La Durée

by Richard Armstrong

Watching movies when you are stoned is an odd experience. I first smoked dope while watching a movie in 1983. At a Chicago cinema (I believe it was called the 'LaSalle Theatre'), we saw The Conversation after turning on in the car. That night I was an outsider in America watching an American outsider's awkward encounters with it. Harry Caul's story came to seem like the relationship between my experience and myself. I had seen the film before. But as time crawled in tune to the concert of sound and image working itself out before me, it felt as though I had never seen this film before.

Grass has the effect of slowing the proceedings down so you become curiously focussed on the mesh of sound and image, oddly aware of yourself making sense of the movie. The weave of a movie's audiovisual fabric is such a joyous surprise that your mind falls into concision with this music. And the concert can be heard for days ...

American academic Samuel Chell has written that a film score realizes the spectator's perception of time. Evoking Henri Bergson's notion of 'la durée' ('real' time in which each moment is successive yet interacts with the moment before and the moment after), Chell suggests that the direct affective appeal of music solicits at the level of intuition. And intuition is the spectator's only access to la durée, Bergson writes. "For this reason", writes Chell, "the spectator's sense of coming a long way, of having experienced diegetic time more acutely than actual time, is strongest in films relying heavily on music scores."

This is how time passed one night in the summer of 1987. Arriving back in Finsbury Park from a dull book reading in Kentish Town, I procured a little cannabis resin and excitedly made my way home for the start of the late movie: Remember My Name. I recalled the fate of the nervy ex-con as she patiently stalks a married man to Alberta Hunter's intense blues score. Like Harry Caul, Emily is an outsider in this society. She haunts the film like a metaphor for desire itself: desirous to watch, love and walk here. Seeing it through strangely aromatic fog that night made us converse on deeper levels. It was with something of a start that I found myself in my old room after the film had ended. It was as though I had been in the film, unseen by any of the characters yet with agency enough to look and listen in this place, rove amongst the chinks and crevices of this voice. During the ensuing weekend, I thought about this experience a lot. I kept coming back to the impression I had had of leaving one life and standing on the outskirts of another. There seems to be no other way of talking about experiencing the look, the pace, the sounds, the moods, the air the film breathed, than to say that I had been a long way away. It seems to me that I will never see this film again.

Copyright © Richard Armstrong 2004