The Cinema Viewing Experience Has Changed

One of the many "not so popular in a mainstream way" magazines I read is 'The Believer.' For cinema enthusiasts, I trust an article titled, "Contemplating the new physicality of cinema" by C.S. Leigh will be of intriguing interest.

We've come a long way since Vaudeville I tell ya.

My thoughts to go along with a couple of excerpts from the article if you please.

"...I’m also talking about dark and damp basement cinemas in New York, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Berlin, and London, places like the Carnegie Hall Cinema, the Cinema Village, and the Notting Hill, where double features were the order of the day. They were cheap and they were brilliantly programmed and we flocked to them in droves. Sometimes you walked up three flights to get to these theaters but they still felt subterranean. You could buy candy and drinks and there was always a smoking section. It was a fetid, human experience."

"You could also have a very different relationship with a film depending on where and with whom you watched it. An audience at a university cinema in L.A. had a solemn, nearly funereal reaction to Pasolini’s Salò, based on Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom (they seemed uncertain whether they had just witnessed a film or a crime); later, I watched the same film at the Accattone in Paris with an audience that couldn’t stop laughing."

During my University days, I did the same thing - albeit with a much more local flavor. Montreal used to have "repertoire" cinemas not all that dissimilar to what is depicted here. I attended many international and genre festivals - usually to spend some time with a girl. Then we'd go off to some bohemian cafe where Che would get an instant standing 'O.'

I'm not sure if I liked or understood some of the films I saw ("you have to grasp the regional Spanish humorous sensibility!" one chick told me after I wasn't convinced a Spanish film we watched could be classified as "comedy") but it did enrichen our cultural awareness I suppose.

I still wonder what Cathy is up to these days. We had a great time loitering the streets of Montreal.

"A young woman who watched the film with me told me she thought those people who talked about their feelings and inner turmoil endlessly were “losers.”

Which pretty much describes most of what's on television these days. It is irritating to watch the over-clinkering of inner turmoil. At some point you just have to conclude the flaky sluts on 'Sex and the City' are pretty much impossible to please. After a while it's like "dude, get over your narcissism. Ever consider you're the problem?"

"Bernardo Bertolucci calls what some directors are making today post-cinematic cinema, and cites Harmony Korine as a major exemplar of this tendency. Bertolucci stresses the importance for filmmakers of freeing themselves from the pressures of the great cinematic canon; rather than grappling with the anxiety of influence ad infinitum, he believes that practitioners of post-cinematic cinema should avoid it altogether. Korine—who still lists among his heroes Godard and Antonioni—expresses his ideas in a way that probably owes more to music video than to cinema.

Post-cinematic cinema, in other words, more or less takes its cues from reactions to and defenses against distraction and boredom. I’m thinking about the films of Michel Gondry, Paul Thomas Anderson, Charlie Kaufman, and, to a lesser extent, Sofia Coppola. They deal with the notion of offhandedness in a cool but structured way. Viewed through the prism of YouTube, it’s a cinema told from the left and right of the page and via footnotes, as if the essential documents telling the story have been lost, and someone is trying to re-create it. These directors make films you can watch while doing the many other things we do while watching movies now, but that still command our attention."

Which is why dialog has to be written in a way such that if someone is cutting an onion as thye watch something they can still follow the story. We no longer have the time to sit in a "fetid" and dingy artish cinema theater manned (or womaned) by outcasts and fringe characters for three hours.

Even if we did, those theaters are long gone now.

That is, unprofitable.