It had all started with Ben Hur. It was the Easter weekend of 1999, and Ben Hur was being shown on terrestrial TV (Singapore's television station not being terribly original). I wish it hadn't been a religious movie, cos that gives to mon histoire de l'origins a shade of a religious overtone, and I'm uncomfortable with the thought that what should subsequently change my life forever might actually have something to do with divinity. But be that as it may, Ben Hur it was, and Ben Hur I decided to watch that fateful weekend......
But it wasn't that simple. Had I just merely watched Ben Hur, none of the following would have followed. That same weekend, my dad decided to take advantage of some Easter lunch-buffet special (I come from a country dedicated to food - everybody eats at every possible occasion, including religious holidays) and the whole family had to go. As a result, I couldn't watch Ben Hur. So I had to tape it.
But more to come. My math not being very good, with a cursed inability to add or subtract the simplest figures, I forgot to time the tape properly. I knew it was a long movie, but (see above factors) still I popped in a 3-hour tape, which was the longest I had anyway. To cut a long story short, Ben Hur is something like 2 hours 50 minutes long. Add the ads every 10 minutes (terrestrial TV, remember), it hit hard on 3 and a half hours.
Be that as it may. But for some unearthly reason, I was somehow oddly taken with the movie. I was engrossed. I was hooked. When I discovered, at the end of the tape, that I had missed a good half an hour of the ending (obviously I knew what was going to happen, but I wanted to watch it), I was distraught.
Again, no matter if it had just stopped there. Then I mentioned it to a good friend of mine at college, who gave me the bright idea that was to change my life. He said, "why don't you check out the film at the
It was in that Media Resource room that I discovered films (and thence the relatively strange path my life was to follow). I checked out their database (which was in some primitive monochrome DOS-based form (the main database in the other parts of the library had just been converted to being web-based - clearly the Media Resource room was not part of the Library IT department priority list), but I loved it) and stumbled upon a gold mine. Looking back, I remember staring at that screen like it was the golden light beaming out of John Travolta's briefcase. There were all sorts of weird names - some I have heard of, some I vaguely knew, some I had no clue, but all I desperately, desperately wanted to know.
I discovered early on that they (the university administration, the librarians, the government - I don't know) censored anything even vaguely suggesting the unclothed human body (things have moved on a little since in Singapore and they've now got a public film library, but I understand that, get this, they still do, which sorely tests my faith in the country) . Basically, anything found to be objectionable was fuzzed out, and after one memorable episode of watching about one and a half hours of fuzz on Atom Egoyan's The Agent, I kept my film diet to everything before the 50s, all of which were relatively safe from the fuzzers. And I discovered Chaplin, and Murnau, and Capra, and Tati, and Welles, and Leone, and Hawks and Hitchcock. Ok, so (now that we know a little better) I could have given myself a better film education (at least include Godard), but I watched randomly, I watched whatever I could find, for everything was gold.
There are so many other things I can wax lyrical about the Media Resource - how it was tucked in the basement, so it was like descending into a vault of treasures, how I would time my free periods (and frequently including the lectures too - I wasn't much of a student those days) to the films, how I would go back every single day of the holidays (I think I went to school more times in the holidays of my third year than I did during term-time of my first and second years collectively) etc etc. It is now appalling how I even watched anything there - the equipment was primitive, the VHS tapes were terrible, the headphones were decades old, there was always a bunch of Chinese students watching The Dream of Red Mansion and talking really loudly (why put on the headphones, then talk over them?). But an unexplored world always looks beautiful, simply because you have never seen it before. And despite all that, nothing, nothing can ever replicate that sense of wonder, that astonishment, that feeling that you've finally found it, the one thing you could care about, the one thing that could break that awful ennui. And believe me, there was alot of ennui.
And so it goes, and here I am now. I blogged this because this evening I was thinking about two things: films, and my relationship with God. I have always been very neutral about the latter topic. But if there really is a God and if it really was He who showed me the way and brought me here, would I still be such a non-believer? The answer, of course, is: obviously not. I would go down on my knees and thank Him with all my heart, because He had truly saved me.
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