John Pearson says see films in a cinema. Try the real thing.
Christmas is coming, with its usual offering of films, both at cinemas and on TV – this last the customary mix of recent TV premieres and staple old favourites: Mary Poppins, The Muppet Christmas Carol, The Dambusters perhaps?
Since my first visit to see a film, nearly 60 years ago, I have been totally hooked. The outing, to a long gone cinema in Doncaster, was arranged by an enterprising Aunt, trying to fill another afternoon of my stay with her. It was a pirate story – total escapism. I was captivated by this brave new world; colourful sets and characters doing exciting things, bringing to life stories I had previously only seen in picture books. Subsequently came trips to the cinema with my father. He used to invest heavily in these father-son bonding exercises – always opting for the circle rather than the stalls, 2/6 rather than 2/-, no trip complete without an ice cream for both of us!
I guess that children today expect by right the wonders which can be created by CGI (computer-generated imagery), whereby anything can happen, and it looks real. This has been used to create, amongst other things, talking animals and an army of perfect 3D characters doing the impossible. But I shall never forget Mary Poppins (1964), staring in wonder at the stairway carved in the smoke from the chimneys above Victorian London, carrying the characters into the sky, or the simple but beautiful recreation of St Paul’s Cathedral set within its pre-Blitz surroundings… ‘Feed the birds, tuppence a bag!’ Simple by today’s standards yes, but magical.
Over the intervening years I have seen perhaps a hundred films in cinemas. I am a two a year man – always a far better experience for me than the same thing seen at home on DVD. Close Encounters (1977), for example, can never be as impressive in your front room as it is on the wide screen, seeing the whole sky ahead of you gradually filling with the alien spaceship.
In these relatively bland days for the would-be adventurer, denied the opportunity personally to fly a Spitfire, to go into space or man a submarine, films can take me there. They can put imaginative new life into otherwise dry old Shakespeare (as in the modern Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann, 1996). In the cinema I can stand alongside Mr Turner as he creates one or more of his masterpieces (2014), can travel with small boats to rescue the soldiers from the beaches in Dunkirk (2017) and join the invading armies on D Day in Saving Private Ryan (1998), all in vividly recreated detail.
As well as seeking relatively easy thrills, escapism, we can see presentations of history, or sober commentary on contemporary everyday life, as in I, Daniel Blake (Sofia 122). Issues of our time, such as ageing, can be reflected on, albeit through fictional settings, as in the imagined later life of Sherlock Holmes (Sofia 117).
Film is creative art, an interpretation by the script writer, the director and the actors. We see what we are meant to see. This is an attempt at representing the ‘facts’ (as understood by the writer). So, when viewing the film, can we be sure words were actually said? If in fact characters had said something entirely different, or did indeed, could events and thus history have turned out differently? My father was always rather dismissive of those films in which the Americans seemed to win WW2 unaided. He knew it was really won by him and his fellow humble airframe fitters, somewhere behind the lines in North Africa, Italy and France.
For history vividly brought to life don’t miss the timely new film They Shall Not Grow Old, actual footage from WW1 skilfully converted to a colour version by Peter Jackson, in which the mud is mud coloured, and the blood is red!
I lost my belief in God long ago. Thanks to cinema I still believe in magic. Incidentally, I have just viewed a short trailer for the new Mary Poppins. 55 years older but little wiser since the original, I suspect I shall suspend disbelief and go and watch it. Once again, it looks magical!