Confessions of a reluctant film-goer
There’s a scene in Robert Bresson’s film Four Nights Of A Dreamer where one of the film’s two central characters Marthe and her mother go to the cinema after receiving an invite to a film premiere from their mysterious lodger. They don’t want to go because “first nights are too much trouble”, meaning all the fuss of film stars and press photographers. They go anyway, hate the film (including a mesmerically strange gangster shoot-out scene which Bresson’s film shows at lingering length) and leave half-way through. That could be me. Except I wouldn’t have gone at all.
Bresson would probably never forgive me, but I’ve basically given up on going to the cinema. Like Tony Benn with his retirement as an MP so he could spend more time involved in politics, I’ve opted out of the cinema-going habit to spend more time watching films.
Yeah, you say? So what? Stfu and stay in, if you like. Alright, I will! Anyway, I’m writing this boring Christmas Day blog a couple of days after hearing Ron Howard on the radio trotting out the usual film industry PR stuff about how the “communal experience” of watching a film as part of an audience is the real deal. It’s all about shared experience, apparently. Plus, you get a big screen and sound that’s “going to be better than the sound you get at home”, even on an expensive home entertainment giant TV-with-all-the-fancy-speakers kit. Er Ron, you reckon?
No man, I’m staying in to watch my dull arthouse films on the tiny screen of a laptop perched on a chair in front of the sofa. No popcorn, no “communal” exhilaration/shock/laughter/sadness, no smash-you-in-the-face surroundsound. No nothing. Except I don’t have to trek through London (where I live) for an hour to get to a cinema that shows the stuff I tend to like (ICA or BFI). And I don’t have to shell out about £14 for a ticket for each film. And I don’t — whisper it — have to put up with slightly annoying fellow arthousers rustling their sweet packets, laughing at not-even-vaguely-funny scenes apparently because they’ll laugh at anything, while also having late-arrivers making masses of noise as they tread on my feet before plonking themselves down right next to me even though there are two empty seats immediately to their left.
But look everyone: the big screen, the big screen …
Yep, it’s this sunny non-Scrooge-like outlook of mine that probably makes me so damned popular. Anyway, I realise my stay-at-home-and-stream-it behaviour would kill off all the cinemas if everyone followed suit. Cinema audiences in the UK have apparently been fairly stable for the past 20 years (around 170 million admissions per year) after a long-term decline from the incredible heights of their post-war golden era (1.6 billion admissions in 1946). But Covid decimated attendances in 2020 and it could be that audiences are never going to get back to pre-pandemic levels after people have fallen out of the cinema habit and with dread Netflix-ification taking ever firmer hold.
Hmm, now I feel slightly bad. It’s my fault! With my stingy misanthropic laziness I’m a threat to bricks-and-mortar cinema-going. Er, maybe not. I watch quite a few films at home, yes, but I also tweet about them and — well, this is my argument anyway — I do a minor bit of film promo that way. Plus, subscribing to MUBI (which I do) feels vaguely supportive of the film industry in general. Ahem. It’s a weak case but it’s the only one I can muster.
Meanwhile, hypocrite that I am, these days I often go around London with an ICA tote bag, souvenir of the fairly recent (mid/late-2010s) days when I was a member there. Would I go back, forsaking the comforts of my sofa and laptop? Yeah, maybe. On the one hand comfort is no small thing. A fave film line of mine is Ben Gazzara in Cassavetes’ excellent The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie saying the secret of happiness is comfort (the people who are happy are “the people who are comfortable”). But some things are worth making an effort for (live music for example). On past holidays — in New York and elsewhere — going to the cinema has been a daily activity. A film, a meal, a drink, a gig — every day. At their best these are, I guess, all elements of an in-the-moment experience. One of my more notable cinema experiences was seeing Jim Jarmusch’s Gimme Danger at the ICA, mostly because of a scene where I Wanna Be Your Dog blasts out on a big soundsystem and — for a tiny second — I could almost feel the thrill of a Stooges show. Well, sort of. Also, one of my primary film experiences (so to speak) was seeing Truffaut’s The 400 Blows in an almost-empty cinema in Manchester’s The Cornerhouse when I was about 23. Sacré bleu — c’est le cinéma!
So no, these confessions of a reluctant film-goer are the self-indulgent ramblings of someone who, I like to think, still genuinely appreciates good film-making and — in the right circumstances — would brave the central London crowds to cram into a room with a bunch of not-especially-quiet strangers to watch something genuinely good. Or to be more exact, something genuinely good with something extra thrown in. An interesting talk (a short one though please) or … some spumante and panettone. One New Year’s Eve a few years ago, myself and my partner went to a late-night screening of the 1921 Swedish film The Phantom Carriage, tempted out of the spartan comforts of my partner’s provincial Italian house into a potentially hellish central Milan by the lure of freebies and a live piano accompaniment. Cheers!
Anyway, fwiw, of the 50 or so films I saw this year from the miserable comforts of my own armchair, these stood out: Happy Times Will Soon Come (Alessandro Comodin); Playground (Laura Wandel); Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi); Autumn Almanac (Béla Tarr); Jauja (Lisandro Alonso); A Girl Missing (Kōji Fukada); Another World (Stéphane Brizé); Mean Streets (Martin Scorcese); Below Dreams (Garrett Bradley); Anne At 13,000 Ft (Kazik Radwanski); La Caja (Lorenzo Vigas) and, of course, Bresson’s Four Nights Of A Dreamer.
