RAIDERS OF THE LOST HEART

Just a few months ago, I was sitting by the lake in my local park, steeling myself for a tennis combat, and I could hear, through the surrounding trees, a brass band playing various themes from the Indiana Jones movies. It roused, like Greek fire, some core memories inside of me, reminding me just how ingrained the John Williams music for that movie franchise is in my DNA.

Hearing the wistful Marion's Theme especially reminded me just how deep certain culture goes, like buried treasure hidden deep down in forgotten places of the heart.

Watching Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark 45th Anniversary re-release at my local cinema a few days ago, I began to reflect on what is actually occurring when returning to a film you've enjoyed since you were a kid.

Is it nostalgia? Or something else entirely?

Re-watching Spielberg's Raiders this most recent time, a film which I most likely first saw on a tiny television on a school night, felt like more than an exercise in nostalgia and increasingly like returning to a place outside of time and space where one's reality is paused and where the film itself becomes its own reality in the present moment in which it's being viewed.

A great film you've seen many times before shouldn't make you think of it as something lodged in the context of its past, in the time when it was made, but almost like a vivid dream re-lived. Its ultimate power should be in its mastery of atmosphere and storytelling, to such an extent that it's as if it's a fresh, new, living, breathing fusion of light and sound each time. This should be no ghostly exercise in flickering shadows, but more a return to adventures like the echoes of past lives.

Yes, we know the walls of the caves when Indy goes in search of the golden idol like the back of our hands, but why is it we still find ourselves catching our breath when we know he'll slip through that closing stone slab in the wall in the nick of time?

Perhaps, like the re-opening of the Ark, great films such as Raiders can possess a hidden magic, a type of celluloid soul that refreshes each time it's gazed upon by the viewer.

I certainly felt as if there is an almost supernatural sorcery in how a film 45 years old still has the power to maintain its allure after nearly half a century.

One might almost imagine an Indiana Jones-like character in the future unboxing 35mm canister reels of Raiders from a mysterious warehouse and losing themselves for a few hours in a reconstructed cinema, marvelling at this transcendent matinee feature par excellence, which reminds us that humans made these sublime entertainments, not robots.

Of course, Harrison Ford's rubbing of stubble and swigs from a whiskey bottle are the kind of human details that are hard to capture when the performer isn't inherently sentient.

Even make-believe needs to be believable, and now, in an age of increasing unreality, we find it harder to suspend our imaginations and surrender ourselves to the illusions on screen.

The Ark of the Covenant itself would barely register interest in our digital age, neither would holy grails, and so it's for this very reason that we need the repeat magic of stories told in the pre-digital era to remind us, in that almost primal, sat-round-the-campfire type of way, what the power of symbols and heroes truly is.

Though Indiana Jones may appear to be mere popcorn fodder to some, I would remind the sceptics that there is increasing value in this cinematic relic, which in its way remains as timeless as the Ark itself.

Of course, Indiana Sr. might scold me for saying that and accuse me of blasphemy.

I suppose in this instance my only defence would be to claim cinema as my religion.

Sometimes, sitting in the dark, it feels like that.

Almost sacred.