The Trailer

In 1983 the Odeon Cinema in Bishop Auckland closed and I felt miserable about it. For the three years since we moved to the town, this was a building I visited to escape the increasing seriousness of adolescence, a place where the magic of earlier days of childhood could be recaptured in exciting onscreen adventures that included The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Clash of the Titans. I enjoyed going so much that I even went to see Robin Williams as Popeye.

Others, however, were not so committed to the film-going way of life. The arrival of home video played a part but perhaps even more significant was the fact that many cinemas were in a dilapidated state and were sometimes staffed by people who had lost touch with the idea that a night at the pictures was supposed to be special and entertaining. Sitting in a chair with broken springs, and hearing a soundtrack though fuzzy speakers with your shoes glued to the floor by yesterday's pop was hardly the stuff of the picture palaces of old, especially if the film you were watching was George and Mildred: the Movie.  With this in mind the Odeon chain decided to close about half of their cinemas and re-develop the remaining ones so that the film-going experience could be special again. I recall going to the refurbished Odeon in Harrogate to watch Starman and being wowed at the plush new seating and amazing Dolby stereo. There was still hardly anyone there (I was alone for the first twenty minutes) but the manager was so proud of the development (and / or bored) that he came and told me all about it. From what he said I could see the wisdom of closing the Odeon in Bishop Auckland but over the next few years I watched the building deteriorate. The paint peeled off, the windows were smashed in, and eventually signs appeared that read, 'Dangerous building: Do not enter.' Finally the cinema was condemned and demolished, and I couldn't help but see this as highly symbolic, like one of those foreign films they showed late at night on BBC2 that I would sit through partly out of intellectual curiosity but mostly in the hope that there would be rude bits (which there often were). In this symbolism the cinema stood for the imaginative world of my childhood in Liverpool, where every day was an adventure and people laughed at my jokes. In adolescence, the escapism and joy of my imagination had fallen into disrepair and was in danger of being demolished and replaced by a new branch of Fine Fayre.

I have always been evangelical about films and part of the explanation is religious. Many of the more revivalist sermons I heard as a teenager followed a formulaic pattern that portrayed life in bleak terms.  We were to turn away from the ways of this sinful world and take up our crosses as we followed the way of Christ. The message may have been well-intentioned but it was no fun, at least not on this side of the grave. By contrast, films portrayed joy and meaning in a dance routine, a corny romance, or fights with aliens from outer space. Films also offered an alluring kind of immortality. Watch Cary Grant being seduced by Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest and he is as witty, stylish and suave as he was in 1959. He hasn't changed at all and you might even make the case that the process of film restoration and the availability of High Definition media has left him looking even better than he ever did. Show a child an old Laurel and Hardy short and there's a good chance they will laugh as heartily as their great-grandparents did back in the 1930s. These flickering images on a screen may date but often that is part of their charm and in indulging my enthusiasm for early silent comedy I am keeping Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and the less well-known Max Davidson, alive. For them, immortality is to be found in the next audience to gasp at one of their stunts, laugh at a pratfall, or cheer in appreciation. To refer to the experience of sitting in a cinema watching a film as a religious experience may seem outrageous but it is a well-rehearsed argument. In Film as Religion, John C. Lyden argues that popular films perform an informal religious function in contemporary culture, working as rituals, myths to explore our values, and, I would add, visual poems that occasionally have the power to lift us towards the transcendent (see, for example, Stephen Soderbergh's version of Solaris). With this in mind I thought it might be interesting to start a blog that is all about the spiritual value of the films I watch but I am using the word spiritual loosely (I am a Unitarian after all and according to joke legend we're so liberal we got the ten commandments down to three suggestions).   So that's the trailer over. Enjoy the movie.