Memoria

I've always been fascinated by old things, whether it be man-made objects, natural ones, or even living things. Things with history. It's why I've always been so fascinated with museums, why I take hours to go through one room of ancient pottery or whatever. I know it's not just a fascination with history - I like the idea of studying history more than I actually like doing it. It's something deeper, something almost spiritual. I knew there was something more to it, and I think all that time I spend in museums is, at least subconsciously, trying to make the other shoe drop, for it to finally hit me why I'm actually so fascinated by this stuff. Memoria makes me feel like I finally have that answer - or maybe it just made me realize that it'd been swimming around in my head all along, and gave me the tools to extract it. I feel like anything that a physical entity has ever been witness to, anything that's taken place around it, is still contained within it in some way I can't explain. I'm not sure if I think it's physical or metaphysical, but it's there. Whether I'm looking at a painting from the 17th century, a piece of pottery from Ancient Egypt, or a dinosaur bone from tens of millions of years ago, the weird feeling I have is a sense of communion with everyone and everything that's ever been in proximity to that thing. The artist who painted the painting and the first who beheld it, the ancient potter and their family, the dinosaur the bone belonged to; they're all still there with me, in some way beyond direct observation that stretches beyond time and space and logic. I'm generally not what you'd call a spiritual person - this is basically the only belief I have approaching that, and in any case it's more a feeling than a belief. And it is, as you can tell, a very hard thing for me to explain in a way that doesn't make me sound like an insane person. It's hard for even me to comprehend. It's strange how much watching a film can make you understand yourself - watching Memoria, I felt like I finally understood the feelings I had bubbling under the surface of my brain all this time. The film locks onto that strange connection I've always imagined and takes it a step further, beyond individual entities, to the very core of the earth and the tombs of the billions upon billions who came before us, our very contact with the earth putting us in constant communion with them whether we know it or not, an undying acoustic connection of all time, space and dimension - a connection that can be utilized, even weaponized against others by people in tune enough with it. Jessica's curse is that she can sense all of this at once, physically, through sound, and it's not until the end that she senses the nature of it and becomes able to interpret it. The memories embedded within an object, a person, the earth itself come through fuzzily and as a flurry of disconnected sensory input - our memories aren't clear, why would someone or something else's be? There's an extended moment near the end where the sound design is so beautifully all-encompassing and the image so still that I actually closed my eyes for a little bit, to try and see what sort of pictures the sound put in my head. I realize this all sounds like ridiculous mystical bullshit, truly I do, but it's something I've felt all my life, and to see it treated so seriously and expressed so beautifully by a film like this resonates deeply.