Unfortunately, I can't remember the first film I saw because I was too young. But I can tell you about my first relationship to the cinema, as I remember it, when I was five years old--which was a bit weird, and certainly had an erotic-sexual facet to it. I remember that I was looking at a publicity folder for a film showing a tiger tearing a man to pieces. Obviously the tiger was on top of the man but for some unknown reason it seemed to me with my child's imagination that the tiger had half swallowed the man and the other half was still protruding out of its jaws. I terribly wanted to see the film; naturally my parents wouldn't take me, which I bitterly regret to this day.--Pier Paolo PasoliniWhat's the first movie you remember seeing in a theatre?
The cinetrix has been told the apocryphal story of being taken to the drive-in by her young parents to see a movie, the title of which has been lost, I think, in the mists of time. She does know that she went on such a crying jag [a lifelong leitmotif, she's compelled to say] that they had to bundle her home before the movie was over. She has never again been to a drive-in, an abiding regret.
One of the first films I do remember seeing, vividly, is Doctor Doolittle, with Rex Harrison as the good doctor who could talk to the animals. I have no idea why a two-screen theatre in Norwell, MA, was screening a 1967 release in what must have been 1974 or 1975, but there you have it. And I'm confident it must have been around then because my aunt and I had to wait until my younger brother went down for his nap before we could leave on our oh-so grown-up excursion.
[The 'Fesser is a savant who grew up in a university town with a superabundance of art houses and groovy babysitters. He can still tell me which movies he's seen in a particular theatre.]
UPDATE: Here's a saucier, far gayer translation of Pasolini's anecdote.
The young adventurer seemed to be still alive and conscious of having been half-eaten by the splendid tiger. He lay with his head down, almost in the position of a woman, defenseless, nude. Meanwhile the animal was ferociously swallowing him.... I was seized by a feeling similar to that which I experienced seeing the young boys playing at Belluno two years earlier, but it was more murky and insistent. I felt a shiver within me like a kind of surrender. Meanwhile, I began to wish that I myself were the explorer being devoured alive by the beast.
The cinetrix would like to say for the record that nothing in Doctor Doolittle stirred any such feelings, in her tender psyche or anywhere else. Not even the evocatively named pushme-pullyou.
