Ranjit Rewinds: How Long Is A Piece Of Memory?

“Where did your love of cinema begin?” An innocuous question, surely. Just reminisce a little and draw connections from your childhood, devouring films on the telly, to your present, screening films under a railway arch in East London. It’s good marketing, Ranjit. In fact, skip the telly, the school hall projector, the VHS rentals and get straight to basics: what was the first film you saw in the cinema? Classic interview question for a film listings site. One run by a very nice man who lives on a boat. A widebeam barge in a London dock just like the ones in the swinging 60s British films I love. Like Michael York in Smashing Time. A boat in which I am being interviewed.

The boat did not bob up and down but my memories did. Floating to the surface. Spilling onto dry land.

Even today, I can never answer that question without internal disputation as to what really counts as my first film and tangential rumination about the nature of memory itself. Here are the candidates and my working out. This is not good marketing, Ranjit.

Candidate 1: Thunderball (1965) Dir. Terence Young

These days you have special parent-and-baby screenings. In the 70s, my parents just took me anyway. A rep screening at the Evington Cinema, one of the many local picture palaces of Leicester. An entrance flanked by twin octagonal towers. I see a big warehouse-sized auditorium with pillars in my mind. The façade and towers remain today, used as offices after the rest was set ablaze by arsonists in 1984 and later replaced by retirement flats. But it was still screening films until 1978, so the timing checks out. I would have been a baby of 1 or 2 years.

My current key memory of this film is Molly Peters massaging a smirking Sean Connery with an impressively soft-looking mink glove. But this memory will not have come from that first watch. My early memory is highly suspicious and seemingly impossible. A baby on my mother’s lap. The screen. The pillars. I see it as if I am an outsider watching myself and my family. An out-of-body experience? No. A recreation. A false memory. Constructed from a recurrent anecdote by my parents. Family lore. Retold on bank holidays whenever a Bond film came on the box. It is Connery that caresses Peters using mink in the film; the reverse scene appears in publicity shots and lobby cards. A memory manufactured by tales and advertising.

But those pillars. Why would I invent them? An unnecessary architectural detail in a cinema hall requiring clear views. Not a detail likely to be included in a parental yarn. A corroborating clue? That I was indeed at the back of the stalls with pillars holding up the circle above. Do babies retain visual memories?

Candidate 2: Popeye (1980) Dir. Robert Altman

Pro: Having an Altman film as your first ever is cool. Con: That Altman film is Popeye.

Hang on, hang on. I re-watched this film with my daughter recently. It is fun. The Harry Nilsson songs are great. The production design is extraordinary despite the disasters and spiralling costs during its creation. I would have been 4 when I was taken to the old Odeon in the centre of Leicester: a grand Art Deco cinema with an auditorium that could seat a thousand or two. The building is still there looking beautiful. A banqueting and conference hall since the Odeon moved to a bland, brick box in a car park.

I was definitely there. The memory is real. I sat in the dead centre of the auditorium. The screen felt enormous. I retain an image of Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall in full cartoon costume but I didn’t remember the film. Only a single scene. A giant octopus on a giant screen that scared me to death, forever burning the memory into me. Does one scene count as a meaningful watch?

Candidate 3: Tron (1982) Dir. Steven Lisberger

How long is a piece of memory? An explicit, episodic memory. Can they vary in length or is a longer memory just a collection of smaller memory fragments in sequence?

I remember watching Tron. The whole film. The full cultural experience of cinema. The hype on Saturday morning kids’ TV. Anticipation. Knowing we were going to see it. The driveway of my childhood home. Waiting by the Datsun. Looking at the open porch door. Eagerness. Already waiting for Dad to lock up and let me in the car. The journey. The cinema. Gorgeous Odeon again. THE FILM. David Warner’s high-tech table. Computer animation. The rotating column of red light that looked like a strawberry-flavoured whistling lollipop from the pharmacy on Evington Road. The helicopter. Only Solutions by Journey. Pretty clear. This is the one, right? Yes, I had been to cinema before. Yes, I even retained possible and actual memories from previous visits. But this is the one.

Those troublesome fragments. I remember the hype for Ghostbusters and Labyrinth better. I was older with more coherent memory retention. Those specific segments on kids’ TV? Troublesome. Did I extrapolate a memory back from later films to Tron? Is the memory of hype and anticipation an assumption? I’ve watched the film many times since that weekend trip to the cinema with my Dad. Those later memories lay on top of older ones. Writing data to an ageing magnetic disc again and again to stop it fading over decades. Does the original memory of the film even exist anymore under all those re-watches? How many scraps of memory are borrowed from my many later childhood trips to the same cinema and re-purposed to keep this one looking complete? Stones secretly taken from less important walls to shore up this one and keep it looking whole.

The interviewer looked at the time. An hour had passed. There were more questions to get round to. Important ones about my future screenings. Events that needed listing. Events that needed promotion. Marketing, Ranjit, marketing. We laughed and gave up. I didn’t mind. I got to wear my nautical white trousers and visit someone who actually lived on a boat. Just like the ones in the swinging 60s British films I love. Like Carol White in I'll Never Forget What's 'Isname. Her character ended up in a car crash. As did my interview.