I have been thinking lately about what a privilege it is to have access to the Criterion Collection: some of the best movies ever made, in one place, restored with real care. And there is a second pleasure sitting next to the films, one I did not expect to love this much: the short videos of directors and actors talking about their favorite movies. Serious film people, standing in a closet full of discs, reduced to delighted children. Nothing is produced in those videos except affection, which is probably why I keep watching them.
So the pleasure is double. First, watching the films. Second, thinking about the ones I have not watched yet, and how I will see them in the future. I did the math: at a movie a day, every day, the whole collection would take about four years. I will never finish it, and I find this comforting rather than discouraging. Not all of them will be my style, and not all will become favorites. But sometimes you end up watching a movie you would never have chosen, and that is a thing choice cannot give you.
One of those movies found me a long time ago. I am quite sure the Criterion Collection was less famous and much much smaller; I know for certain my copy was downloaded illegally, when I was much younger, as one would do in this parts of Europe back then. Dersu Uzala, one of Kurosawa’s later films, in color, unlike the black and white ones everyone knows, and visually it is pure poetry. It is the story of a friendship: a surveyor sent to measure the vastness of Siberia, and the old hunter who becomes his guide. I remember little of it now, and I have decided not to refresh my memory before writing this, because what a film leaves in you after twenty years is its own kind of review. I remember a terrible winter storm, and the hunter, who knew everything about surviving that the educated man did not, saving the explorer’s life. That is where they bond, for life, more or less. And I remember the ending’s shape: the hunter grown too old for the wilderness, taken into his friend’s family in the city, having to adapt to a new environment the way the explorer once adapted to his. And failing. A very kind and beautiful movie about friendship. It sits in my head next to Ghost Dog, another great friendship movie.
Watching movies about friendship, you realize what they are actually about: time. You can only have a friend by giving huge portions of your time to another person, for nothing but the pure joy of being together, sharing a passion, a hobby, or sometimes just seeing something extraordinary side by side.
Which brings me to you. The ones who write back; the ones whose postcards are somewhere in-between us right now; the ones I will never hear from and think about anyway. You give this letter portions of your time, week after week. Thank you for the time. I know exactly what it is worth and I’m grateful for spending it on this newsletter.
Yours in idleness,
Leo Umilio
Editor, The Idle Gazette
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