remembering a time of forgetting
by Douglas Messerli
Michael Aiello (screenwriter and director) The Sunset Through the Blinds / 2017 [stop-motion animation]
In this short “poetic-narration,” the narrator
describes a small bedroom room with two beds, green walls, a tiny closet, with
posters on the wall where he hung out with a fellow student. There is not even
a bedframe, just the mattresses on the floor.
Since
they had little money, most of their dates involved “hanging out at his place.”
In that room they would sometimes make out, sometimes talk, sometimes cuddle. But
mostly they watched TV on his laptop for hours at a time.
What it
remembers most is the light on the sunset on the blinds. “I had a habit of forgetting
things when I was there,” notes the narrator, temporarily losing the memory of
their difficult studies, his work at a demanding retail job. He’d forget even
his long commute to city via the commuter train.
But, as
with all things, the quiet and stillness disappeared as did their friendship;
both moved away and on. The narrator notes that he has lived in many other
places since: the third floor bedroom of an Old Brighton house, the back room
of a back-bay brownstone, the ritzy downtown Boston apartment. But no room, he
insists, ever felt like the one he describes to us.
He is
seeking just such a room, knowing that if he went back to the old room, it
would have changed, the new owner probably adding a bedframe, perhaps a bureau
to help with the small closet and hanging new posters. He hopes that whoever
lives there also feels the joy of the sunset through those blinds.
With humorous
stop-motion photograph, Aiello has created a piece of nostalgia we all have
within ourselves, a place or moment in time, a person or sensation that we have
lost but which, now and again, we return to discover ourselves at peace and joy
with the world.
This statement
of memory is only incidentally a gay story. But even such tangential tales can
be meaningful to queer life. In this instance, the gay individual, oddly
enough, dearly remembers a time of forgetting.
Los Angeles, November 16, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November
2025).
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