The following is not so much "a review" as "a personal reflection." I trust my post may fit into a liberal interpretation of the context of this section of this "Poetry in Colour Forum."-Ron in Australia
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My sexuality had an impulsive aspect as most poeple's does; my appetite was, from time to time, apparently insatiable and required containing; I was in the grip of sensual conflicts and forces that life released, that required checking, that required resolution. Films like Tom Jones (1963) and Darling (1966) depicted perfectly normal people going about their lives and fornicating without either suffering agonies of guilt or being run over by a steamroller. The freeing-up of sexuality from the restraints of tradition and religion was, arguably, greater than for any generation since the days of Ancient Rome. One could argue that this freeing up process began seriously in the 1920s, with the 1960s increasing the pace and each decade since then having its own story, a story told in film after film in its own symbolic way with each film and each decade.
My clamorous appetites, my religious restraints, exposed me to tensions that were difficult, sometimes impossible, to control. With that lack of control came risks. Had the Baha'i Faith not come into my life in the years after puberty, who knows what would have befallen me in my young adulthood. Hugh Trevor-Roper, famous British historian, once wrote that "History is not merely what happened: it is what happened in the context of what might have happened." And I can apply this aphorism to what I write in this narrative account at so many junctures.
Even my most innocuous encounters, for example, with the feminine, the erotic, the sensual, contained the seeds of potential trouble. By my early twenties, on graduation at 23, my quest for a suitable marriage partner was linked to a sensual wakening which I had by then controlled, for the most part successfully, for a decade, perhaps mostly be placing sport, study and religion at the centre of my life. Conscious of an erotic energy that inhabited me and an emotional-sensual ambience that I generated, the conflict between my impulses and defences was sometimes acute and gave me many uneasy moments. I could say as I entered the marital bed for the first time in August 1967 that, although I technically had not engaged in intercourse I had enjoyed much excited premarital play in the urgency of courtship and its new opportunities.
And so it is that as I watch film after film present these conflicts and romances for each generation since film came into existence in 1895, I watch myself and my society trying to work out a new ball game. And I wish you all well as you watch films and try to play the game oflife as best you can.-Ron Price, Tasmania
