All of the talk these last few months about getting back into cinemas has focused on movies like Christopher Nolan’s time-bending Tenet or superhero extravaganzas like Wonder Woman 1984. And it’s not hard to see why. The thrill of watching the biggest movie in the world in a packed cinema with an audience that is eager to go on that ride can be a real buzz.
Many people’s favourite film memories are those rooted in the shared experience of seeing dinosaurs for the first time in Jurassic Park, discovering Darth Vader is Luke’s father or that Bruce Willis was dead all along, watching the Titanic sink or any number of other iconic pop culture moments surrounded by hordes of moviegoers in equal rapture. I may be a bit of an ol’ stick in the mud these days when it comes to American blockbusters, but even I can admit that watching Hollywood do what it does best(?) on a screen the size of a house can add half a star or more to a film’s enjoyment.
For me, however, the largest impact of shut down cinemas hasn’t been felt in the mainstream blockbusters...
After all, I grew up in the ‘90s watching a good percentage of new American releases on VHS and that didn’t stop them going on to become favourites well into adulthood. It’s not exactly foreign to watch explosions and shootouts on a small screen.
No, the experiences I am dreading missing the most are the smaller films. The indie sensations, the festival hits, the foreign worlds. ‘Arthouse’ films and the businesses that exhibit them were already in a precarious situation, but it has become harder and harder to imagine things will return to the state they were even as recently as February when Weathering with You, Portrait of a Lady on Fire and the 2020 Oscar Nominated Short Films were the leading limited releases for the year. With streaming and VOD (including ‘virtual’ theaters) booming throughout the pandemic, it’s likely only going to become harder and harder to convince people to leave the house and pay for ‘adult’ fare. While that may be a convenient advancement for some, it a worrying trend for others.
What are we going to miss if we (the collective we, not necessarily TFE readers) begin treating independent, foreign and festival films as strictly couch movies, only venturing out for the big stuff or those with a director rock star name attached like Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch? We’ll miss much the same things as we would not seeing Tenet or Wonder Woman 1984, actually. The rumble of the bass, the eye candy, the sensory phenomena, the commune of cinema. I have felt this acutely these past six months with many of the films I have been discovering. Films like Brian Welsh’s Beats (out on disc and VOD on September 8).
Just from the look of it, you may think this black-and-white Scottish quasi coming of age film would fit right at home. What could it really offer that requires a cinema? It’s clearly got lineage to the so-called 'kitchen sink' dramas with its two leads falling in and out of strife with local cops as their paths through the class system begin to splinter. But Beats is also about their discovery of the rave scene set against Thatcher’s reign with a truly pumping soundtrack of acid, house and techno from The Prodigy, Orbital, LFO, Outlander and more that deserves to be heard so loud your eardrums throb. As these boys take ecstasy, the film opens up into a kaleidoscopic trip of colour and light and molecular transformation. The thumping soundtrack booms and the characters descend into vibrating euphoria before reality comes storming back with a very different kind of deafening thud.
For these reasons, it’s a thrilling film especially if you miss dancing the night away to the pulse of a darkened club just as much as you miss going to the cinema. That it will likely never see the figurative light of day inside a cinema ever again after its 2019 festival run is a shame.
Film festivals have had to reckon with this new reality very abruptly, too. Those that didn’t cancel altogether, have more or less succeeded by stripping down programming and finding little things here and there to make the virtual experience just a bit more special. They’ve almost been too successful in some regards, with the online nature of 2020 film festivals allowing more people from around the country to participate (and around the world, too, if you have a VPN, a personal saviour of my lockdown experience). They’ve also allowed audiences to experience festivals who may have otherwise not been able to attend due to the more rigid scheduling of titles. That’s all a win, in my book.
But while there is definitely wriggle room moving forward for festivals to incorporate virtual spaces in their festivals, I recently engaged with Melbourne International Film Festival’s 68½ fest and found myself missing the opportunity to truly soak in the all-consuming State Funeral (a five-star masterpiece says me) or the avant-garde Polish animation Kill It and Leave This Town, and laugh in unison with a crowd discovering Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Senegalese classic Hyenas for the first time with its beautiful restoration. And, yes, that includes being lulled into a mid-film nap, one of the low-key treasures of watching slow cinema in a warm theatre.
Most notably, I’d quickly take up the chance to re-watch Valentyn Vasyanovych’s Atlantis on a big screen more than, oh I don’t know, The Old Guard. Moments into this Ukrainian futuristic post-war drama—a winner at last year’s Venice Film Festival and surely a contender for Ukraine’s international film submission—I was enraptured by the writer-director’s own cinematography. His compelling compositions playing not just with light and perspective in interesting ways, but color, too. Most notably in an early factory scene that surprises with two silhoutted figures against deep blues and reds, an image that is later inversed in its stunning closing sequences.
But this is a film made predominantly out of long unmoving takes as characters deal with PTSD, suicide, grief and the desire for connection in the face of a country ravaged and literally poisoned by war. Body bags and mass graves. Grim stuff. As comfy as my couch can be in trackies and uggs, it doesn’t quite allow one to immerse themselves in the film’s vision. It’s easy to mock Christopher Nolan for his insistence that his movies are made for a big screen, but in some cases I have to agree. I will praise Atlantis until I’m blue in the face, but I will always wonder about seeing this projected 30 feet high.
Another film that I watched as a part of MIFF was Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document (Single Channel), which is not an easy film to talk about. Despite this, it has a potent message for today and, because of that, I was especially happy to see the festival offer this as a free viewing option. Gary’s weaving of film sources including sequences of avant-garde digital visual art, vox-pox interviews on celluloid, cell-phone video, with flourishes of what look like etched and over-exposed animation and archival footage of a performing Nina Simone is as lyrical as it is ambiguous, and as effective in its assumed simplicity as it is ambitious.
This film won LAFCA’s experimental film and video award as well as a prize at Locarno and is the sort of film that I can picture carving out a niche for itself in a place like the Anthology Film Archives or Maysles Documentary Center, audiences huddling outside in the cold afterwards to discuss its themes of female autonomy. What does it mean, and what does it have to say? Virtual releases do allow a film like this to be opened up to more potential viewers if those viewers are willing to look, but I know I certainly missed the unique thrill of a post-film debrief with friends and strangers alike, maybe over a glass of red or just on the tram ride home.
Shutting down the browser window and opening Twitter to throw 280 characters into the (potential) void of Twitter just doesn’t have the same vibe, you know? And it’s certainly not a film conducive to review in any traditional form outside of academia.
Yes, it would be nice to see Niki Caro’s Mulan on a big screen, but we will have plenty of opportunities for that and others like it in the future. I genuinely don’t know how much of an opportunity there will be to watch the sort of films I’ve written about here (and plenty more where they came from). I am lucky to live in a relatively culturally aware city that I can’t quite picture (yet) without an annual roster of film festivals, but so many aren’t as lucky. And so while many are rightly gauging just how the industry will rebound after 2020, be prepared to potentially see a whole lot fewer titles on our screens if there isn’t an impetus for distributors to acquire them and exhibitors to screen them.