Salon.com > Roger Ebert

I do not fear death

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:01:00 +0000

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. I am grateful for the gifts of intelligence, love, wonder and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

I don't expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing. I was talking the other day with Jim Toback, a friend of 35 years, and the conversation turned to our deaths, as it always does. "Ask someone how they feel about death," he said, "and they'll tell you everyone's gonna die. Ask them, In the next 30 seconds? No, no, no, that's not gonna happen. How about this afternoon? No. What you're really asking them to admit is, Oh my God, I don't really exist. I might be gone at any given second."

Movies the way God meant them to be seen

Tue, 11 Sep 2001 19:51:00 +0000

I hold this truth to be self-evident, that all movies deserve to be seen in their original aspect ratios. Four recent events suggest that this truth is not universally evident:

In Chicago's Grant Park, a summer film festival holds free screenings on a big screen for as many as 10,000 movie lovers. The 2001 season began with "An American in Paris." Introducing the film, I was startled to discover that it was being shown in widescreen -- in what's called a 1.65-to-1 aspect ratio. But like almost all films made before 1954, "An American in Paris" was photographed in the 4:3 ratio, or pretty close to a square screen. By trimming the top and bottom of the original picture to artificially widen it, the projector was cutting off, among other things, Gene Kelly's feet. I learned that the entire season was planned for 1.65:1, despite the booking of such other 4:3 classics as "The Maltese Falcon," "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "Top Hat" -- with the cutting off of the even more sublime feet of Astaire and Rogers. Protesting, I learned this was not a mistake but a policy; the festival was being underwritten by HBO, and an HBO executive in New York had insisted on widescreen "so that people will not think we're showing television."

John Lennon, 1940-1980

Fri, 08 Dec 2000 20:00:00 +0000

It was that troubled autumn of 1968 that John and Yoko came to Chicago, to show their new movie in the film festival. The shouts of the Democratic Convention had scarcely died down, and Woodstock had not yet been held, and "Hair" was onstage at the Shubert, and here was this goofy home movie by John and Yoko about a butterfly that took 26 minutes to fly in slow motion from one side of the screen to the other side of the screen.

What was the movie about? We didn't have questions like that then. There were still hippie children getting married in Lincoln Park, still little VW Bugs with McCarthy flower stickers on their bumpers, and you didn't ask what it was about, a butterfly in slow motion. Such images explained themselves, in 1968. John Lennon and the other Beatles did more, perhaps, than any other four people to bring about that state of our cultural mind from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.

As long as the people who were young at that time still live, the songs of the Beatles will evoke that period as poignantly and heartstabbingly as the music of other eras still draws tears to other eyes. And as long as the Beatles themselves were all still alive, as long as people could kid themselves that there might be a reunion, a final concert, one more album, that time in history was itself still a little bit alive.