Film and TV
For the love of film
Louise Benson describes her lifelong love affair with cinema, and why you should feel the same about it.
The romance of cinema
A look back over one shoulder, a raised eyebrow, the beginnings of a smile; film captures expression and meaning that no words can convey. It creates images outside of the realm of our own imagination, different to those projected from our mind’s eye when reading alone late into the night, when the text melts into dreamy sequences and you don’t notice turning the page. Reading requires us to apply our own images to ideas, while film can frame a thousand ideas in one shot, images we would never have imagined being transferred from the director’s eye to ours.
It opens up a different realm, a Technicolor singing spectacle or sharply shot Film Noir catching life in a different shade and different angle to our own life and late-night imaginings. Its images imprint upon the mind, by-gone screen beauties awakening excitement, desire and aspiration as they laugh once more across the cinema screen each time the projectionist’s light shines through the flickering frames of the film.
It is a collective experience, every person in an audience seeing each shot, each scene, at the same time. The pace of a film, unlike that of a book, is determined by a force outside of ourselves; it engulfs us. A tear hovering at the corner of an eye in Sunset Boulevard, a drop of blood trickling from the side of the mouth in A Prophet – the reactions such simple images create in their audiences are as important as the film itself. We laugh, jump and gasp together. Abbas Kiorostrami’s Shirin, released last summer, captures this connection, filming only the faces of an audience of women at a performance of an Iranian folk-tale, the movement of their lips, widening of their eyes, even intakes of breath forming a new, more important performance.
It doesn’t matter what films we watch, it is the experience which film creates that matters. Whether it is a 3-D movie projected all around us in the cinema or a DVD played from a laptop precariously balanced at the end of the bed with your back pressed against the wall, it is the person beside you and the people around you when you watch a film that become integral to your experience, perception and memory of it. Putting on a film at home on a sleepy Sunday morning or crunching through an immense bucket of popcorn in the cinema, sitting right at the front with your neck craned upwards to the sprawl of the screen or at the very back of the cinema exchanging whispers, forms the delight of film as much as the film itself.
Films are there to hold hands, kiss, and fall in love to. They are also there to react against, argue with, and open our eyes to another way of seeing and framing the world. The bounds of each framed shot unite our immediate perceptions in a way utterly different to the looseness of theatre or literature, in which our eyes and imagination are free to wander and shift focus. Film makes us think and feel with an immediacy that cannot be found anywhere else, an on-screen glance or touch eliciting reactions in us that draw us closer to both the characters on the screen before us and the people around us. Just be careful: a look back over one shoulder or a raised eyebrow on the screen can make you fall in love not only with the person beside you, but deep in love with cinema itself.
