What I Saw at the Movies

During​ a four or five-year period at the turn of the millennium, I went to the cinema around six hundred times – or, I should say, I saw around six hundred films at the cinema, since many of the visits were for double, triple and occasionally quadruple bills. I wasn’t a film critic or festival programmer or even an aspiring director. I was just an adolescent schoolboy and, in my parents’ probably loving description, a ‘weirdo’.

Stanley Cavell wrote that his memories of movies seemed so closely tied to memories of his life that he was no more likely to write a book about film than to write an autobiography (he ended up doing both). I could say the same. On the night of Tony Blair’s first election victory, I was in my bedroom going through a tin of memorabilia for the hijack thriller Con Air, which I hadn’t yet seen. I received my first text message on the way to Julien Temple’s second film about the Sex Pistols, The Filth and the Fury. At a school interview, I told a teacher that I’d been to see The Matrix, to which he replied ‘isn’t that a 15 certificate?’ – the final nail in the coffin. To get into my back-up option, I submitted something I’d written about another recent film, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged (an adaptation of James Lasdun’s story ‘The Siege’), which was somehow rated PG. Much of the time I spent with my parents was in foyers and auditoriums across London, and on the journeys there and back. My mother was the more regular companion, my father the more long-suffering: in the course of five days in August 1999 he sat through the Dardenne brothers’ Rosetta, Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanité and seven films by Robert Bresson. It was the summer I learned the word ‘austere’.

My taste, or at least my appetite, was indiscriminate. As Pauline Kael wrote in 1969, ‘when you’re young the odds are very good that you’ll find something to enjoy in almost any movie.’ Cavell, whose own ‘odd education’ took place in part at the Berkeley cinemas where Kael worked as a programmer, put it in more positive terms: ‘To be drowning in the material is really the only way – not to care too much what you’re seeing, to care a lot about what you think about what you’re seeing.’ And I did care, filling exercise book after exercise book with star ratings and plot synopses for Meg Ryan romantic comedies, Disney cartoons, John Grisham adaptations, disaster movies and action thrillers, along with harder-breathing fare from the Dogme 95 group and Leos Carax’s Pola X, remorselessly grim and containing shots of what the censor called ‘actual’ sex, which I saw on 12 May 2000 as an alternative to Gladiator. François Truffaut, the patron saint of this weirdo sub-type, said that no child, on being asked to name their dream, replies: ‘I’m going to be a movie reviewer.’ He was wrong.

The beginning of my obsession coincided with the centenary of the Lumière Brothers’ first cinematograph projection, on the boulevard des Capucines in 1895, of workers leaving a factory. The craggiest reflection on the centenary came from Susan Sontag – an instantly notorious essay, less birthday card than death certificate. The history of the medium took the shape of a life-cycle, she argued, and we were now in the stage of ‘irreversible decline’. Sontag mourned the loss of cinephilia, the ‘very specific kind of love’ that had dominated in the 1960s. Back then, she wrote, ‘cinema had apostles. (It was like religion.) Cinema was a crusade. For cinephiles, the movies encapsulated everything. Cinema was both the book of art and the book of life.’

What’s strange about Sontag’s emphasis on cinephilia is that she opposed the central cinephilic crusade – the elevation of ‘old Hollywood genre films’. Sontag described the taste for such movies, exhibited in journals such as Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, as ‘passionate (or sentimental)’, arguing that it was rooted in a denial of the fact that the Hollywood studio system was collapsing and that the kind of commercial entertainment the French critics had enjoyed in their youth was being swept aside by Italian films ‘of the highest seriousness’. This was wildly wrong, an attempt to downplay the debt that European cinema owed to American mass culture – at least as large as that owed to Roberto Rossellini. Before videos, the evanescence of film stock and the unavailability of so many films meant that cinephilia had an elegiac component. But the idea that André Bazin, Éric Rohmer and their younger colleagues at Cahiers were watching The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) in a valedictory spirit was a figment of Sontag’s own nostalgia. (Rohmer, in his essay ‘Redécouvrir l’Amérique’, describes a moment of conversion in the late 1930s.)

