To lose our cinemas would bring me to tears
Now that the days of the big screen may be numbered, Serena Davies reflects on how they have shaped her life
It feels like I’ve spent a lot of my time in cinemas in tears. Of course it is easier to cry in the cinema than during almost any other cultural experience because people are rustling boxes of popcorn and jiggling ice about in oversized cups, which covers the sniffles, plus it’s really, really dark. Occasionally, my emotions have been exposed, like the time when my friend Rebecca and I wailed out loud over Daniel Day-lewis saying goodbye to Joan Allen on a beach in The Crucible, and everyone laughed at us.
But truly, cinema can be emotionally overwhelming like nowhere else. And the news that its days may be numbered, thanks to the combination of Covid mitigation rules and the rampant march of the streaming giants, makes me so sad. I think about my 10-year-old daughter and all she will miss out on. The experience of seeing a great film at the cinema helps you understand the romance and drama of the world – it becomes a small but significant part of your life story. I know I can tell a portion of mine this way.
ET was my first cinematic experience (who has ever forgotten theirs?). This was when I first understood that sacred pact only the big screen can make for you between your own little upturned face and the giant ones in front of you; and that you can live your make-believe. Spielberg’s film invites every kid who watches it to be his little protagonist, Elliott, to reach out to ET’S finger, to get on that bicycle – which is the same size as a real one on the big screen – and cycle over the moon.
I remember my adolescent solo trips to art house French films, having caught the bug from the twin assault of Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (Emmanuelle Béart striding through Provence a lot). Watching films such as Un Coeur en Hiver (Emmanuelle Béart playing the violin a lot) and La Belle Noiseuse (Emmanuelle Béart posing nude a lot), I was fascinated. These were the movies that gave me my first understanding of the subtle negotiations of adult relationships, my first inkling that sexuality was responsible for an awful lot more than I had it down for. La Belle Noiseuse is four hours long and barely anything happens. It demands you sit in the room with it and is a masterpiece no one would ever even get through on the small screen. Meanwhile, I remember coming out of Un Coeur en Hiver thinking now, finally, I know how to move through the world like a grown up, and I should do so in French.
Then there was the moment in 1997 when two of the films I have loved best came out within weeks of each other, in my vulnerable, over-sensitive early twenties: Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and The English Patient. How I’d longed even for the arrival of these films, with a yearning that would do the Count Almasy proud.
With Romeo + Juliet, Luhrmann showed us how you could smash together Wagner and The Wannadies, Shakespeare and high camp and make something wholly new. The most romantic tale ever written could land here and now into messy, garish modern life and still feel true. It also taught me what the best party ever should look like.
As for The English Patient and its own impossible love, here was my generation’s Casablanca. It stays with me in intricate detail, with its keening sense of loss. But it also teaches like no other film I’ve seen the way that joy has this way of breaking through into even the most terrible of times – as best demonstrated by the scene when Hana the nurse takes the dying patient out on his stretcher on a musical garden tour through the rain to the sound of Cheek to Cheek.
As it is with the pop songs from our youth that we remain most attached to, it is those films we see in childhood and our early decades that leave the strongest emotional imprints. We remain forever devoted to them for the moments of pure absorption they offered, and the sense of possibility they conveyed.
Of course visits to the cinema also teach its history. They are their own instructions. I think of the times I saw restored reels of both Gone with the Wind and Les Enfants du Paradis on the big screen and finally absorbed them as the giant slices of mythmaking they were – and understood cinema with a capital C as a cultural force.
And there are the films about the love of cinema itself, perhaps most movingly epitomised by Cinema Paradiso. This film about a boy who falls in love with film in a village in Forties Italy reminds us of the childish wonder we all have in cinema. It ends with the wonderful picture house where he learnt his craft – the boy grows up to be a film director – being demolished to make way for a parking lot. Which may well happen to our own multiplexes.
The death of cinema has often been predicted before: with the arrival of talkies, with the arrival of television, with the arrival of video, and indeed with the first arrival of streaming. All that doom-mongering has subsequently seemed superfluous, and yet this time, with such a global shock of Covid as catalyst, the threat to the traditional movie experience seems the greatest it ever has been.
Cinema outings form part of our memories, how strange to think they may become confined to them. It makes me well up.