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Viva Lewes Issue #130 July 2017

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COLUMN<br />

David Jarman<br />

Cinema days<br />

‘There were years when<br />

I went to the cinema<br />

almost every day and<br />

maybe even twice a<br />

day, and those were the<br />

years between ’36 and<br />

the war, the years of my<br />

adolescence. It was a<br />

time when the cinema<br />

became the world for<br />

me’.<br />

That’s how Italo<br />

Calvino begins his<br />

A Cinema-Goer’s Autobiography, one of his five<br />

‘memory exercises’, published by his widow in<br />

1990 under the title La Strada di San Giovanni.<br />

There have been similar times in my life. At<br />

Cambridge there was the Arts Cinema and every<br />

college seemed to have its own film club. There<br />

was even a society devoted solely to showing<br />

the films of the Marx Brothers. It was the only<br />

society I joined. And so I could easily have seen a<br />

couple of films a day; quite often I did. I came to<br />

recognise other lonely cineastes as they emerged<br />

from a showing, blinking in the daylight<br />

to which they were becoming increasingly<br />

unaccustomed.<br />

When I started working in London in 1976, I<br />

lived in Oakley Street. (In his autobiography the<br />

journalist Michael Wharton, of ‘Peter Simple’<br />

fame, describes Prince of Wales Drive, Battersea<br />

as ‘one of those London streets, like certain<br />

streets in Chelsea, Oakley Street or Redcliffe<br />

Gardens, of which it is said that everybody has<br />

lived there at one period of his life and some<br />

people twice, once on the way up and once on<br />

the way down’.) I used to walk over from Oakley<br />

Street to see the frequent double features at<br />

the Paris Pullman that started at eleven o’clock<br />

in the evening. The Everyman Cinema in<br />

Hampstead now<br />

seems to show only<br />

blockbusters, but<br />

in the seventies the<br />

programme was<br />

far more diverse. I<br />

remember trailing<br />

up to Hampstead<br />

four weeks running<br />

to do justice to an<br />

exhaustive Greta<br />

Garbo season. The<br />

Academy Cinema<br />

in Oxford Street was another favourite. Marcel<br />

Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis seemed to come<br />

round there every year. I saw it every time, but<br />

recently my wife and youngest son watched<br />

it on DVD. They both thought it was utterly<br />

ridiculous.<br />

And yet at other times of my life I’ve spent<br />

months, even years not going anywhere near a<br />

cinema. Early indications at the Depot suggest<br />

this is going to change again. Six films I’ve seen<br />

in the first seventeen days! And it was seeing a<br />

new print of Fellini’s La Strada at the Depot that<br />

prompted my rereading of Calvino’s essay which,<br />

as the author admits, ‘Fellini himself recently<br />

convinced me to write’.<br />

Calvino and Fellini both grew up in seaside<br />

towns, Fellini in Rimini, Calvino in San Remo<br />

on the Ligurian coast. Their cinematic fellowfeeling<br />

flourished, as Calvino explains, ‘because<br />

behind all the wretchedness of the days in the<br />

café, the walk to the pier, the friend who dresses<br />

in women’s clothes and then gets drunk and<br />

weeps, I recognise the unsatisfied youth of the<br />

cinema-goer, of a provincial world that judges<br />

itself in relation to the cinema, in a constant<br />

comparison between itself and that other world<br />

that is the cinema’.<br />

27

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