In interviews, Sontag conceded that there were still great filmmakers working in Russia, Greece, Poland and Hungary, as well as Taiwan and Iran. The other prominent declinist, David Thomson, wasn’t even convinced of that. The only director in Sontag’s contemporary pantheon who featured in the edition of Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film that I owned was the oldest, Theo Angelopoulos, and in his entry Thomson lamented that ‘there are so few masters left now.’ For Thomson, in his essay ‘Who Killed the Movies?’ (the culprits were Steven Spielberg and George Lucas), ‘the death of film’ could be attributed to its ‘woeful removal from the cutting edge of our culture’.

It was hard to miss the element not just of fogeyish intransigence but of generational warfare. Sontag talked about ‘the young’, Thomson of ‘the generation now in their twenties’. True cinephilia, Sontag wrote, ‘tells us that the Hollywood remake of Godard’s Breathless cannot be as good as the original.’ (Though would a true cinephile refer to it as Breathless?) When Sontag complained that ‘assaultive images’ and ‘faster and faster cutting’ had produced ‘a disincarnated, lightweight cinema that doesn’t demand anyone’s full attention’, she failed to appreciate the way audiences responded to the shoot-outs or chase sequences in the work of the Hong Kong directors John Woo and Ringo Lam or in Jerry Bruckheimer productions. We were experiencing a variant of the aesthetic excitement that Sontag claimed was no longer possible. The modern filmgoer was a descendant of the mid-century cinephile – so long as you allowed popular cinema back into the story. This was understood by Jacques Rivette, the former Cahiers critic who became a leading figure in the French New Wave. In an interview in 1998, Rivette said that he tried to ‘stay attentive to all the greats and also the less than greats’. He spoke about his original canon – Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Bresson, Rossellini – but also about recent films such as Alien: Resurrection (‘inventive, honest and frank’) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (‘I’ve seen it twice and I like it a lot’).

At some point I wrote a fan letter to David Thomson. In his reply, he urged me to develop interests other than film. That was Spielberg’s problem, Thomson said – he didn’t know anything else. But there seemed little danger of that in my case. (Not that it was really true of Spielberg.) Films were always telling you about other things. In 1998 alone there were adaptations of Les Misérables, The Woodlanders, Great Expectations, Lolita, Washington Square, Mrs Dalloway, Cousin Bette, Oscar and Lucinda, Julian Barnes’s Metroland and three works by Conrad. From a Daily Express review of The Talented Mr Ripley in February 2000, I learned three new words in the space of a single clause: ‘a conspiracy of patriarchal decorum in which even Dickie’s father colludes’. Also, from the same piece, ‘amorality’, ‘deferential’, ‘enervated’, ‘homoeroticism’.

It was relevant that neither Sontag nor Thomson had ever worked as a regular reviewer. Kael was a much more useful guide. She had retired from the New Yorker, but to a consumer of new movies she could still feel like the critic of the moment. After the gigantic Waterstone’s opened on Piccadilly in 1999, I saved up to buy the collections of her reviews, and for the next few years I rarely went anywhere without one of her books. Kael favoured a poppier, peppier approach. She believed that if ‘we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work’ is not continuous ‘with the academic, respectable tradition’. Receptive to the claims of both ‘trash’ and ‘art’, she liked art with a sense of fun and trash that believed in itself. The elevation of Hitchcock missed the point of his films, and the desire to emulate him could lead ambitious directors astray, notably Truffaut. The French critics hadn’t erred in admiring the skill and visual interest of genre films, but in making grand claims for their intellectual substance and psychological depth.

Kael didn’t share Sontag’s view that the mid-1960s were a halcyon period. For her, it was a time when she worried that movies no longer ‘meant something to people’ and might just become ‘a barrage of images’. Her first book, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), begins with an essay that asks: ‘Are Movies Going to Pieces?’ The movement against interpreting films, as promoted by Sontag, had encouraged the arthouse crowd to behave in more or less the same way as ‘the larger audience’, just letting movies ‘happen’ to them. The films that ‘look like art’ were disabling intelligent thought no less than lame farces and blockbuster musicals. In the polemic ‘Fantasies of the Arthouse Audience’, Kael complained about the ‘principle of ineffability’ embraced by Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais and Ingmar Bergman and the ‘spiritual style’ of directors such as Bresson and Yasujirō Ozu. She looked to the silent era and the 1930s, the straightforward genre films of the 1940s (John Huston, not Hitchcock and Hawks) and ‘natural’ foreign directors like Jean Renoir, Max Ophüls and Vittorio de Sica. In 1967, she lamented the frustrated career of Orson Welles, someone who could ‘unify’ educated and uneducated audiences – the quality that makes movies ‘a great popular art form’.

