Some meditations on Cinematic Space

My previous posts lead on to some thoughts about cinematic space. In particular the way films create – for the want of a better phrase – ‘safe space’, in the same way that ‘home’ is a ‘safe space’ or ‘refuge’ is; a place of comfort, a feeling of not wanting to leave, of being happy within certain confines. A psychological trick that we use as human beings is to go to a ‘happy place’ in our heads at times of distress or unhappiness, a memory of a place and time that was particularly special in our lives. In this, the cinema is – as it is so often – like memory:

I am child, four or five, attending nursery, or returning to it after some time out. It is that time of day when the staff seem to abandon hopes of control and surrender to the chaos and mayhem. I and a group of other children find an alcove, a short corridor with a dead end. We build a barricade of sorts out of soft cushions and plastic mattresses which encloses us in. We decide to defend and protect this space from the others. They come and try to tear down our walls. Eventually they succeed. But for a time they don’t and in that time there is a sense of comfort and warmth and at oneness with the world. Yet there is also excitement and fascination and I don’t want this moment to end yet I know it must.

In film there are often sequences we choose to watch over and over again, often as opposed to the films themselves in their entirety. David Thomson claims to regularly view a dance of Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire in Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940), a truly glorious piece of choreography set to Cole Porter’s ‘Begin the Beguine’ on a black marble floor, which partially mirrors the two dancers dressed in white, all set against a backdrop of black and white lights, almost a night sky.






Another sequence that I cannot forget and that Thomson looked at in an essay for the Spring 1980 edition of Sight and Sound is Humphrey Bogart’s visit to the Acme Bookshop in The Big Sleep(1946): ‘We are in paradise, a version of Los Angeles with book stores on either side of the street. Is there any surer trace of William Faulkner’s involvement on The Big Sleep than the dreamy city being so book-ended, or book stores harbouring sharp honeys who can persuade the bookworm that he is on the verge of racy action whenever he browses among dry pages?’





I am the age I am now. It is last year.. I am walking down Portobello Road towards the market on a Saturday afternoon. It starts to rain and put up my very flimsy umbrella which may break at any time. Then I come to the market stalls which are under the Westway, a concrete flyover overhead which is the motorway into Central London. The space under the Westway is packed full of people sheltering from the rain. I make my way through and take a spot at a stall selling discount CDs and DVDs and flick through the boxes. This is partly to kill time while the rain stops, but also to find a bargain. The owner of the stall plays music, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Nina Simone and then Glen Miller. There is almost a party atmosphere as the sound echoes into the space under the flyover; a kind of communal joy as everyone exalts being in the dry. There is a short burst as the rain gets heavier and the mood is heavy with a nostalgic war on the home front like spirit. A girl half dances while walking past

Then there is John Boorman’s Hope and Glory (1987), a semi autobiographical story of a young boy (Sebastian Rice Edwards) growing up in South London during World War II works as a series of these kinds of memories rather than any kind of coherent whole. Boorman’s alter ego, Bill, runs over playgrounds of houses left derelict by the blitz, catches hundreds of fish when a German plane drops a bomb in the river and discovers how to bowl the perfect googly. Meanwhile Bill’s friends and family sit around the piano and talk about how much better life is now that war is on and his teenage sister Dawn (Sammi Davis) dances joyfully around the house (ironically they’re all singing ‘Begin the Beguine’ – maybe it’s something about that song!). In the most wondrous moment of the film a barrage balloon comes lose from its ropes and floats across the rooftops like a huge great friendly lumbering elephant in the sky (Dawn (Sammi Davis): He just got fed up with all the other boring old barrage balloons and decided it was time to have
some fun!) only to be shot down by the Home Guard.

As David Bordwell wrote in his blog a few months ago, the true cinephile would ‘watch damn near anything looking for a moment’s worth of magic’.