After Getting to Lawrence of Arabia
Sep. 2nd, 2019 06:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerRecording lots of old films off Turner Classic Movies but seldom managing to push aside enough smaller diversions to block out the time for watching even one of them a week did lead me in the end to giving up that channel as I pared back my cable. When I happened not that long ago to see a brief comment presenting “four very highly regarded movies,” though, I did think “I’ve seen three of them; let’s try and make it four,” remembering I’d set my timer for Lawrence of Arabia a while ago but left the film on my recorder’s hard drive. (The other three movies were Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and 2001: A Space Odyssey.) With the holiday long weekend, I did have the time even if the recording ran for four hours.
Everything I ever recorded off cable had a very soft picture, and having to enlarge the letterboxed image to fill my TV made it softer yet, but the sweep of the visuals (“vaster than any science fiction desert,” although I know the Star Wars saga eventually visited some of the movie’s architecture as well) did catch me up from the start. While I paused the movie after exactly two hours for the night, I got back to it the next morning instead of waiting for the evening. Thoughts like “deliberately paced” could come to mind, but all in all my interest was held for all that I did think every so often we’re further from the movie’s premiere now than it was from World War I. So far as “the human factor” goes, I can reflect on a classic tale of “rise, the dangers of coming to believe your own publicity, and fall” even as the little issue of “no speaking roles for women and hardly any close shots either” does bounce around my mind (along with the way “fandom” tends to find its own solution for either extreme of that...) As it turned out, the movie did have an intermission suitable for breaking the recording into pieces small enough to fit on recordable DVDs, although “seeing it on Blu-Ray” feels much more appealing now.
A 1962 issue of the old arts-and-history “Horizon” magazine I’ve managed to collect did have an article about Lawrence of Arabia in production (along with a piece introducing its reader to the films of Akira Kurosawa). That it would look at a movie at that point, however grandiose the production was described as being, and introduce it with a comment about trying to make “the flawless film” has stuck in my memory for a while. Four years later, after changing from bimonthly to quarterly, the magazine tossed in a comment about someone who’d seen the movie six times just for the Rolls-Royces in it, which might be its own small response to that previous comment. I never like to identify “absolute bests,” as “everything else” left behind them always seems to weigh more on my mind, but in its own way this movie does seem to stand alongside the other three I saw it mentioned with.
Everything I ever recorded off cable had a very soft picture, and having to enlarge the letterboxed image to fill my TV made it softer yet, but the sweep of the visuals (“vaster than any science fiction desert,” although I know the Star Wars saga eventually visited some of the movie’s architecture as well) did catch me up from the start. While I paused the movie after exactly two hours for the night, I got back to it the next morning instead of waiting for the evening. Thoughts like “deliberately paced” could come to mind, but all in all my interest was held for all that I did think every so often we’re further from the movie’s premiere now than it was from World War I. So far as “the human factor” goes, I can reflect on a classic tale of “rise, the dangers of coming to believe your own publicity, and fall” even as the little issue of “no speaking roles for women and hardly any close shots either” does bounce around my mind (along with the way “fandom” tends to find its own solution for either extreme of that...) As it turned out, the movie did have an intermission suitable for breaking the recording into pieces small enough to fit on recordable DVDs, although “seeing it on Blu-Ray” feels much more appealing now.
A 1962 issue of the old arts-and-history “Horizon” magazine I’ve managed to collect did have an article about Lawrence of Arabia in production (along with a piece introducing its reader to the films of Akira Kurosawa). That it would look at a movie at that point, however grandiose the production was described as being, and introduce it with a comment about trying to make “the flawless film” has stuck in my memory for a while. Four years later, after changing from bimonthly to quarterly, the magazine tossed in a comment about someone who’d seen the movie six times just for the Rolls-Royces in it, which might be its own small response to that previous comment. I never like to identify “absolute bests,” as “everything else” left behind them always seems to weigh more on my mind, but in its own way this movie does seem to stand alongside the other three I saw it mentioned with.