18 - Creative Remembering and Other Perils of Film Study

Summary

This article was published by Film Quarterly in 1978. Coming from a time before video copies of films were commercially available, it is of course badly dated. But it may be amusing for today's readers to see the kinds of difficulties and often crazy solutions one faced at the time. The problem of inaccurate publications has not gone away, however, even though video has made it easier for people to check copies of films for visual details and dialogue. I remain fanatically committed to the importance of simple accuracy in film scholarship, given what is known at the time one writes. For many writers today, that vigilance begins with not taking every date and credit on the IMDb for granted. The comments on Gerald Mast's A Short History of the Movies are fateful, because after Gerald died in 1988, I became the person responsible for correcting and updating that book, and edition after edition, the task has proved more difficult and time-consuming than I ever imagined.

I went to see The Wild Child with someone who paid intimate and careful attention to the film; who understood it as completely, as personally, and as intellectually […] as anyone could; and who was yet convinced, not 20 minutes after we left the theater, that the film had been in color.