Watch: Celebrating the Cinematic Images We Can't Get out of Our Heads

What is your first memory of watching a film? Maybe the first thing that pops into your head is the music or the story, but if I had to guess, I'd say that it was an image: E.T.'s finger lighting up, a flashlight beam focused on the eye of a T-Rex, the Death Star being blown to smithereens. The magic of cinema lies in its profound ability to make us feel in large part through the moving image, and Andrew Saladino of The Royal Ocean Film Society has put together this video to talk about the images that we can't seem to get out of our heads.

I love how this video is an open-ended musing. It may teach you something or help you realize something new about the art form, but really it's just about nostalgia—remembering the images that made us fall in love with cinema or made us want to become filmmakers.

To this day I still remember the one image that has been burned into my memory ever since I first saw it. I was sitting in one of my first film classes in college watching a documentary on Quentin Tarantino or something, and all of a sudden I see a clip from a black and white movie—three individuals racing across a bridge. It was only a few seconds long, which gave me just enough time to quickly jot down the title that appeared on the lower third—Jules et Jim.

The world of cinema immediately became so much wider and wild and mysterious as I began my love affair with the French New Wave, and each time I see a new image that stops me in my tracks, it gets even wider, wild, and mysterious still.

Now, this might've been the first cinematic image that made an impact on me in my adulthood, but there are so many more that changed me as a child. Watching that iconic roar from the T-Rex in Jurassic Park convinced me that real dinosaurs were used in the movie. Watching Regan's throat swell in The Exorcist showed me what real terror felt like. Guido comically marching to his death in front of his son in Life is Beautiful gave me my first idea of what kind of parent I wanted to grow up to be.

It's kind of nice to think back on all of the images filmmakers have made that have affected us so greatly, and it's exciting to wonder which ones will affect us in the same way in the future.

Which cinematic images have lasted for you? Which films are responsible for your love affair with cinema? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: The Royal Ocean Film Society