If I felt that Kael was addressing my experience of movies – addressing me – it was partly because I was catching up with those directors, but mainly because I was living in the aftermath of the next developments she described. Barely a month after the Welles piece, Bonnie and Clyde was released (Kael’s review of it got her the New Yorker job), initiating what, by March 1972, she felt confident calling a ‘legendary period in movies’. In The Last Picture Show, Welles’s friend and protégé Peter Bogdanovich had made ‘a film for everybody’. The Godfather was an ideal merging of ‘commerce and art’. Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets was ‘a triumph of personal filmmaking’ and a gripping thriller. For Sontag, these films were merely a case of Hollywood ‘plagiarising’ European innovations and rendering them ‘banal’. For Kael, they rejuvenated what had become stale in commercial cinema.

It didn’t last. By the late 1970s and early 1980s there was a turn to glib pastiche, prompted by the musical flops of Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola and Scorsese as well as the Lucas-Spielberg collaboration Raiders of the Lost Ark. But Kael’s concerns were quickly dispelled by the work of directors who revealed the possibilities of a committed postmodern aesthetic: Brian De Palma, Neil Jordan, David Lynch, Tim Burton, Gus van Sant, Stephen Frears, the Coen Brothers, Pedro Almodóvar, Spike Lee. Even during the darkest days (in 1983 Kael referred to ‘a low, low point’), there was always something to recommend. And at the start of Hooked, a collection of pieces from 1985 to 1988, she notes that the period ‘begins rather lamely, and then suddenly there’s one marvellous movie after another’. These were the harbingers or, in some cases, first steps of what made the 1990s and early 2000s such a happy, fruitful time to be a filmgoer.

Kael exerted widespread influence: on directors such as Quentin Tarantino, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and David Fincher, and on the critics in whose work I was immersing myself, the so-called ‘Paulettes’ who populated the culture sections of American publications (notably David Edelstein and Stephanie Zacharek). But not only them. Kael had been dismissive of British film criticism: ‘If we recall an article or review,’ she wrote, ‘it’s almost impossible to remember which Peter or which Derek wrote it.’ But thanks in part to her influence, I was spoiled. Next to my bed I had a filing cabinet with cuttings from British newspapers by Ryan Gilbey, Jonathan Romney, Nigel Andrews, Anne Billson. There was also Adam Mars-Jones, writing in the Independent and then the Times. Like Kael, Mars-Jones could see the point of Spielberg without overlooking his weaknesses. Both described being a regular film reviewer as ‘the best job in the world’. Mars-Jones said that film was doing ‘very nicely, thank you, despite all the obituaries’.

Kael’s approach had its limitations. She saw films only once. Reporting on the San Francisco International Film Festival, she said that the range of national cinemas on display – ‘Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Korea, Thailand et al’ – left her wondering if the organiser was a stamp collector. While you could hardly be an avid or grateful filmgoer in the late 1990s if you shared Sontag’s diagnosis, there was still a lot to learn from her curiosity and exacting standards. In the 1990s, an age of more, it felt natural to go further in both directions and embrace the ‘two completely opposite strains’ identified by Romney: ‘event movies’ and ‘anti-event movies’, Con Air and Rosetta, say, or, in Romney’s examples, earthlings repel alien invasion (Independence Day) and man takes dying mother for walk (Aleksandr Sokurov’s Mother and Son).

Watching​ the films – reading about them, thinking about them – was only part of the filmgoing experience. As Kael put it, there’s ‘a good movie’ and there’s also ‘slipping into a theatre’. In his centenary essay, Thomson took aim at the modern cinema: ‘a lifeless pit of torn velour, garish anonymity and floors sticky from spilled Pepsi’. Like the narrative of decline, this image was a decade out of date. In Gilbert Adair’s novel Love and Death on Long Island (1990), set in the mid to late 1980s, Giles De’Ath, a novelist and art historian who has never ‘partaken of the joyous simplicity of filmgoing’, shelters from the rain under the ‘massive overhang’ of a local cinema (the Odeon Swiss Cottage in all but name). Stepping inside, he finds the carpeting so threadbare that the company logo is illegible; the ‘streaky, slab-like concrete walls’ and ‘scratched, discoloured paint’ are indicative of ‘urban disuse and disrepair’. Yet the period between Giles’s visit and Thomson’s dirge was marked by radical change.

