The Church of Movies

The most successful documentary film of the last twelve months is probably The Act of Killing , Joshua Oppenheimer's startling and original exploration of the cinema ganster death squads in 1960s Indonesia. Recently Nick Fraser, editor of the BBC's Storyville series, wrote an article for the Observer berating the film for being tasteless. He also accused the filmmaker of indulging mass murderers in a manner that served to teach the audience nothing. I am not an expert on documentary film but like most couch potatoes, I've seen a few over the years and I would assert that it is not necessarily the job of a documentary filmmaker to be tasteful. Sometimes tastelessness provides a straighter line to truth. One film that for me proved a significantly more troubling ethical dilemma than The Act of Killing was The Bridge , Eric Steel's 2006 film about people committing suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Steel's crew filmed the bridge for...

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...

My grandfather could be quite serious. Whenever we met, he had a tendency to open the conversation with an obituary monologue, recalling the recent deaths of people I was supposed to know (but never did) and the various tragedies their families had been through in the preceding half century or so. It was difficult to know how to reply when I was 12. Sympathetic nodding seemed to go down well but was taken as a sign of encouragement as my grandfather reeled off the name of yet another person who had died without me ever knowing that they had lived. Probably my grandfather was at a stage in life when it was getting difficult to live in the present moment. Obituaries were interesting but they were a constant reminder of life slowing down and slipping away; they rendered the past more relevant than the present.  I don't read obituaries like my grandfather did and I definitely don't recite them. Perhaps that day is coming. However, I often do struggle to live in the presen...