Why The MacMahonian: The MacMahonian seeks to redress an acute shortage in cyberspace, namely that of amateur independent film comment and criticism.
Now seriously, the creation of this blog stems from the fact that I always wanted to be a film critic but never found anybody interested in paying me for it. To do me justice, I never really looked for it either... Actually, to be absolutely truthful, The MacMahonian comes into existence because my daughters dared me to fulfill my lifelong wish to write about film and finally do something meaningful with my life (no comment, no contest). Whatever my other shortcomings, however, I suffer from no shortage of things to do in my spare time, to the contrary, but I´m loath to fail my promise to my daughters, so here it is.
Why “The MacMahonian”: It´s a cinephile reference or, as the French would put it, a clin d´oeil. I will publish the best (or first, or, in desperation, any) reader´s explanation of the title of this blog, and then add a comment. OK, a clue will also be given: instead of “The MacMahonian”, think “Le MacMahonien”. Now, four things can happen:
1. Most readers will figure it out easily, meaning the allusion is not as arcane as I think;
2. No one will figure it out, because not many people will bother to read the blog;
3. Many people will read it, but no one will have a clue, or care;
4. Very few people will read it, but most of these will be sufficiently nerdy to know what the allusion is.
Whatever the case may be, I will have learned a valuable and important lesson. I will make sure I write it down somewhere, otherwise I´ll forget.
Why Film – When I was little my father would sometimes take me to football matches. I found it boring. My father or my mother would also sometimes take me to the circus, which I found boring, or the theater (boring). On to later childhood and puberty, my parents would also sometimes take me to the beach, sporting events, field trips or holidays in the sun. You know how I found it.
But sometimes they took me to the movies. That I loved! The lights went out, the screen lit up, automatic dreamland (The MacMahonian doesn´t subscribe to Jean-Luc Godard´s proposition to the effect that “le Cinéma c'est la vérité 24 fois par seconde”). I found my parent´s taste in movies infallible: Disney animations, kid´s movies, Hollywood blockbusters, old westerns or classic American epics, I would love it all and return home from the theatre emotionally exhausted, feeling as though I had lived a whole lifetime through Moses, Doctor Zhivago, or whomsoever.
The next chapter of my cinephilia, roughly ages 13-17, was spent seeing dodgy copies of old westerns, Hong Kong Kung-Fu Movies, Italian giallo films or (then favourites) “realistic” political thrillers in the manner of Costa-Gravas and such, in second-run theaters in Lisbon´s suburbia (The MacMahonian hails proudly from Lisbon, Portugal).
The next and to this day final chapter of my lifelong passion for the movies happens to have a precise (although unrecorded) and conscious date: seeing The Maltese Falcon on TV around 1979-80. I thought it was the coolest thing ever and immediately abandoned my notion that old black and white films were cheesy. There ensued a case of acute cinephilia that had its most serious period in the early to mid-eighties, sometimes involving seeing 8 films in a single weekend and being a semi-permanent resident of the Lisbon Cinematheque. This was followed by a milder, but nonetheless very persistent, chronic phase that has spanned the last 30 years.
I won´t bore you with a list of my top favorite movies, it would run to some 400 hundred titles and be totally predictable and academic (The Searchers etc., I´m not going to lie). I hope it is more entertaining, and eventually revealing of this blog´s aesthetic orientation, to record my strongest movie memories:
The first time I remember going to the movies I must have been around 4. It was a cartoon version of the 1001 Nights or Ali Baba, I think. I remember Ali Baba, or Sinbad, floating in the sea with a blue turban under a yellow sky. I´m not sure this is how the film really is but this is what I remember. Especially the yellow sky. To this day.
Now seriously, the creation of this blog stems from the fact that I always wanted to be a film critic but never found anybody interested in paying me for it. To do me justice, I never really looked for it either... Actually, to be absolutely truthful, The MacMahonian comes into existence because my daughters dared me to fulfill my lifelong wish to write about film and finally do something meaningful with my life (no comment, no contest). Whatever my other shortcomings, however, I suffer from no shortage of things to do in my spare time, to the contrary, but I´m loath to fail my promise to my daughters, so here it is.
Why “The MacMahonian”: It´s a cinephile reference or, as the French would put it, a clin d´oeil. I will publish the best (or first, or, in desperation, any) reader´s explanation of the title of this blog, and then add a comment. OK, a clue will also be given: instead of “The MacMahonian”, think “Le MacMahonien”. Now, four things can happen:
1. Most readers will figure it out easily, meaning the allusion is not as arcane as I think;
2. No one will figure it out, because not many people will bother to read the blog;
3. Many people will read it, but no one will have a clue, or care;
4. Very few people will read it, but most of these will be sufficiently nerdy to know what the allusion is.
Whatever the case may be, I will have learned a valuable and important lesson. I will make sure I write it down somewhere, otherwise I´ll forget.
Why Film – When I was little my father would sometimes take me to football matches. I found it boring. My father or my mother would also sometimes take me to the circus, which I found boring, or the theater (boring). On to later childhood and puberty, my parents would also sometimes take me to the beach, sporting events, field trips or holidays in the sun. You know how I found it.
