Sight&Sound - 04.2020

April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 33

ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH J COLEMAN AT INKYMOLE

Cinema is limitless.

And she isn’t going anywhere

There’s no such thing as a foreign film

There’s no such thing as an old film

The idea of any national cinema

is missing the point

We have over a century’s worth of

bounty from all corners of this globe to

savour and learn from, fresh as the day

And the wide, wide screen can hold

every possible thing we throw at it

We have filmmakers everywhere – of

every possible description – with films

in their heads and hearts and fingers

All on their way

Some of them are producers’ PAs

or cine-passionate stand-by props boys

or even film students

Some of them just sold us our coffee

or bus ticket or insurance

They have cameras in their

back pockets, every one

They have a wide-eyed intergalactic

audience open to and eager for new

fellowships and new horizons

Hooray for the multiplex and the

spandex zam-fests and whoosh-

athons, the gargantuan one-stop

big-top bunker-cathedrals, the

cardboard nosebag of unspeakably

toxic phosphorescent worms and the

quadruple-flavoured American ice cream

We leave our world and gallivant, ricochet’d

with mythic abandon in the deafening

surround-sound pinball playpen

We love it

From time to time.

And

Meanwhile

We love other stuff too, stuff of all shapes

and sizes, stuff of the planet and all of us on it

We want to see ourselves and others and

recognise how magnificently, mind-

glowingly similar/different we are

And

We want to travel, through time

and space and into other people’s

shoes and behind their eyes

And we like not knowing

what’s going to happen

And so

We would love more screens to see all this

on: big rickety ones currently in great old

ramshackle cine-palaces now furniture

showrooms, dinky ones in niche rooms with

comfy seats, inflatable ones in parks, sheets

tied to two broomsticks in village halls

We would love all the above and more

We want to watch film together in the dark

We want to watch things we’ve never heard

of in languages we cannot understand

We want new faces, new places, new shapes,

new sizes, new stories, new rhythms

We want to get lost

And

We want long immersions

We have the stamina

We have the lust

Trained up by the box-set: imagine the

binge cinema three-day plunge...

And

Some time, imagine this:

We get to know a film at the end of our

bed – even in our hand, even on our

wrist on the Tube – and when it comes

to town, we LOVE to see it live large

Like knowing an album inside out

and just craving the band’s live gig

WE WOULD LOVE THIS

And so

We would very much love the mighty

streaming services to feel galvanised to

restore, support or build great big

screens from the beginning to the end

of the territory their reach touches:

to make good their stated commitment

to filmmakers interested in making films

for the wild, wide screen, the experience

of communal exhibition and the honest

diversity of the canon of cinema history.

Wouldn’t that be grand?

And

We would love to stop squabbling

over the idea that cinema cannot

be more than one thing

Because then we can also stop whispering

and mouthing about cinema as if she is

a fragile invalid that needs quiet, vacant

and sterile surroundings lest she break,

an endangered and diminishing ice

floe that has any limits whatsoever

When, in fact, she simply doesn’t. End of

Cinema rocks and rolls

And bounces and stretches

We love cinema for her elasticity,

her inventiveness,her resilience, her

limber and undauntable roots and

her eternally supersonic evolution

As it says on the bottom of the studio credit

roll: throughout the universe in perpetuity

Film Forever

Onwards.