In less than a month cinemas will reopen. We should mobilize. See two films, go out, dance. Reignite the senses, make them shudder. Don’t stop for air. Be like a surfacing free diver. Taste it all and taste it again. Knock your ears out, stupefy your eyes.
My life is indexed by cinema trips. I have grown up in reclining seats and clinical foyers. I didn’t need Pick & Mix, the sight and sound was enough of a rush. My first high baby! They never miss, only hit. Even if the film sucks, something elevating happens in front of the white screen, when you’re stuck between the speakers like a pinball. That morbid, incongruously Brutalist Vue cinema near my house was a portal. Kind of. It’s where I learnt how to see, and to think.
After her first ever trip to the movies in 1926 Virginia Woolf said it was like ‘beholding a world which has gone beneath the waves.’ What waves? The waves of reality? Of time? Of feeling? Who knows. I think all those things at once, because they are all true. Reality bends, time curves, feelings catch. For Woolf the cinema experience was an exhilarating kind of displacement because how we feel and how we think is fundamentally impacted by what we see. Cinema’s let us see like gymnasts. Cinemas are voids, they’re zoos, they’re benzodiazepines, they’re aphrodisiacs, they’re ecstasy. They are the ultimate form of seeing so they are the ultimate form of feeling.
The Vue (Sterling)
As we slouch toward Bethlehem to be reborn, I look back on some of my most memorable and affecting cinema trips. Join me upon’t this embellished and indulgent road.
When I was a teen I went on my first proper, adult-ish date to see the ridiculous Riot Club. I don’t remember anything about the film, but I remember I spent the whole day teetering on the edge of excessive aftershave induced unconsciousness. I wore so much fucking aftershave that sometimes if I smell the scent on the street or in a pub I’ll go into a brief kind of trance like I’d just watched an entire film in the space of a second. Like if you wake up and are instantly awake. Or if you take one bite of something but you instantly feel full. Sight and smell working in uncanny unison. Both senses were overworked that day I think. But what a formative and memorable occasion in front of the movies. Going to the cinema was like having a comforting parent with you without the other person knowing you’ve got a parent with you. And there are many stories like it. Cinema has been our collective nanny in a way, witnessing all our inglorious ascents into adulthood.
Two summers ago myself and someone close went to see Leonard and Marianne at the Watershed in Bristol. It was a great summer after a long winter of poor health. Bristol was beautiful; sunny, full and exciting. The Watershed was the heart of it, right beside the water where the tour boats came in. Good times orbit around the Watershed. On this evening, the cinema air was stiflingly hot and hung about like a compression blanket. We panted like dogs. It was a jungle of bags, legs, knees, sweat, lager, and suspense. People had been drinking in parks and beside the water all day. Or laying in bed beneath a fan, windows open, heat-struck, love-struck - whatever. I stuck to my seat and dripped the way through, more focused on the immediacy of the room; the heat, the giddiness, who was beside me, the sweat on my palms, creeping fingers, than the film, that self-indulgent clunky doc which annoyingly will be in my heart forever thanks to the setting in which I experienced it. Timelessness at the movies. It seems that the context surrounding trips to the cinema are just as important as the film itself. Maybe cinema is not so other worldly as all the previous posturing would make out. In fact, the experiences themselves seem inextricably bound to the mood you bring with you. Either that mood shifts and changes colour, or it compounds. Both are significant I think, both are bold actions.
The Watershed Cinema (Bristol)
Another brilliant memory spent at the Watershed was when myself and two friends went to see the Scottish techno epic Beats at the end of university. The cinema was crammed again. Every seat sold out. All young people, which is odd for the Watershed. I’ve never been in a boozier screening. Everyone was off their face. The screen’s exit barely stopped swinging for all the people coming and going with their drinks. It was annoying, but it was also a rave film, you wanted to be on your feet, you wanted to feel cloudy in the strobe lights. The cinema screen was like a DJ booth. I guarantee most people went out after that as well. During the film when Halcyon On and On by Orbital came on I turned to my friend Ross and said ‘I fucking love this tune.’ Some guy behind me shouted back ‘aye it’s a banger!’. It’s the only time I haven’t cared about free flowing conversation in a movie theatre. Afterwards we sat at the bar and my friend Marko bought tequila shots to celebrate the battering we’d given our ears and eyes. Then it was late and we walked through Bristol and tried to get into a fancy cocktail bar but the security told us ‘not with those clothes your not’ so we went behind a back alley and swapped clothes as a kind of clandestine ruse to refashion ourselves into a smarter trio. They saw us and were like ‘you’re the same people, just with each other’s clothes on.’ We were energized by the movies, feeling bold from the movies.
Beats (dir. Brian Welsh)
In late winter last year I went to a 11am screening of A Portrait of a Lady on Fire in a gigantic, completely empty central London cinema before a 12 hour weekend shift at a cinema the other side of Soho. I was over-worked, tired to the bone and stung from job rejection. I went to be lulled, not to sleep but into barely-aware contentment. It was like a kind of pre-shift meditation. Settle back, settle in, cue blackness. That’s how it goes. But Celine Sciamma’s romance was too bold, too wrought for passive looking. Expanses shrunk into the world of a dilating pupil. We watch people communicate through looking. In Portrait, two eyes meeting is more exhilarating than a car chase or a sex scene. It was truly one of the most spectacular cinema going experiences, which unlike the last two, was made so by the cinematic brilliance of what I had seen. On a small screen through tinny speakers it would have still been great, but in the expanse of that visual chamber, it was life-affirming.
After years of going to the cinema religiously, often alone, at least once a week, I stopped suddenly and didn’t go back for almost a year. The cinema was too much of a sanctuary to bring into it an illness which drastically discolours things that are good. I would not let the two touch. I could not go and be confronted with a different, lesser kind of experience than the ones I had enjoyed so significantly before. When you are unwell, your illness implicates itself in everything; when you look that’s all you see, and cinema is entirely about looking. My tools of looking were malfunctioning and I didn’t want to turn the world of visual expedition into a backscattering of feeling shit.
Of course this is a self-fulfilling, self-defeating prophecy. The more you worry about something compounding your bad feelings, the less likely it is you will be present in the way you want to be. Mindfulness 101. But you want to let something go before it gets all messed up in the bad stuff. Keep those memories good. And the memories are good, and will always be good. Even if the habit is prone to lulling, I will be coming and going to the cinema for the rest of my life because for me, cinema is where life happens.
Support ya local cinemas!!!