A few weeks ago in these pages David Thomson reviewed a new biography of John Ford. Thomson, always stimulating, wrote a final paragraph that was especially charged with experience and thought.
Movies flash bright and die early.
They are hard to preserve, and harder to watch once the mood of their time has gone. This paragraph bristles with ideas that invite comment. Certainly time puts any work in a different context. In film courses that I have taught, grand pronouncements about honor and patriotism by screen characters often evoked snickers and groans from the class. But this disjuncture in time isn't limited to film.