Watch: A Per­son­al Ode to Going to the Cinema

The first few days of lock­down, which start­ed for me a week before every­one else when my cin­e­ma job was put on hold, set the tone for the last four months. They were large­ly spent catch­ing up with films I hadn’t seen from var­i­ous direc­tors, some of whom, such as Pedro Almod­ó­var, I already loved while oth­ers, like Richard Lin­klater, I devel­oped a renewed inter­est in.

While Almodóvar’s films remain mas­ter­ful, it was in the work of Lin­klater and Jim Jar­musch and their debut fea­tures – It’s Impos­si­ble to Learn to Plow by Read­ing Books and Stranger Than Par­adise – that I found some­thing more res­o­nant. Both are not entire­ly suc­cess­ful but they each have their own clear voice and were made with sub­stan­tial­ly few­er resources than either director’s lat­er projects. See­ing them at a time when con­ven­tion­al film­mak­ing prac­tices are deemed poten­tial health risks does make you feel, as restric­tions are slow­ly being lift­ed, that cre­at­ing new pieces of visu­al work isn’t com­plete­ly beyond reach.

Anoth­er source of inspi­ra­tion came in May when Eliz­a­beth Sankey’s fea­ture-length video essay Roman­tic Com­e­dy was released. Com­prised entire­ly of clips from films in the epony­mous genre and large­ly dri­ven by Sankey’s obser­va­tion­al nar­ra­tion, it ignit­ed some­thing in me that I hadn’t felt from oth­er films released online recently.

It was Sankey’s film that ulti­mate­ly inspired me to cre­ate ​‘This Is…’, a video trib­ute to some of the films and cin­e­ma-going mem­o­ries that have shaped my inter­ests over the years. I’ve even won­dered if I would’ve made the video at all if it weren’t for the tremen­dous anx­i­ety I feel towards the future of film exhi­bi­tion at present.

And then there are the sto­ries I hear of film­mak­ers div­ing back into their work irre­spec­tive of lim­i­ta­tions. Bait direc­tor Mark Jenkin is cur­rent­ly between projects, as is Almod­ó­var who com­plet­ed a long ges­tat­ing script enti­tled Madres Para­le­las dur­ing lock­down and is now film­ing an adap­ta­tion of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice with Til­da Swin­ton in the Eng­lish language.

Almod­ó­var even marked the occa­sion with a pic­ture of him­self wear­ing a face mask as he held a clap­per board, a sen­ti­ment echoed by Kevin Smith as he shot his own short film under sim­i­lar mea­sures. As the state of the world changes on a dai­ly basis, I look to these indi­vid­u­als and what they’ve accom­plished for the sense of encour­age­ment that helped me to fin­ish ​‘This Is…’ and will hope­ful­ly help me realise many more projects soon.