Assignment #1: Movie Memories
Posted by Austin Cinephile
Every week, we will be posting a prompt related to cinephilia, and each of our four founding members* will contribute a short response. Hopefully you, our dear readers, will feel compelled to respond in our comment section as well. This week’s prompt was:
Describe your favorite experience in the cinema in the past 10 years.
*Michael will not be participating this week because he is in Brazil getting married.
Daniel: MANHATTAN (1979) at the Film Forum in New York, March 28, 2008
I was living in New York, in the East Village, while attending the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. It was my senior year, and I was working hard to relax for my last semester. I was awaiting acceptance letters from graduate schools. I was also in a long distance relationship with my girlfriend Corinna, who at the time was freezing her pretty little butt off in Siberia.
I didn’t have many friends, so I often found myself going to the cinema alone. I had subscriptions/memberships to many of the cinema and film clubs in the city, and I spent most weekends in the dark recesses of Manhattan, enjoying the unreeling of old 35mm gems. This Friday night I went to the Film Forum for a double feature as part of their United Artists retrospective. The first film was Woody Allen’s Manhattan, followed shortly by Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull.
I had seen Manhattan many, many times before. In fact, I had seen a 16mm print of it as part of the NYU collection back in September 2006. I had never, however, seen it on 35, and definitely never in a proper theatre. It is one of my absolute favorite films, both for the gorgeous cinematography as well as the ideal and hilarious screenplay. From the opening moments (which incidentally is the greatest opening in post-studio cinema), my hair was raised and my heart as warm as a cauldron.
The opening is done in voice over, while Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” slowly makes its way into the scene. Allen, as Isaac, is reading a narration about New York, but he repeatedly starts over, trying to find the correct tone to start his novel (and, by extension, this film). For me, this has always been a funny and incredibly poignant moment about identity, about love, and about location. The black and white still-camera shots, lensed by the famous Gordon Willis, are breathtakingly beautiful; New York has never been captured better, nor made to look so vibrant and austere. The scoped celluloid shining on the wall made it all the more luscious.
But the truly wonderful, transcendent moment came at the end of the opening. Allen points his camera toward the New York City skyline as Gershwin’s song comes to a crescendo. Fireworks begin to flare at the top of the frame as bursts of white light against the black night sky. With each explosion, the little auditorium on W Houston filled up with light and flickered back to darkness. Every face in the crowd was alternating illuminations, and the music was so climactic and strong.
It was clear to me that this is what the cinema is really all about. Our art is about light and dark, about being in the shadows and seeing hope on the horizon. In this venue, I was able to have that as a group experience, to see the whole room taken over by the cinema, no longer a theatre but merely a room full of lightness and darkness.
After that, Raging Bull had no chance.
Stephen: THE NEW WORLD (2005) at Starplex Galaxy in Waco, TX, sometime in 2005
In the past ten years, I have been lucky enough to enjoy many memorable and meaningful experiences in the cinema. More than a few of them took place during the six months I spent in New York City as an undergraduate: I will never forget going to see Pan’s Labyrinth during my second day there, happy in the knowledge that I had a whole six months in the city ahead of me, or the time I sought out the sleaziest cinema in Brooklyn to watch Grindhouse, or the afternoon I went to see David Lynch’s Inland Empire and watched as, one-by-one, members of the audience began to trickle out until only a few fellow weirdos and I remained. And I will always treasure the night I saw Synecdoche, New York at the Regal Arbor in Austin, TX, with Daniel and Corinna, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
But if there is one experience in particular that solidified my love for the cinema, that designated once and for all a movie theater as my refuge of choice, it would be the weekday afternoon at the Starplex Galaxy in Waco, TX, when I saw Terrence Malick’s The New World for the first time. At that moment, in that town, I was apparently the only person interested in seeing this film, and I found myself alone in a 250-seat theater. For the next two-and-a-half hours, it was just me and the movies.
And what a movie it was. From Malick’s observant camera to the restrained performances, the lush natural settings to the generous use of Wagner’s magnificent prelude to Das Rheingold, the film seemed to rely on just about every cinematic tool except dialogue. I had never before seen a film so untethered from the bonds of literature and the stage; I felt as though I was watching pure cinema, and the simple fact that I enjoyed it came as a great relief to me.
Like her, I was transfixed, astonished.
As an undergraduate student of film, I occasionally felt as though my initial passion for the cinema was being buried under theory rather than enlightened or expanded by it, and I would wonder if I had made the right decision when I chose to turn a childhood hobby into a career obsession. In the days before The New World, I was at my lowest point in this regard, but Malick’s film vaulted me to a height from which I have still not come down. Oh yeah, I thought as the images flashed before my eyes, this is why I’m here, this is why I’m doing what I’m doing.
When the film came to a close and the credits rolled, though, I found that I couldn’t bring myself to leave the theater. I suddenly remembered how dull the world outside the theater had become, and I had no desire to return to it. But then I thought of a reason, and I walked out of the theater with the singular purpose of collecting as many friends as I could find and bringing them back to the theater to see the film for themselves. It is a purpose that I have carried with me through my work, through this blog, every minute of my life. For me, The New World was more than just invigorating. It was reinvigorating.
Stephanie: LE FABULEUX DESTIN D’AMÉLIE POULAIN (2001) at Montgomery Cinema in New Jersey, Winter 2001
The small New Jersey town where I moved when I was eleven years old and stayed until I left for college had one movie theater. Six screens, family-owned, in the shopping center that was essentially the hub of our town, since it also contained the pharmacy, the grocery store, the video store, one of the better pizza places, and the toy store. Sometime around 2000 the family who owned it bought another theater in the next town over. From then on, they programmed mainstream Hollywood film to that theater, and independent and foreign releases to our theater.
In the winter of 2001, I was fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school. I had never seen a subtitled movie outside of school. It would be another year before I got my first job clerking at a video store. I didn’t know how to drive, wasn’t even eligible for a permit for about another six months. So when my parents wanted to make another trip to Home Depot (they’re real do-it-yourselfers), I don’t know what possessed me to ask them to drop me at the movies instead. None of my friends could come. I didn’t know anything about the movies playing that weekend, hadn’t even read reviews or summaries in the paper.
I don’t remember the decision process that led to me purchasing a ticket to the matinee of Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain from my friend Adam’s older brother, who was working at the theater that afternoon. I remember that I bought some M&Ms at the concession stand, that I didn’t realize the film was in French until it started playing, that I was the only person in the very small theater that afternoon, and that I had plainly and simply never seen anything like Amélie.
I probably looked pretty much like this that day.
I don’t know what the pop culture buzz was surrounding this film at the time; it has obviously become a fairly mainstream crossover hit in the years since, to the point where it can probably still be purchased at a retailer like Best Buy, a rarity for a foreign film. Describing my viewing experience that afternoon in a way that adequately conveys the extent to which this film was so strange and new and wonderful is probably impossible. But can you imagine never seeing the color green and then one day looking at new spring grass? Can you imagine a life of movies sitting sedately before you, leading you safely through the same five narratives over and over, and then being grabbed by the arm and breathlessly told, “Come here, you have to see this, but I can’t tell you what it is until we’re there!” Alone in the darkness of a room I thought I knew, Amélie unfolded before me, with all its color and playfulness, and asked me to be curious, to be patient, to look, as Nino looked, not at the statue, but to where the statue points.
Amélie was released on DVD sometime that summer, and I demanded that my family watch it with me. Afterward, my mother wrinkled her nose and said it was too weird, and my father declared that if he wanted to read, he’d buy a book. I didn’t care. I’d seen a new color, and I wanted to see more.
