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Italian moviemakers admitted (almost reveled in) the existence of dirt in the streets, soiled clothing, cracked plaster. In super-hygienic, middle-class America, where I’d been raised, such grunginess was rarely on view. Yet, by some subtle magic that became my earliest appreciation of the art of film, these exotic images of a tawdriness I’d never experienced actually managed to make “real life” as I’d known it seem artificial, lacking the organic vitality they possessed. Silvana Mangano, laboring at the harvest in
Bitter Rice,
pauses to wipe her brow. Her hair is a magnificent straggly chaos. Her ample body streams with real sweat. There is damp hair beneath her upraised arm. Her shirt, loosely knotted at the midriff, gapes in the wind to bare the lush curve of her pendulous breasts. Nipples press assertively against the clinging cloth. Only a passing mirage on the screen. But to my captivated eye, the woman is palpably
there.
Almost discernibly, she smells of the earth, of forbidden female odors.
    How diabolically ironic it was that I should have been summoned to the serious study of film by these French and Italian sirens. As I remember them now—Gina Lollobrigida, Simone Signoret, Martine Carol—they brim with the bright promise of love, the insurgent fertility of life. But the hunger of the flesh as I learned it from them was only the beginning of a darker adventure; though I could never have guessed it, beyond them lay the labyrinthine tunnel that led down and down into the world of Max Castle. There, among oldheresies and forgotten deities, I would learn that both life and love can be bait in a deadly trap.
    Still I must be grateful, knowing that the awkward desire these few fleeting moments of cinematic seduction quickened in me was the first early-morning glimmer of adulthood. Through them, I was learning the difference between the sexual and the sensual. Sex, after all, is a spontaneous appetite; it bubbles up from the adolescent juices of the body without shape or style. We are born to it like all the simple animals that mindlessly rut and mate. But sensuality—raw instinct reworked by art into a thing of the mind that can be played with endlessly—
that
is grown-up human. It idealizes the flesh into a fleshless emblem.
    Plato (so some scholars believe) had something like the movies in mind when he wrote his famous Allegory of the Cave. He imagines an audience—it is the whole sad human race—imprisoned in the darkness, chained by its own deceiving fascinations as it watches a parade of shadows on the wall. But I think the great man got it wrong. Or let us say he couldn’t, at that distance, know that the illusions of film, when shaped by a deft hand, may become true raptures of the mind, diamond-bright images of undying delight. At any rate, that’s what these beauties of the screen became for me—enticing creatures of light, always there, unchanging, incorruptible. Again and again, for solace or inspiration, I reach back to recapture their charm, the recollection of something more real than my own experience.
    One exquisite memory embodies that far-off period of youthful fantasy more vividly than all others. I see it as a softly focused square of light, and see myself dazzled and aroused, seated in the embracing darkness, savoring the enticement. It was, so I remembered, a moment from Renoir’s
Une Partie de Campagne.
Then some years later I discovered that I was mistaken. I saw the movie again; it contains no such scene. I searched in other likely places; I never found it. I turned to friends and colleagues for help. “Do you remember the movie where … ?”
    But they didn’t.
    Where does it come from? Is it some form of benign hallucination? Perhaps it is, after all, a composite creation pieced together from all the naively romantic images I bring away from those years, the memory of a love story I never saw, and yet of all the love