I was born on 10 October 1985, the day Orson Welles died. More significant for my purposes, that November AMC opened the country’s first ‘multiplex’ cinema, in Milton Keynes, a development that coincided with British Film Year, a government initiative to boost filmgoing. The initiative worked. Attendance rose. The Empire, on Leicester Square’s north side, was reopened in 1989 by Prince Charles, while the cinema named after him, on Leicester Place, opened in its current incarnation in 1991, offering tickets for £1. Cinemas were built at Staples Corner, the junction where Edgware Road meets the North Circular and the M1 (six screens, 1991); in the Trocadero on Coventry Street (seven screens, 1991); and on the Charing Cross Road side of Leicester Square (nine screens, 1993). These new or renovated institutions were proud of their wheelchair facilities, air conditioning, Dolby stereo sound, projection technology, luxury seating and ‘computer-designed sight lines’, along with their ‘well-stocked kiosks’.

I liked going to Staples Corner and Swiss Cottage, but most of my filmgoing took place in the West End, in what became for me a magic zone. It stretched from the ABC on Panton Street, which had been Europe’s first four-screen cinema, and the Westminster Reference Library, which had a decent collection of film books, to the ABC on Shaftesbury Avenue, with its forty-metre bas-relief depicting drama through the ages. It included the Plaza on Lower Regent Street and the ABC on the third floor of the Swiss Centre, where, on my first solo outing (if you discount the time my father walked out of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas after fifteen minutes), I took the rickety lift to see Angelopoulos’s Eternity and a Day, despite knowing my parents had been bored to tears by his previous film.

Jeremy Cooper’s short novel Brian, which appeared in 2023, offers a portrait of a cinephile in contemporary London. The central character attends only one cinema: the National Film Theatre, now known as the BFI Southbank. Cooper doesn’t give any dates, but the novel appears to take place between 1988 and 2016, when Brian is more or less a ‘nightly regular’ at the BFI. Cooper portrays the same sense of solidarity and ritual among Brian’s new friends as Adair depicted in his novel The Holy Innocents, about soixante-huitards at the Cinémathèque Française (adapted by Bertolucci as The Dreamers). Derek Malcolm, the Guardian film critic from 1971 to 1997, regretted that the ‘type of film buffs who would queue outside the NFT in the 1960s to see all-night programmes of obscure movies doesn’t seem to exist nowadays’. In the world depicted by Cooper, buff culture is alive and well.

Most of Brian is devoted to the period since 1997. Cooper’s focus on a repertory cinema prevents him from getting bogged down in questions about the state of the art. What he offers instead of context or analysis is a psychological study of the filmgoer. Brian makes film ‘his thing’ – without consciously deciding to do so, ‘without really noticing the change’ – after a few failed hobbies, much as I had earlier flirtations with football and pop music. (My father probably preferred the toils of a Bresson retrospective to seeing Oasis at Knebworth.) And we may have been drawn to film for similar reasons: in Cooper’s phrasing, ‘the safety of repetition’, ‘self-protection’, a way of enjoying one’s ‘separateness’ and an opportunity for ‘inner identification’, as well as an occasion for pleasure and a source of education. Until Brian becomes a BFI regular, we are told in the opening paragraph, his ‘nervous concern’ had been focused on work. Now it is redirected to movies, looking at programmes, planning outings, post-film chatter.

Truffaut said that for a long time he had overlooked ‘the neurotic aspect of my love for cinema’. If I also did this, it was probably because of the lack of overt neuroses in my everyday existence but especially around filmgoing, the lack of pedantry I brought to the act itself – being unbothered, for example, by the fire-exit sign or by people drinking Pepsi. I preferred to get to things on the opening weekend, but I didn’t really care. Truffaut was talking about subtler signs, the fears or forms of mess that filmgoing sublimates or tidies away. He noted that in his day the ‘most cinephilic cinephiles’ tended to like happy endings, stories of heroes and villains. The French filmmaker and critic Jean Epstein compared going to a movie to entering a state of hypnosis, an aesthetic experience that ‘modifies the nervous system’ much more than reading does. And it would be perverse to deny that watching the dead speak or past actions embalmed in an eternal present tense plays some role in what we find comforting about movies.

