ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WESTERNS

There's something about Ennio Morricone's main theme to Once Upon A Time In The West that brings to mind the last of the cinemas (pre-multiplexes) when you could saunter in to watch a movie on a hot summer's afternoon while sitting in a musty old theatre and crunch the unswept popcorn beneath your feet: where you would then be immediately transported to the old west as mythic characters would appear like 50ft greek gods up on the screen and the scratches on the projected print gave the impression that the celluloid had been unearthed beneath the desert soil.

This isn't an actual memory of mine, of course. It's an imagined memory conjured up by recently listening to Morricone's iconic OUTITW soundtrack and remembering enough from my own cinema watching past to pine for the organic quality of film back then which has subsequently been replaced, cleaned up and made infallible by digital cameras and processes. Cleaning up things, including the complexities of human behaviour, seems to be a common trope in the 21st century. We now live in the age of airbrushing out imperfect things.

And if we can't airbrush them to be perfect, we cancel them.

Even the popcorn tastes different these days. Perhaps thats digital, too. Heh.

I began my cinema pilgrimages around 1983 at the age of 5 where I believed the fusion of light and sound to be the equivalent of God and have increasingly pined for those authentic cinema experiences as I've got older, like returning to church when you've been lost in the spiritual wilderness for years.

Sometimes, when I crash on my bed back at home and fall into a half sleep watching an epic movie such as Once Upon A Time In The West, I find myself caught in a trance of nostalgic reverie, where the late afternoon sun pours through the small lancet monastery window in my room and shows up the dust particles in the air like the light from an old cine projector. The micro cosmos of dust particles seem to pass in front of my television screen like a slow motion laser beam and recall that old school Cinema Paradiso vibe which I yearn for of old picture houses and movie theater chains.

And as I study the wide close ups of Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda and Claudia Cardinale's faces up on my modestly sized television screen, I see all of their perfections and imperfections just as it should be. We don't want our heroes and heroines to be so perfect that we can't recognise some part of ourseves reflected in them.

But without risking becoming too nostalgic for the past, let me also say that perhaps it's because of the ever changing transient nature of things that we fully appreciate these moments in our culture as well as the rituals and processes over decades, sometimes centuries of time, never quite able to fully recapture them as we first experienced them.

Is the past then as much an illusion as the films we watch projected up on screen?

And when we do return to old classics such as OATITW are we not simply attempting to transport ourselves back in time to a place where we felt more certain about life and art? A bit like home.

I'm pretty sure I am.