Sitting in a cinema is a very uncinematic affair: there is not particularly much to be seen or narrated about people sprawling on seats in the first, second, or back row, in the middle or on the aisle (dogmas differ here significantly)—and they're not particularly interesting to look at either. Regardless, then, of how lovingly films about cinephiles take on geekdom, they face a fundamental difficulty. Directors used to solve the problem by allowing their (usually male) film lovers to experience some sort of exciting extra-cinematic action. Works like Roy Del Ruth’s STARLIFT (1951) or Frank Tashlin’s HOLLYWOOD OR BUST (1956) are less about cinephiles in their intellectual form than about the admiration of individual fictional or actual stars; attempts to connect with these idols unleash a cascade of adventurous complications. In PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM (1971), Woody Allen connects the plot—film critic is unlucky in love, finds love, swears off love—with the film within the film. There is just as much going on in the hero’s head as there is on the screen, and thanks to his hallucinations, even Humphrey Bogart shows up and helps the overwhelmed critic get back on his feet.
Films about cinephilia, it seems, always need to find a way out of the cinema. This is perhaps because they are always also about relationships to reality, and for that reason alone have to go beyond the actuality of sitting in a movie theatre.
Does cinema help us find reality or cause us to miss it?
This is also the subject of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 2003 feature film THE DREAMERS. The film begins with the 1968 riots in Paris that came about as a reaction to the dismissal of the head of the Cinémathèque française. The American exchange student Matthew (Michael Pitt) meets the twins Isabelle and Theo (played by Eva Green and Louis Garrel) in front of the legendary cradle of '50s and ‘60s cinephilia. The transformation of the real into the cinematographic takes place gradually: the first time Matthew visits the two in their upper-class family home, the camera moves in very close to Isabelle’s hair, which brushes against her father’s cheek as she greets him. Together with Matthew’s gaze, the camera sinks into this image, as if such intimacy before the eyes of a stranger were indecent. As if it were…cinema. Georg Seeßlen writes that Matthew subsequently turns into “a cinephile in a way that is only possible in France. The larger question behind this, however, is whether cinema helps him find reality or causes him to miss it.”
Matthew himself refers to the screen as “a wall that protects us from the world.” THE DREAMERS is about this barrier becoming porous. It is no accident, then, that Matthew is surrounded by smells, those manifestations of the inescapably real. At the beginning of the film, Isabelle tells her new friend that he looks “awfully clean for someone who goes to the cinema so much.” She is describing a difference that still persists, a manifest non-belonging. By contrast, she announces the arrival of her brother Theo by referring to his supposedly abominable smell. After many reenacted film scenes and sexual excesses in the twins’ parents’ increasingly squalid apartment, the real breaks into the trio’s regressive cocoon where they have detached themselves from the world with the question “What’s that smell?”: it is the gas that Isabelle wanted to use to kill herself and the other two, as a final escape from the impositions of the obvious. But a cobblestone comes flying through the window and tears the three out of their stupor.
Life goes on after the film: that pesky or astounding characteristic of reality
While THE DREAMERS still embodies the beautifully dangerous youthful dream of cinephile loving and living, with an ageing director looking back and painting a flattering threesome self-portrait, documentaries show to what extremes a movie-struck life can lead. Life goes on after the film: how pesky and astounding the real is!
He prefers cinema to reality, one of the five New Yorker cinephiles portrayed in Angela Christlieb und Stephen Kijak’s documentary CINEMANIA (2002) declares. A lover of French auteur cinema carries around back pain medication and sleeping pills (for after the film) in his cloth bag. Sacrifices must be made: his diet consists of toast with peanut butter, but he proudly declares that showering before a film is mandatory. Not a given, evidently.
It smells in the everyday lives of cinephiles. Not just of popcorn (“Stop selling popcorn!” someone complains in CINEMANIA), but sometimes also of feet, cheap perfume, or stomach problems. I have a body; so do the others: an experience that has been somewhat forgotten in the past two years. In exceptional situations, physical proximity becomes a sensation. Or an imposition.
At the end of the film, the five subjects—actually a bunch of loners—leave the movie theatre as characters in a movie: they got to see CINEMANIA; they saw themselves on the big screen, but as they walk out of the theatre, they make the same perfunctory statements they do after every film.
Cinephilia as radical openness
How different is the impression left by the cineaste couple portrayed in Alice Agneskirchner’s documentary KOMM MIT MIR IN DAS CINEMA. Erika and Ulrich Gregor, co-founders of Friends of the German Film Archive (today Arsenal—Institute for Film and Video Art) and the International Forum of New Cinema are radically unlike the maniacs in CINEMANIA.
The two have seen about 100,000 films and have shown 40,000, the film tells us. They brought works to Germany—sometimes under risky conditions—that today belong to the canon of German and international film art, and had a significant influence on numerous filmmaking careers. Jim Jarmusch, for instance, says that if the Gregors had not made him feel like a filmmaker when he first started out, he would have thrown in the towel. Not detached from the world, but worldly, not exclusionary, but open, working to construct a (cinematic) world that can also be inhabited by others; this is not a given, at least for classic cinephilia, which, with its enthusiastic talk, “incessantly also communicates the exclusion of those who are enthusiastic for different reasons,” as the film critic Ekkehard Knörer writes. With the Gregors, cinephilia steps out of the cinema as curating, friendship and conversation—and steps back in again.
KOMM MIT MIR IN DAS CINEMA: Even in the title—Come With Me to the Cinema—, taken from a poem by Else Lasker-Schüler published in 1937, the creatively loving gaze perforates that “wall that protects us from the world”: In the cinema, “my hand lies in your hand/ Overpowered in the darkness,/ An elephant takes a stand/ Suddenly from the forest – / A crocodile firebrand / On her silky film strip, / Snaps at us from the hot sand / Then – I kiss your lip!” Trunk and hand, crocodile maw and lips: a playfully undulating intertwining, an up and down, as if we were watching a diaphragm at work.
She always feels that moment when the audience “breathes with the film,” Erika Gregor says. Her husband asks her to explain. She shrugs her shoulders—she just feels it. How can you explain something that defies measurement? And yet this little difference between them says a lot about this love, about the ability to let divergent views or things that are incomprehensible simply be. The breath of cinema does not want to be stilled or fixed; it is something that diffuses; it is literally inspiring.
At the end of the film, Erika Gregor says that even today, when she is in the cinema, she still hopes that when the curtain rises “that it will be a wonderful film and that I learn something.” She looks at Ulrich. “Right?” He gestures at the screen and says with a touch of ironic theatricality: “The blank screen demands to be lit up again with a film.” He is both paraphrasing Erika and adding to what she said. In a successful cinematic moment, both are lit up, the people watching and the screen. Both are both: recipients and inspiration. Body and soul.
Cosima Lutz lives in Berlin and works as a film critic for various print and online media outlets such as “Die Welt” and “Filmdienst.”
Translation: Millay Hyatt
