Memory

Old times? Not a bit. There aren't any old times. When times are gone, they’re not old, they’re dead. There aren't any times but new times.

The vertigo the film deals with isn’t to do with space and falling; it is a clear, understandable and spectacular metaphor for yet another kind of vertigo, much more difficult to represent – ­the vertigo of time. Elster’s ‘perfect’ crime almost achieves the impossible: rein­venting a time when men and women and San Francisco were different to what they are now. And its perfection, as with all perfection in Hitchcock, exists in duality. Scottie will absorb the folly of time with which Elster infuses him through Madeleine/Judy. But where Elster reduces the fantasy to mediocre manifestations (wealth, power, etc), Scottie transmutes it into its most utopian form: he overcomes the most irreparable damage caused by time and resurrects a love that is dead. The entire second part of the film, on the other side of the mirror, is nothing but a mad, maniacal attempt to deny time, to recreate through trivial yet necessary signs (like the signs of a litur­gy: clothes, make-up, hair) the woman whose loss he has never been able to accept...
Obviously, this text is addressed to those who know Vertigo by heart. But do those who don't deserve anything at all? - Chris Marker

The movie Solaris has a space station, it takes place near another planet, but actually it's a mediation on the human individual and not really a space opera at all. Do we see other people as they are, or do they exist for us only in our ideas about them. The planet can read the man's mind and reproduce his dead wife, but as he looks at the reproduction he grows depressed because he questions how well he really knew her in the first place. The planet cannot supply what's not there in his mind. The movie is quiet and creepy, thoughtful and very moving about the subject how well we can ever really know one another. - Roger Ebert's review of the Solaris remake (applicable to the original film)

The human brain is mysterious; we can't share the time axis in our memory with other people. I'm interested in trying to visualise those nonlinear ways of thinking. - Satoshi Kon

We love the place we hate; then hate the place we love. We leave the place we love; then spend a lifetime trying to regain it. Between loving and hating the real journey starts. Do you remember? Will you ever forget?