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’.

Selective Memory

My recent reflections on Devil’s Daughter started a train of thought which inevitably led to the subject of ‘lost films’. This is a game that film buffs play quite often, with Orson Welles playing a starring role; the altered ending of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), the tantalising fragments of Don Quixote and The Merchant of Venice, the endless will they-won’t they saga over the release of The Other Side of the Wind (1972 – for what it’s worth!). Meanwhile there is Erich Von Stroheim’s vision for Greed (1924), originally lasting ten hours, reduced to four and then coming in, at Irving Thalberg’s insistence, at two hours and twenty minutes. Honourable mentions should also be given to Jerry Lewis’s unreleased holocaust drama The Day the Clown Cried (1972) and to Sam Peckinpah, whose work continues to show up in different director’s cuts.

I also thought about the films we remember from childhood but then later can’t identify. For years I had flashbacks about an Abbott and Costello film in which the duo were bus drivers. I could see them driving the bus into the sea and then my selective memory cut to them being carried away in a storm and left marooned on a desert island. A search through the film guides brought nothing up, but the internet (of course!) revealed this to be Pardon My Sarong, in which after the bus crashes into the water the pair end up working for a playboy on his yacht and then get shipwrecked. I think I prefer the earlier version! Meanwhile I’m haunted by a film about a married woman who gets caught up with a mysterious stranger. Black and white, it feels like it came out of the 1950s. The story is told in flashbacks and voice over and with a hypnotic intensity. Was it an early TV film, a B Movie, a major release? Who knows? Any suggestions welcome!

Literary films and B Movie masterpieces

Two articles in the Guardian pick up on a couple of recent posts. Salman Rushdie writes more fully about the art of adapting books into films and, despite his complete lack of a sense of humour, it is a fascinating piece. Meanwhile John Patterson looks at the studios that made the likes of Gun Crazy, although one somehow suspects Rushdie turning his nose up!

A trip through the archives...

I've spent part of the evening playing a game of 'what was on release' on this day x number of years ago and looking through the archives of the New York Times. Exactly sixty years ago to the day the review was of a French film, Devil's Daughter, which had been released in 1945, but only got to the United States a few years later. I can find very little real trace of this movie on the web. The director Maurice Saurel gets an imdb page for being a production manager! It shows the fragility of the medium; not just the actual physical decay of celluloid, although that danger is very real, but how easily hundreds of films fade from our collective memory. In contrast here is the review of a comedy which was released fifty years ago next month and, to slightly contradict its famous final line, may be one of the most 'perfect' ever made.

Scoop 3?...God I hope not!

Woody Allen is to make a third film in London featuring Freida Pinto from Slumdog Millionaire, which strangely seems to bring much of what I've been blogging about recently together. I intend to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona in the next couple of weeks and looking forward to it, but Woody in London only brings about a shudder these days. Have I mentioned how bad Scoop is?! Meanwhile The Guardian is asking whether Inglourious Basterds will be the worst film ever made!

'Danny Boyle dancing like Tigger?'

This is what Salmon Rushdie really meant about Slumdog Millionaire, although the actual comments about the film piling ‘impossibility on impossibility’ and his criticisms of the original book Q&A aren’t that far off. Meanwhile The Daily Show has a wicked response to Hugh Jackman replacing Jon Stewart as the host of the Oscars.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

81st Academy Awards

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things With Demetri Martin

Funny Political News
Joke of the Day

Cue Colin Welland...

And sometimes Oscar gets it absolutely right. This is punch-your-fist-in-the-air time - the right film at the right time winning the awards it deserves. No, Slumdog Millionaire isn't the greatest film ever made. It doesn't really stand up even against No Country for Old Men or There will be Blood from last year. But it does, as plenty of the commentators have been saying this morning, sum up the moment in a way that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button just can't. You see what I mean though - how exciting it all is! These contests between films are like sporting bouts, with fascinating duels - Raging Bull v Ordinary People (1980), Forrest Gump v Pulp Fiction (1994), Crash v Brokeback Mountain (2004) - or just complete knockouts like Ben Hur (1959) and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Sometimes you even cheer!