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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 />
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