Memories of Movies I Never Saw
A tribute to the enduring magic of peripheral movie images, and the lost art of hand-crafted posters.
I see that image at night, when the moon is full, its lighthouse beam revealing a slow exodus of scattered clouds. The composition of the sky makes for a poetic tableau, yet this vision always brings to my mind one single thing: a movie poster from thirty years ago, for a film I haven’t even watched.
It’s the poster of Il y a des jours… et des lunes, a Claude Lelouch ensemble film released in April 1990. The ever-busy Lelouch was on a roll at that time. He had directed Itinéraire d’un enfant gâté two years prior with the late Jean-Paul Belmondo, and he would come back two years later with La Belle Histoire, an over-the-top biblical saga that crashed at the box-office. I have missed all of these films, but this moon behind the clouds is still with me.
This poster belongs to a collection of movie images that made a persistent impression on me when I was a kid. Most of these movies were released within a three-year time frame, between 1988 and 1990. They represent a formative period when cinema became a pulsing fascination in my childhood. Anything remotely associated with movies, I would obsess over, trying to collect every detail. Without knowing it, I was assembling a bucket list of films to catch on at a later age. Some are now buried deep in my memory, others are up there in my Movie Hall of Fame, and a few are still too bizarre for me to even consider.
I was lucky to be raised by parents who made cinema an essential family activity. We saw those French epics adapted from classic books, a successful genre that seems extinct in today’s mainstream (they just don’t do them like Uranus or Cyrano de Bergerac anymore). I’m grateful I got to see beloved franchise installments like Ghostbusters II and Back to the Future III on a big screen. In a move of self-interest that I can only respect in hindsight, my parents also dragged me to some highbrow movies that certainly appealed to my older and more literary-minded sisters, but were probably a bit too much for my 8-year-old self. (I have hazy memories of Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh, and a viewing of Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary might have triggered an anxiety attack that I never fully recovered from.)
Some of the movies I saw during that period, the year 1989 its epicenter, became lifelong classics. Though I was mad at it back then—I was persuaded that The Abyss would be the day’s showing—Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso will never leave my Top 3, while Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade remains my definition of pure movie joy (coincidentally, both films operate, in their own ways, as nostalgic celebrations of cinema). But around these marquee events, there were secondary movies, those we wouldn’t go to, the ones that only existed as trailers, lobby cards and posters on rotating Morris columns. They were clues to a hidden, wider world I could only witness in passing.
I remember a trailer for Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Münchausen that opened on a panning shot of a Martian landscape. For a second, I had thought this was the beginning of the actual movie we went seeing (that film was Le Grand Bleu, inescapable as it was back then).
I remember a 32-sheet billboard for Roselyne et les Lions in the lobby of my local theater, le Plazza Lumière. It was a photorealistic painting of a young Isabelle Pasco as a godlike lion trainer, whip in hand, standing gloriously in a circus cage (she became my first movie crush).
I remember the totemic, all-caps “UN MONUMENT !” splattered above Philippe Noiret’s face, even larger than the title of the film for Bertrand Tavernier’s La vie et rien d’autre. I remember a city square, at night, and a column with a spooky poster for a random Dolph Lundgren horror named Dark Angel. I remember the terrifying pair of eyes peering through a KKK hood for Mississipi Burning ; the villain in his orange jumpsuit, frying on the electric chair, for Shocker ; the Siamese faces of Jeremy Irons for Dead Ringers. On any poster, the mere mention of the Avoriaz film festival, a bygone staple of fantasy and horror in France, would always instill a sense of scandal (the name “Avoriaz” alone sounded sharp and dangerous).
I remember snapshots of forgotten hits, like The Gods Must Be Crazy, which somehow had a sequel in 1987. I remember the Gipsy Kings singing “Volare” in the trailer of a late-period Gérard Oury comedy named Vanille Fraise. I know for a fact that Look Who’s Talking was released on April 4, 1990, three weeks after Steven Spielberg’s Always (the most random movie trivia I know, and still an immense source of pride).
I remember the color palette of Dick Tracy and the sunglass-wearing baseball in Major League—two movies that continued the tradition of blockbusters as brand identities, a trend epitomized in 1989 by the incredible Batman logo. And how could I forget Kenny, and this image of a kid my age, holding a thumb up, with his skateboard and half of his body absent. This image was so striking that I recently wondered if the movie ever truly existed (it did, and its title character, who lived 42 years with an extremely rare disability, sadly passed away a few years ago.)
On a Sunday, when we would come back to the city after a family visit in the rural areas of my region, the highlight of our trip home would be my dad driving past the movie theater. He would slow down, and I would try to catch as many images as possible—Claude Zidi’s ill-suited romance Deux, Andrew Zulawski’s really-not-for-children My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days, or Un monde sans pitié, with Hippolyte Girardot standing between two windows in some dreamlike Parisian night.
The director Frank Darabont once wrote that the greatest posters would provide “the sense-memory of a movie you love.” He was paying homage to Drew Struzan, one of the most influential poster artists in the late 20th century. And he was right. There was a common trait amongst these childhood posters. Most were hand-crafted, in a hyper-realistic style that worked as a truthful evocation of a film more than an advertising ploy. This drawing technique was powerful because it presented an idealized vision without unveiling the film’s true look. This was the not the film, but it was close, a vivid promise that still remained out of grasp.
Looking back at these memories, I understand why the J.J. Abrams’ Mystery Box theory—the celebration of what can be over what is—always resonated with me. To this day, I wish I could find the original trailer for Nikita. It opened with a message: “In ten seconds, you will watch the trailer of the new movie from Luc Besson”. The following countdown, of course, tripled the excitement for the Éric Serra-scored madness of the actual trailer. More than anyone, Luc Besson must have understood that the best moment of a theater experience might be adjacent to the movie in itself, the same way the iconic Gaumont logo could deliver more punches than any masterpiece.
My love of films never turned me into a movie director—I just do stuff now. But as I grow older, I cherish these memories. To me, they prove the under-appreciated value of peripheral culture. This culture is not academic, it’s not carefully curated, it’s not decided by parents. It’s accidental and messy and, sometimes, frankly inappropriate. But to a wide-eyed kid, it presents a world beyond the familiar, a strange gallery to wander into. It’s an engine for curiosity.
Is it cinephilia? I always found the term a bit intimidating. I felt too small, not cultured enough for it. In English, there is a more approachable word: moviegoer. It’s very literal, but it contains the enthusiasm of not just watching movies, but hoping for them. Moviegoer underlines the essence of my experience with cinema: there are the movies—the thrills, the awes, the tears—and there is something around them, something scary and magnetic, like a whisper of all the stories life hasn’t told yet.