In a passage I’d overlooked until I read Brian, Kael defined movies as ‘the sullen art of displaced persons’ and reasoned that we are less likely to seek out their ‘diminishing pleasures’ if we have a ‘decent, useful life’, ‘other things to do’. ‘If life at home is more interesting, why go to the movies?’ It’s true that, in going to see a film, you are choosing not to do a lot of other things. If it becomes a daily habit, you may find that you do little else.

In his late thirties, Truffaut told Renoir that he had watched La Règle du jeu over and over again between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, ‘when everything in my life was going so badly’. He said that it helped him ‘to understand the motives of the people around me’. I was more interested in understanding myself: if not my conscious motives – which didn’t seem to extend beyond going to the cinema – then my existential state. Many of the new films I loved concerned young people: sometimes gay (though I was not), such as Christian Bale in Velvet Goldmine and Malik Zidi in François Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks; sometimes female, such as Gina McKee in Michael Winterbottom’s Wonderland, Christina Ricci in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm and Chloë Sevigny in Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco; and occasionally male and heterosexual but out of sorts, like Jonathan Rhys Meyers in Mike Figgis’s The Loss of Sexual Innocence or Leonardo DiCaprio in The Beach. I gravitated towards films that were pensive or a little sad. I also loved close-ups and slow-motion and dream sequences and voiceover and Michael Nyman scores and stories about regret. As Truffaut said, ‘lyricism, always, always lyricism’.

Looking back, I can see that my most extreme cinephilia, which dates to when I was fourteen, coincided with my moving school and my mother developing cancer. I didn’t like the school; I didn’t like my mother being ill. The frequency and intensity of my cinema visits increased. I saw the film that I remember finding most powerful, Wonderland, at the Gate Notting Hill while my mother was in hospital having chemotherapy and I was staying with relatives. I took the Tube with a distant cousin. Otherwise I went alone, by then a strong preference – to Magnolia at the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue after visiting University College Hospital, to the shark-attack movie Deep Blue Sea after St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington.

The cancer went into remission. I settled into the school. Someone introduced me to a place on Greek Street where you could get a ‘vodka mixer’ for £1. I started going to the movies less frequently. On Sunday mornings I would wake up late and calculate whether I had the energy to make it to the Curzon Soho for the afternoon double bill. I almost never did. That wasn’t the end, though. My appetite returned the following year, in time for extraordinary new films by the two pre-eminent American directors, Robert Altman’s Gosford Park and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, on what were becoming extremely rare trips with both of my parents. I saw 23 films at the cinema in July and August 2002, including the sequels Stuart Little 2, Men in Black 2, Spy Kids 2, Austin Powers in Goldmember and the tenth instalment in the Friday the 13th franchise, as well as the first film I ever walked out of, The Wash, with Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre. I kept up that pace until the day I left school in 2004, an occasion marked with a solitary trip to the second-tier disaster film The Day after Tomorrow.

That phase of my life now lies as far in the past as Sontag’s golden age did in 1995. And though I still watch something most days, I don’t experience the same excitement about film culture or filmgoing. I enjoyed almost none of the critical hits of the past few years, and I most look forward to work by my original pet directors. But even at my grouchiest I try to agree with Kael that praising and complaining ‘in the same breath is part of our feeling that movies belong to us’.

The Swiss Centre is now a ‘luxe landmark hotel’ with a blinding façade. The building on Lower Regent Street where I paid £4 to see Fight Club is now a Tesco. The Odeon on Shaftesbury Avenue has been shuttered since August 2004. Many of the original multiplexes have been turned into flats. But there’s also the wonderful new Garden Cinema in Covent Garden, traditionally a filmgoing desert. Everyone says that streaming means you never know what to watch; I lost hundreds of viewing hours struggling to choose from a stack of fifty or sixty covers at branches of Channel, the chain of West London video shops. Clint Eastwood’s most recent film, Juror No. 2, was largely buried by Warner Bros. But my father and I were able to catch it at a multiplex: almost exactly half a century after he had gone with his father – on their final trip together, as it turned out – to see Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, in which even then Eastwood played the older of the partners. It’s hard to get my head around the idea that my lack of enthusiasm for Anora or The Brutalist, let alone Challengers, may just be a trick of the light. Still, the spirit that Sontag believed was gone for good is boisterously present in the hyper-cosmopolitanism of online cinephilia and the eclecticism of the revival scene. At the ICA, where I recently saw Godard’s final work, Scénario(s), an 18-minute installation with a 36-minute documentary to explain it, an Angelopoulos retrospective is just getting going.