Okay: the first film I saw at the cinema was
My Girl, in 1991, which means I would have been four-years-old; didn't know I could remember that far back! As far as the power of (C)inema goes as both a medium and as a place to watch it, I cried at the end of the film; telling, perhaps, of the medium's grip on me ever since. I remember wondering at the time what all those marks were (it was, in retrospect, a really grubby print), and being especially interested in the black mark which appeared in the corner every now and again (reel-change!). My mother took me, as she always did back in those days: we also saw
Home Alone 2 (1992),
The Jungle Book (1967) re-release back in 1993,
Jurassic Park (1993) and
The Lion King (1995), among others; all vivid memories of all good films.
Back in those days, too, when our home football team played at home, they used to broadcast it live at the cinema, which was a fantastic idea, I think - the cinema used to be completely full of football fans who watched it live on the big screen with full Dolby. Imagine!
As years passed, and I hit adolescence, very much on the fringes of falling obsessively in love with the medium, I went to the cinema with my dad to see
Gladiator (2000), and it blew me away. I remember the scene which mimicks the Battle of Carthage, when Maximus leads an enemy horse and carriage into a trap, and the whole thing goes crashing through one of the Collisseum entry doors, towards the camera (and audience), and both me and my dad clapped. Not an uproarious clap, but one single clap of the hands, in appreciation of the entire thing.
A lot of my best big screen memories, which will stay with me for a long time I'm sure, have come from my local arthouse, which I discovered in 2003. I had always known it was there, but my only knowledge of it prior to that was that it had once had a "Blue Movie" festival when I was very young, and my mother thought it was disgusting!
The first three films I saw on the big screen there were
Amores perros (2000) (a re-run in conjunction with
21 Grams' release at the time),
Infernal Affairs (2002) and
Zatoichi (2003), all of which got me hooked onto wanting to see every film they ever showed there.
And even if now I will admit not every film an arthouse books in is a masterpiece, it is because of that place that I've seen
Nosferatu (1922) with a live DJ score,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) and
Metropolis (1926) with a live piano accompaniment! The latter was especially unforgettable, as you can imagine. I also first saw
Stalker there as well as re-watches of
Taxi Driver (1976),
Mean Streets (1973) and
Manhattan (1979). I regret that last year when they showed
Don't Look Now (1973), I couldn't make it, nor could I make it this year when they showed probably my favourite film,
Eraserhead (1976).
Two Novembers ago they had the Northern Lights Film Festival, a week-long schedule of north European films, many of which were obscure at the time and a lot of which are still waiting wide theatrical releases. I think I probably saw more films at that festival than anybody else (all shown bar three, I think); I bought a week-long pass and stayed in the vicinity morning till night, seeing about four or five films a day...
I saw several overlooked masterpieces there, and won't ever forget the context in which I first saw them: a midnight screening (with free bottle of beer!) of
Bleeder (1999), a violent, self-reflexive film self-consciously reminiscent of
Mean Streets;
The Wedding (2004), a frantic and surreal Polish comedy;
King's Game (2004), a Danish political thriller full of wonderful, sombre cinematography and all the momentum of
All the President's Men;
The West Wittering Affair (2004), a humble, inventive British comedy which just got a limited release this year; and, as well as those new gems (plus some rotten stinkers, too!), I caught at the same festival a trio of Garbo vehicles, namely
Mata Hari (1931),
Queen Christina (1933) and
Anna Karenina (1935), plus one reel from a lost and forgotten silent production of
Petter the Tramp (1922) which she starred in before signing for MGM.
On a very personal side note, that same festival's Closing Gala was
A Cock and Bull Story (2005), preceding which was a public showing of the second short film I made, an adaptation of
The Little Match Girl. A very powerful and rewarding experience, to say the least.
Enough of boastful day-long stints at the theatre catching this obscure film and that obscure film, though; there are a few other individual experiences which I had the pleasure (at the time) to share with a girl I was once in love with.
She lived in a hard-to-get-to place, and so we never kicked it off as I would have liked, but we met up once a week to catch a film and then chill out afterwards somewhere and talk, with me trying to seduce her beyond "friendship" and to try and stop her from entering a relationship with someone I didn't particular like (a bully, no less, who she's actually still with).
We went to see
Signs back in 2002, and I embarrassingly (as far as the convention of dates goes) jumped twice - and both times she didn't; once early on, when a dog barks loudly and breaks silence, and late on when you see an alien walking past obstacles on somebody's home video.
I got my own back, though, in 2004 (when we rekindled a close friendship after long bouts of hiatus), when we went to see
The Descent and
Wolf Creek more or less within a week of each other. During the first, there were a few moments early on where I made the mistake of offering my hand (which had been requested), a mistake because I had nail marks on my knuckles for weeks after. And I don't think she even saw the latter, because for half of it she was hiding behind her own hands - which this time round I refused to hold!
