User:CAndrews/sandbox

This is the user sandbox of CAndrews. A user sandbox is a subpage of the user's user page. It serves as a testing spot and page development space for the user and is not an encyclopedia article. Create or edit your own sandbox here.

Films exist in many places. A film is in a reel stored inside of a can. A motion picture is encoded onto a shiny DVD that sparkles like a rainbow when held up to the light. But at the same time, those are just objects that contain films. We experience films not by staring at a reel or at a disc, but by gazing elsewhere, at a screen. But even the theatre or television screen is not a film’s permanent home, certainly not in the same way that a frame provides to a painting. No, at best it is a fragile, temporal relationship, with the film bounded by opening credits and fades-to-black. The film exists for a short while, until it reaches The End and the screen goes dark. That is not to say that we don’t try to provide frames for our cinematic paintings. We attempt to fix them in our memories, honing in, for example, on particular scenes that we like to recall, over and over again. Lines of dialogue as well, even when the memory that we create constitutes something different from our original experience with the film. Humphrey Bogart’s Rick never actually said, “Play, It Again Sam” in Casablanca (1943), but he certainly did—and continues to do—in our cultural memory.