Cinema nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

Earlier this week, an image from the Toronto International Film Festival’s print programme snuck online. Not surprisingly, the good people at that Canadian event were keen to promote the world premiere of Steven Spielberg’s enticing, allegedly autobiographical The Fabelmans. Paul Dano and Michelle Williams, playing variations on the director’s parents, sit either side of (I think) Mateo Zoryon Francis-Deford as seven-year-old Sammy in what looks like a movie palace of the old school. His mouth is caught in a perfect “o” of delight.

It didn’t take long for the world to notice that the image greatly resembled a similar one from Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. That shot showed the little boy and his family in similar raptures while sitting at a cinema 5,000 miles from Spielberg’s hometown of Phoenix. Twelve months after the Branagh film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, Sam Mendes will, in a week or so, give the world his Empire of Light in the same place. The trailer takes us back to an English coastal cinema of the 1980s. Olivia Colman, Colin Firth and Toby Jones are there to summon up matinees of days past.

Directors almost immediately grasped that cinema was not just an artform; it was also a source of community and solace

Cinema’s love affair with itself is almost as old as the medium itself. In 1924′s Sherlock Jr, Buster Keaton played a projectionist who falls asleep and dreams himself into the film being shown. Directors almost immediately grasped that cinema was not just an art form; it was also a source of community and solace. In this part of the world, the word itself refers both to the medium and the building in which it is exhibited.

It requires only a moment’s thought to summon up memorable films that revolve around picture palaces. The very title of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show confirms how the fate of the movie theatre parallels that of the scuffed north Texas town. Woody Allen’s own favourite among his many films, The Purple Rose of Cairo from 1985, finds Mia Farrow escaping misery at the cinema and – in a converse of Sherlock Jr – welcoming characters from the film into the real world.

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There are books about reading. But, despite what inspirational posters at the library may claim, a book is not a physical destination. You can’t literally hide from unfriendly parents, sarcastic teachers or philistine bullies within the covers of Wuthering Heights. Nor can you share communal joy with family and friends in quite the same way. There may still be parents who read novels aloud to teenage children, but such characters are mostly the stuff of horror stories. Can you imagine the embarrassment?

The most stubborn subgenre here – the one nodded at by Belfast and (we’re guessing) The Fabelmans – is the movie-movie that deals with childhood awakening. Though there are many who find it a little too gooey, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso from 1988 remains an unavoidable Goliath of the form. The cinematic transcendence wrought in that Italian film seems universal. Víctor Erice’s magnificent The Spirit of the Beehive from 1973 details how a screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein bewitches a six-year-old girl in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. In Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes from 1992, a young boy has a quasi-religious experience with cinema of the 1950s in a poignantly imagined Liverpool.

So, this has been going on for a long time in many different places. It does feel, however, as if directors have become more interested in childhood cinematic epiphanies than ever before. Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, an Oscar-winner in 2018, returned to the director’s neighbourhood in Mexico City during the 1960s. The film did not explicitly point towards a future career in cinema for the protagonist, but made sure to build action around a screening of the wacky 1966 comedy La Grande Vadrouille.

Personal longing

So, what’s going on? The word nostalgia was originally coined to describe a morbid, near-psychotic homesickness, a yearning to shake off unwelcome surrounding and climb back into the nest. For the first century or so of cinema history, the type of films discussed above were principally concerned with a personal longing. The parents who are no longer there. A childlike naivete that can never be recovered. There is no more ardent a nostalgist than Terence Davies, but even he would admit that some version of the old collective cinematic experience still existed in 1992. If it was raining outside in John Major’s England, a punter might walk to the cinema and, after running down the available romcoms, thrillers and dramas, find some entertainment closely tailored to his or her tastes.

There is still hope for theatrical exhibition, but the notion of the cinema – that’s to say the building itself – as central to adolescent development has long gone

Little of that remains. A small selection of blockbusters bring back mass audiences seven or eight times a year. The romcom has migrated to Netflix. High-end dramas appear briefly during awards season to modest box office receipts. Arthouses still offer a decent array of quality titles. But the great middle ground of film has been abandoned. There is still hope for theatrical exhibition, but the notion of the cinema – that’s to say the building itself – as central to adolescent development has long gone. The current wave of nostalgia pieces is not just mourning lost youth; it is mourning the dying of a popular culture.