But, for me, that grand vision wasn’t fulfilled in the movie I saw. Something was missing, clumsy, off-key. My love for the movie was qualified, something I kept private. I was certain there was more there, but the Internet that existed then couldn’t fulfill my curiosity about a narrative larger than the film itself, about how it came into being and what happened along the way. This other movie became a dream, something to pursue, a key to a door I couldn’t open. And sometimes I wonder if this isn’t responsible for the profound, unceasing love I had for something so imperfect.
As an example of how information about films used to move: it wasn’t until the next millennium that I discovered there was a director’s cut of Until the End of the World. At some point, I was given an Italian DVD of the director’s cut, this version of the film I’d always dreamed about, but could not bring myself to watch it. It didn’t seem fair to the movie’s spirit to do it that way. I had to hold out, wait for the day to see it projected in a movie theater, turn it into some sort of pilgrimage. For more than half of my life, I lived with this movie only in my head, with no copy, no way of watching it. Only as I write this do I realize how strongly it affected me. It was something more than a movie: a séance, vision, prophecy, a call of longing that, I can admit, changed my life. And somehow decades went by with that faint hope, but no opportunity to see it in a theater.