Dear Friends,
I hope that this finds you well and that wherever you are in the world, you are feeling more hopeful than you were in recent months. The painful reality of a global pandemic has brought the large screen jarringly into our lives and homes. We have been invaded by a fiction made all too real by the cleverness of globalisation.
We have all lost so much during these past 18 months. So many freedoms, so many ways to spend leisure time and find recreation and sadly too many loved ones. We have had to find new ways of keeping ourselves entertained or distracted through enforced 'house arrest'.
I have continued to find it impossible to commit to sitting down to watch a movie all the way through - I hate watching in installments! I have kept up my subscription of Sight and Sound and have avidly read it each month (do you like the refreshed format? I do.) I have continued to buy DVDs but only to add to the pile of 'bought and not yet watched'. Just as well retirement is on the horizon. I have not been into a cinema in these Covid infested months either, neither have I been engaging in binging on boxed-sets of this that or the other. I continue to find myself watching as many food programmes as possible and endless recordings of medical emergency programmes of one type or another.
I do however feel the stirrings of a desire to begin watching films afresh. In the autumn I am actually looking forward to restarting a monthly movie in the parish to watch with friends and reflect on together. I have amassed a growing collection to unleash on them!
The pandemic appears to have accelerated a trend that was already underway which has led to many column inches of debate in the online and printed movie media. That is the developing of small screen streaming services for film and that some projects which previously would have been cinematic are now produced and shot for the small screen - although the average size of new flat screen TVs being sold in the UK is 65" - not such a small screen. This has led to much fretting about the long-term viability of cinemas and reflections on the funding that now comes from the streaming giants of Netflix, Amazon and Disney et. al.
In this month's Sight and Sound there is an in depth exploration of the future of cinema and film with many top film-makers contributing their spin on things. I was particularly taken by this from Director Guillermo Del Toro in response to the question 'How do you see the relationship between cinema and the small screen developing' (p47)?
"Access is trumping 'eventising', of course - that's evident. You may like it or not, but we don't live in a monoculture any more and we are fused - in a transhuman istic way - to our portable screens. Those screens are a bio-extension of our 'self' (almost our id) so they serve a very different function than the big screen, which is collective. The small screen is with us almost 24/7. Therefore it 'wins' by virtue of that alone. But the big screen and its collective, almost humbling proportion soothes the soul."
Discuss!
Thank you for reading this and not giving up on my blog. I hope that before too long some new movie reflections will appear.
Please take care and stay safe.
