Film history’s highways are littered with the lost and the misplaced. You only have to be involved in a debate as to where the lost reels of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons might be to know that such lost material arouses intense interest amongst devotees of cinema. But what about all those widely scattered reviews, essays, journalistic pieces, interviews, etc., which, somewhere between writing and publication, are consigned to the boneyard of criticism? Light Sleeper desires, over time, to collect together such orphaned unpublished pieces -- all are written by those who have devoted, at least some part of their lives, to the rather strange task of trying to use words to hint at something of the conceptual and emotional depths (or lack thereof) found in these movies.

I know of films watched as a child which loom large in my mind, and which haunt my dreams, but which I might pause before re-watching for fear that something of their evocativeness, something of their "magic", might be lost as memories of the film collide with its reality. Mikio Naruse once said, in a quote that intones the transient beauty of cinema, "Perhaps this is what films should be, things that live on only in the audience’s memory..." Our memories of films define what they mean to us, define how they affect our lives. And our memories of any film are themselves changed over time by the accumulation of life experiences, and by everything we read concerning film. It is not unusual for a film’s images to become enriched in our memories. These ‘lost reviews’ will hopefully provide new layers of meaning to the ever-shifting remembrances of films seen in the past, present, and in some cases not seen at all, but known only through fading stills and half-conjured descriptions.

Saul Symonds, April 2005