Cinema and Movies: Introduction
[Under development: 31 May 2005 ]
Since the age of five years, when I watched Singin' in the Rain at a cinema in either Kilburn or Cricklewood (north-west London, UK), I have watched a great many movies: some at the cinema, others at private screenings, some broadcast on television, others on pre-recorded VHS tapes and DVDs. I have watched lengthy movies during long-haul flights, short movies during brief breaks at motorway service stations, and wonderful video installations in art galleries such as the Tate Gallery, London and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (a Bill Viola installation, similar to The Messenger that was installed for a while in Durham Cathedral), both in England; the Modern Art Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland; and the Guggenheim (including an excellent film by an Iranian woman director) in New York City. Sometimes I watch movies late into the night, but when I have only snatches of free time I watch movies on video cassette tape or DVD in instalments over several evenings. I have a substantial library of video cassette tapes, largely pre-recorded but some recorded from television, and a small but growing collection of pre-recorded DVDs. I am proudest of my collection of non-English-speaking movies, and have only one that has been dubbed into English: Babette’s Feast. Occasionally, I borrow movies from the local lending library, or people lend them to me. With indecent frequency, I buy movies new from shops and second-hand from stalls and thrift shops. I have hired obscure movies from the Concord Film Council. I have the film scripts of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Cinema Paradiso and The English Patient, and have biographical books relating to Peter Greenaway, to Andrei Tarkovsky and to Woody Allen. On the other hand, I have neither film posters, nor costumes, nor artefacts.
As a child, I lived for years in perpetual night-time terror of the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz,
and would believe with painful sincerity that she was flying around the house
in which we lived. When I was about eight years old, my mother would pack me and my brother off to Saturday Morning Cinema at the
Odeon in
It is not surprising, therefore, that I have eclectic tastes in cinema. I have watched movies of many genres (British ‘kitchen sink’, Hammer horror, Children’s Film Foundation, Film Noir, Nouvelle Vague, Hollywood silent, Hollywood Blockbuster, Hollywood Romance, Hollywood Disaster, political movies and world art-house – the list of categories is nearly endless.
I have never had a problem with reading subtitles
(I should prefer it were all movies to be screened with subtitles as a matter
of course), and, once my parents bought a television in 1965, therefore I was
watching movies made in languages other than English. I feel exercised when
considering the extent to which a movie should be categorised in terms of
nationality. It seems obvious that the Elstree
Comedies were English, but I do not know whether other European cinema was
producing similar material. (Were they, however, in any respect a reflection of
what is English?) The British ‘kitchen sink’ movies (A Taste of Honey, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, Billy
Liar, The Loneliness of the Long
Distance Runner) appear to be rooted in the depths of northern England’s
working class communities, and mark a significant shift towards a earthy
realism from the polite and mannered movies of the 1950s, yet the Nouvelle
Vague movies in France were not so very different from the British ‘kitchen sink’
movies. What is the nationality of a movie when a British studio brings
in a Hungarian director? What about when two production teams, one from West
Germany, the other from communist Hungary, make the movie of a German book (Mephisto), with a
cast of actors variously speaking German and Hungarian? What is the nationality
of a movie when a Russian Soviet movie director (Andrei Tarkovsky)
uses Russian and Italian crews to film on location in