But sometimes they took me to the movies. That I loved! The lights went out, the screen lit up, automatic dreamland (The MacMahonian doesn´t subscribe to Jean-Luc Godard´s proposition to the effect that “le Cinéma c'est la vérité 24 fois par seconde”). I found my parent´s taste in movies infallible: Disney animations, kid´s movies, Hollywood blockbusters, old westerns or classic American epics, I would love it all and return home from the theatre emotionally exhausted, feeling as though I had lived a whole lifetime through Moses, Doctor Zhivago, or whomsoever.
The next chapter of my cinephilia, roughly ages 13-17, was spent seeing dodgy copies of old westerns, Hong Kong Kung-Fu Movies, Italian giallo films or (then favourites) “realistic” political thrillers in the manner of Costa-Gravas and such, in second-run theaters in Lisbon´s suburbia (The MacMahonian hails proudly from Lisbon, Portugal).
The next and to this day final chapter of my lifelong passion for the movies happens to have a precise (although unrecorded) and conscious date: seeing The Maltese Falcon on TV around 1979-80. I thought it was the coolest thing ever and immediately abandoned my notion that old black and white films were cheesy. There ensued a case of acute cinephilia that had its most serious period in the early to mid-eighties, sometimes involving seeing 8 films in a single weekend and being a semi-permanent resident of the Lisbon Cinematheque. This was followed by a milder, but nonetheless very persistent, chronic phase that has spanned the last 30 years.
I won´t bore you with a list of my top favorite movies, it would run to some 400 hundred titles and be totally predictable and academic (The Searchers etc., I´m not going to lie). I hope it is more entertaining, and eventually revealing of this blog´s aesthetic orientation, to record my strongest movie memories:
The first time I remember going to the movies I must have been around 4. It was a cartoon version of the 1001 Nights or Ali Baba, I think. I remember Ali Baba, or Sinbad, floating in the sea with a blue turban under a yellow sky. I´m not sure this is how the film really is but this is what I remember. Especially the yellow sky. To this day.
The most plausible candidate I have yet found for this childhood memory, after a (not very) thorough investigation, is the feature length Mr. Magoo cartoon 1001 Arabians Nights. Couldn´t detect no yellow sky, though. Just goes to show.
I must have been around 6 when I saw John Ford´s The Lost Patrol on TV. The final sequence, as the silent and invisible Arab enemy inexorably kills the patrol trapped in an oasis one by one, until the last one charges them to certain death in desperation in the last shot, haunted me for a long time (The MacMahonian subscribes, but not unqualifiedly, to the thesis that films lose part of their magic on TV, PCs etc.). When I saw the film again in my late twenties I was surprised that something I then saw as rather conventional and quaint could have had such a strong effect on a 6 year old. To quote my most admired writer, “this proves nothing, but there is nothing I wish to prove”;
I must have been around 6 when I saw John Ford´s The Lost Patrol on TV. The final sequence, as the silent and invisible Arab enemy inexorably kills the patrol trapped in an oasis one by one, until the last one charges them to certain death in desperation in the last shot, haunted me for a long time (The MacMahonian subscribes, but not unqualifiedly, to the thesis that films lose part of their magic on TV, PCs etc.). When I saw the film again in my late twenties I was surprised that something I then saw as rather conventional and quaint could have had such a strong effect on a 6 year old. To quote my most admired writer, “this proves nothing, but there is nothing I wish to prove”;
I was around 14 when I saw 2001 a Space Odyssey. It blew me away. Back then I was heavily into SF books, and I rushed home from the theatre to tell a close friend and fellow SF buff about the epiphany. We went to see the film again the following day - the first and one of the few times in my life I saw the same film two days in a row. My friend, a hard SF fan who would years later go on to teach Maths at University, wasn´t nearly as impressed as I was, pointing out to me the many scientific and technical incongruities of the film… I´ve since seen 2001 dozens of times, and it retains for me most (helàs, not all…) of its magic.
I was around 19 when I saw L´Année derniére a Marienbad. Not quite as blown over as with 2001 some five year previously, but firmly under the spell of having finally found the film I´d been looking for all my life, without even knowing I was looking for it. Marienbad has gone out, back in and again back out of academic and critical favour, but I never stopped finding it bewitching.
I was around 25 when I saw John Ford´s The Sun Shines Bright (the second time Ford is mentioned, I now notice, in this text; always a top favourite director, John Ford´s late romanticism has lost some of its appeal for me in recent years; but I still totally go for the Irish humor); this was at the height of my film-buffness, having gone full circle and finding beauty in nothing but simplicity. I never saw the film again, and suspect would today not be nearly as impressed. (I also now notice that Ford´s films are the only one mentioned by pre-fixing them with the director´s name; the reason for that is I suspect they are less familiar to the general public than the other films mentioned).
Provisional epilogue: Somebody once wrote that people go to the movies to recapture the sense of wonder they felt when they went to the movies as children. They know it is impossible but they still do it, hoping against hope or at least trying to get some ghost of that lost sense of wonder. I agree. Since my Ali Baba days I have seen thousands of films and have sometimes almost, though never quite, seen again that yellow sky. The last times I came close were the first times I saw A.I and Mulholland Drive.
Mission Statement –
To comment and criticize films, old and new, irregularly and at whim, and half-hope someone finds it amusing or perhaps even thought-provoking.
Now read on…
To comment and criticize films, old and new, irregularly and at whim, and half-hope someone finds it amusing or perhaps even thought-provoking.
Now read on…