.  I remember an occasion when the original (and restored uncut) King Kong was shown to a group of movie students in Scandinavia somewhere, and the gruesomeness of the scene where giant spiders eat the hapless sailors actually caused half the audience to flee the theater.

What’s even worse is that the oldies were made for grownups, yeah, actual adults, before “adult movies” became a euphemism for thrusting naked buttocks and gynecological close-ups of female pudenda.  I guess that part of this can be blamed on my Baby Boomer generation [sigh], when “young people” became a distinct market of “teenagers”, whose enormous buying power caused movie makers to make crap like Beach Blanket Bingo or Wild In The Streets, whereas ten years earlier such shallow and simplistic fare would have been roundly decried and boycotted.  Throw in the Playboy  ethos of the 1950s and, well, you know the rest.  (I’m not decrying Hefner’s magazine for causing the sexual revolution, but it no doubt facilitated it.)

It pains me that B&W movies per se  are going to disappear, not because of the propensity of generations to denigrate the output of their parents and grandparents (in the case of movies), but because so much incredible artistic work will disappear along with them.

And you’ll forgive me if I would be somewhat unimpressed by the efforts of some modern director like Michael Bay or Christopher Nolan to do justice to Hitchcock’s Rebecca., or a Quentin Tarentino redo of Casablanca.

I think I threw up in my mouth a little, just thinking of that.  My heartfelt apologies.

Here’s Isabella’s mom, to atone:

“Dear Mr. Rossellini,

“I saw your films Open City  and Paisan, and enjoyed them very much. If you need a Swedish actress who speaks English very well, who has not forgotten her German, who is not very understandable in French, and who in Italian knows only ‘ti amo’, I am ready to come and make a film with you.”  — Ingrid Bergman