Jonathan Rosenbaum has written a book "Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephila" in which he discusses all the profound changes that have taken place in the practice of watching and appreciating films in the last few years. It is absolutely true that in my lifetime the changes have been extraordinary, but it beyond the scope of this blog to discuss all that has changed. (Note that this year's Vancouver Film Festival showed no "films"; on celluloid, that is. All were on hard drives or other digital media.) But I would like to offer a personal account of how I came to to love cinema, and how my experiences have changed over the years.
I grew up in the 1950's watching movies at our local suburban movie theater (it was a single screen "downtown" movie theater, built in the 1930's). It showed the latest Hollywood releases. My family would also occasionally watch films on our black and white TV. On channel 9 in New York, the "Million Dollar Movie" was a great source of older movies (while forever impregnating my brain with "Tara's Theme" from "Gone With the Wind", which accompanied every shot of the Million Dollar Movie logo). All, of course, interrupted by commercials.
I think my first experience of something different in cinema came while we were living in Belgium, and I was 16 years old, and I saw the movie "Blow Up" in a local movie theater. While my 16 year old brain certainly had no way of understanding what Antonioni was about, I was certainly aware this this was something different. People playing tennis with no tennis ball? Weird! Cool! What is reality?
The next step in my cinematic education took place in college, where both of my small New England liberal arts colleges would show "art" movies, perhaps to help make up for the fact that we were in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do. At Williams College, I remember a series of Bergman films being shown by Professor Charles Samuels, an English professor. (I also remember the drunken frat boy types, having nothing else to do, making noisy comments.) (Googling, I find the college newspaper, listing a showing of Bergman's "Virgin Spring" on May 2, 1969. I was probably there.) At Bennington College, I was mostly busy practicing piano (a lost cause...), but I do remember seeing Antonioni's "Red Desert" and Godard's "Weekend" in the college auditorium. What strikes me now is how important it was that someone at these colleges felt it was necessary to pay to rent prints of these films and show them to the students. I will always be grateful for that. I wonder if I hadn't had that exposure whether I would have become as involved in watching films as I did later.
My real cinematic education, however, took place the year I lived in New York City in the mid 1970's. The Carnegie Hall Cinema was showing double features (this long before it was Zankeled), and the Bleecker Street Cinema and others were doing the same. I thought nothing of going to a Godard double feature one night, and the next night to a Kurosawa film at Columbia. Again, this was before video of any kind. Though public television might occasionally show an art film, going to a theater was the only way to see these films. I was going to films nonstop.
The next big landmark in my cinemaphiliac development began when I bought my first Betamax video recorder in the early 1980's, and subscribed to cable television while I was a graduate student. (I was no longer in New York City, but nearby.) There was a French language channel, and I remember taping Bresson's "L'Argent" when they showed it. So all kinds of films suddenly became available, and, courtesy of the time-shifting capabilities of a VCR, I could watch a film that someone had decided to broadcast at 4 AM. Still, my primary cinema experiences were in movie theaters in New York. ( I watched my taped movies on an old black and white TV. ) I remember a 2 day marathon showing of Fassbinder's 16 hour "Berlin Alexanderplatz" at a nearby theater, and things like that.
The next twenty years or so involved incremental changes. Recording formats improved (laser discs, DVDs, etc.) and televisions improved. Film distributors finally realized that there was money to be made in releasing their films for purchase at reasonable prices, and the Criterion Collection began releasing the same films I had seen years earlier on the big screen. Thus I could now purchase a high quality copy of Godard's "Breathless" to have at home to watch whenever I wanted, instead of waiting for a broadcast to tape or going to a theater. And I also discovered that I could browse through the local Vancouver Chinese video stores to find interesting films from Hong Kong and elsewhere.
What really changed things, though, was the internet and the advent of multi-regional DVD players. I am not talking about streaming, though, but rather finding a Internet store in Korea that would sell me the latest Korean films (virtually all Korean DVDs have English subtitles), or ordering newly restored classic Russian films from the RUSICO company in Russia, or even discovering that that obscure Hungarian film you wanted was available on DVD in England (but not North America). And having a DVD player which had been altered to subvert the regional code restrictions made it possible to play all these DVD's. And the internet also changed the way I could find out about films; how would I know about the latest Japanese films if it wasn't for all the various forums and websites with information. Columns like Rosenbaum's global discoveries on DVD in Cinemascope magazine, for example, are truly helpful.
For me, two things are important. One is that my cinema is now truly international in scope, and I am free to pursue watching films from anywhere in the world I choose. I don't need to wait for a North American distributor to release a film on either the big screen or DVD, and I am not dependent on what the North American marketplace decides is worthy of release. Secondly, with virtually all films that still exist available in one form or another, I can assemble and curate my own retrospectives. Thus the Bergman series that I first saw in college can now be reassembled in my own basement. If I feel like doing a retrospective of the noted Hong Kong auteur Johnnie To, it can happen.
There are, of course, possible objections to all this. Many will say that cinema only is really itself on a big screen in a movie theater with an audience. For me, the advantages of not having a tall person in front of me eating popcorn, or having a person beside me texting away outweigh the positives of sharing the film with an audience. And if you have a really good TV at home, there is not always a great deal of difference with some of the film theaters I have been in. And, of course, you need to watch as you would in a theater; all lights off, no interruptions, etc. And we are not even talking about commercials, sonic assaults from previews, etc. that happen in most corporate owned theaters.
That said, I am always happy to go see a new film in a good quality movie theater that is not run by a large corporate entity. In Vancouver, the VIFF theater is absolutely wonderful. In New York, the Film Society at Lincoln Center has excellent theaters, and in the Philadelphia area, the theaters run by Renew Theaters are great.
So do we live in a Golden Age for cinemaphiles? One can argue that having everything easily available can be a problem. What do I want to watch? In contrast to the past, when you had to go see that Resnais film showing only once at your local art cinema because you might never have a chance to see it again. Me, I think it's a Golden Age, and I feel very lucky to be around while it's happening.
(I haven't mentioned streaming and Netflix, etc. That's because, although the selection of films can be wonderful, the quality of the video in generally poor. I am old-fashioned and like my films to be stored on shiny round things, and in the best possible picture quality.)
It is interesting to note that my experience with music has been almost the opposite; from an early age, most of my musical knowledge came from listening to recordings. The chances, for example, of hearing a new work by Ligeti in concert would be very slim, even in a large city. But it would show up on an LP or CD eventually. At this point in my life, though, I feel I can only truly hear music properly in live performance. While a well equipped home theater can give you a very close equivalent to the digital projection of a movie theater, even the best possible musical recording cannot give you the same three dimensional quality of sound that a live performance with instruments can give you. Perhaps when recordings have reached the stage of providing one speaker per instrument, things will improve. In the meantime, there is no substitute for hearing a live performance in a good quality space of appropriate size. (I would never go to hear a piano concert or string quartet in Carnegie Hall, for example. Even most of our large scale concert halls today are unsuitable for smaller scale orchestral works.) And I can't help but mention the fact that virtually every piece of music ever recorded seems to be available on YouTube, albeit in poor quality sound for the most part. Copyright does not seem to exist for music on YouTube as far as I can tell.
