My First Movies, 1942-1948

Two films stand out at the very beginning of my movie-going career.  Bambi and Joan of Arc.  Each made a deep impression on me, though hardly for the reasons the directors or producers would have anticipated.  It was probably just after the War, of course, and my mother and father took me because they wanted to go to the cinema and didn’t want to leave me at home.  I was too young to understand either of these important films, too little too to really know what a movie was or a theatre or why we were walking out of the bright sunshine into a darkened room and sitting down in front of a big white sheet hanging down from the ceiling or why there were so many other people sitting all around us on chairs that were in straight rows and facing towards that big screen. 

If I ever see these films in the memory of my maturity—and when they were showing on television and later available on tape or disk, I tried to watch—it is impossible to recapture the infantile experiences I had.  What is important in my midrashic memory has to be understood as other than the grasp of a narrative plot in the films: all I can find reconstructed in my mind are disconnected images, whether of forest creatures running away from hunters or a fire or of crowds of people holding torches and a woman’s face filling the screen and looking sad, with large tears streaming down.  But I had no idea who these characters were or what they were doing.  I doubt if I would have been able to distinguish between cartoons drawn on film and real actors dressed up in a period costume, and certainly no idea about who or how or why they were created.  What I remember is the darkness, the warmth, the closeness of my mother and father, and the presence of many other people seated in the theatre in rows. 

It didn’t matter to me that someone named Felix Salten had written Bambi as a satirical novel about Vienna in the 1930s.  How that German-language narrative was transformed into a soppy sentimental cartoon was beyond my understanding.  Nor did I weep at the death of Bambi’s mother at the end of the animated film as so many nostalgic comedians report ever since, people who really are more concerned with the power of Walt Disney as a showman than with the reality of the hunting scene in the forest.  For me the trauma was otherwise.  My father went into the army soon after taking me to see the movie and what I could remember about him was always bound up into the memory of the darkened theatre, with the images on screen only a small part of the whole.  The Joan of Arc came out in 1948, so that my memories have not only conflated the time before and after my father was away--so many years fore a little boy--but suggested some meaningful connection between the story of the little deer in the forst and the mystical maid of Doreme.

As for Maid of Orleans and her visions, her service to King Louis, and her glorification in France, what could that have meant to me, a little boy, more interested in looking around at the other people in the Loew’s movie house on Old New Utrecht Road, wondering how I could go to the toilet by myself, and why my father and mother, now together again after the War, wanted to see this film which made no sense to me.  I hoped there would be cartoons later, after the newsreel and the coming attractions.  Ingrid Bergman, who was she?  All I can recall—because I never saw the film again in my youth, and now dare not ruin the important memories by watching it when I am older than my parents were then—is that it was in color, lots of reds and gold.  There must have been flames, campfires, sunsets, knights and ladies, warriors, priests, angels.  I remember my mother wore her sealskin coat and my father took me to the men’s room, lifting me over the other people in the row, and I remember how warm everything was and music that was very loud.  

How strange that these two films have flowed together into one memory though they were seen six years apart, one before and one after my father left for the war--and the whole trauma of the war spent in Brooklyn, New York.  A little fawn in a forest and a mystical girl in Doreme, they have nothing in  common, only my own painful experiences and the confusion of loss and separation.