My earliest experience of film was unfortunate. I grew up at a time when radio was still the king. It was The Foley Family and The Kennedys of Castleross rather than Glenroe or Fair City. The nest of chimney-top aerials was only beginning to cloud the skyline in Dublin in the mid-1950s. The idea of a homegrown television service probably seemed more remote than the fact of it actually turned out to be. Which is all a way of saying that I encountered film before I ever saw anything on television.
It was my mother's idea. Film had meant a lot to her in her youth. She was in her mid-20s by the time the talkies arrived. The cinema in her native Dungarvan disseminated not only films, but also popular songs. She could still recall, late in life, what songs the cinema organist had used in which movies. And the little-man perspective of Charlie Chaplin's slapstick didn't just hit her funnybone; it also triggered her sensitivities to injustice.
So, when I was four, I was given the treat of a visit to "the pictures".
I have only some vague visual images to bring back the experience. I remember seeing the smooth, modernist exterior of the Adelphi Cinema in Middle Abbey Street. I remember the strangeness of going into the dark auditorium, feebly lit by the flickering images on the large screen. Those were the days of rollover screenings, when there were people who seemed quite happy to see a film from a particular point to the end, and then watch up to the point where they had come in. I remember an angle from the stairs towards the seats, with the screen in the background.
I don't know whether that's an image from the beginning or from the end of the experience. And the end was sudden and dramatic. I suspect it wasn't long into The Baby and the Battleship, "simple-minded lower decks farce", in the terse dismissal of Halliwell's Film Guide. The crunch came with a shot of an unsympathetic face, looming in close-up. I'd simply never seen a face that large before, and it scared the wits out of me. I signalled my terror. We made our retreat. And I never did find out what happened to the baby, or the battleship.
It was an inauspicious beginning. But perhaps the crucial point was in the strength of my response rather than the direction of it. Film soon became a major pleasure, in parish hall screenings, city centre cinemas, and at the State Theatre in Phibsboro, the nearest local that figured in my mother's thinking as being not too "rough". And the connection stuck, right through my teens, and was fully sealed by the experience of international cinema through the Film Society in TCD and the old Irish Film Theatre on Earlsfort Terrace. So, obviously, something like the Dublin Film Festival was just made for me. But, in the way things do, it escaped me for quite a while. When you're young you've got lots of time but not much money. When you're older and have the money, the time is more scarce. By the time the film festival started I was up to my eyes in newspaper and magazine work.
And, as anyone who's edited a magazine that's run on a shoestring will confirm, running a small magazine is as demanding as having a baby in the house. Only, unlike the baby, the magazine may never grow up into a less demanding phase. And in truth, the delights of things like the film festival which were being denied me by the unrelenting demands of the magazine (not to mention the amount of money it owed me) led to a redrawing of priorities - out went the magazine and in came the festival.
Festivals are different things to different people. This is as true of opera in Wexford or jazz in Cork as it is of film in Dublin. And it is especially true in the case of people who buy season tickets for the DFF. There are those who use the festival to steal a march on their friends. You hear them before the lights go down, talking in strange, slightly boastful tones of the festival films they've managed to see in advance. The festival always enables them to chalk up an even longer list of things they mostly won't bother to see again whenever they're finally released in Ireland.
My own approach is basically the opposite. One of the first things I do on getting the festival programme is scratch from the list those films which are going to be released in Ireland. So, when people ask me for a response to a particular year's programming, I always feel obliged to explain that, for very good reasons, my personal selections are sometimes born of avoidance. The latest Woody Allen, new Hollywood talking point or Oscar hopeful (or Oscar success, given the April dates of this year's festival) rarely secure my attention, unless the alternatives are unattractive.
Of course, for heavy-duty season ticket holders, what's attractive or viable is something of a moveable feast. If you're going to watch four or five films a day, which I mostly manage, by taking leave from work for the duration of the festival, you need to take care about what follows what. The Theo Angelopoulos season probably sent me looking for lighter fare to reduce the demands of concentration. I try to leaven the sequence of sub-titled films with ones that don't demand to be read as well as watched. And at the same time I try to protect those opportunities for leaps into the unknown - for instance, films from Israel (which, for reasons I'm not sure I fully understand, remain something of a closed book), or Iran (which, with minimal resources and fuss, seem to be able to turn the everyday into the mythic). The late arrival of a series of Iranian films at a recent festival event was a major disappointment that re-scheduling (at times I wasn't free) did little to lift.
When I first started going, the festival was based in the Screen cinema, not the most luxurious of venues (though the seating and projection did improve), but one which had a mysterious element of atmosphere in abundance.
There were aspects of the festival routines that reminded me of boarding school, the queuing, the marshalling of space by the ushers in the tiny foyer, the often appalling state of the toilets. For anyone who was not a VIP, who wanted to see films in sequence, the challenge was to avoid the exit to the open air between films and the relegation to the end of a long queue. Boarding school, of course, where insane prioritisations applied to minor privileges, provided a good grounding in techniques of lingering and avoiding unwanted attention. While others were periodically banished from the warmth of the foyer, I somehow manage to stay loose inside, free of the queue.
The semi-nomadic festival of two years ago (split between the Ambassador and the Screen) and last year's move to what was then the Virgin (now UGC) multiplex have seriously altered the festival experience. And it's not just a matter of intangible atmosphere. There was last year's ridiculous attempt to enforce numbered seating. And the quality of the projection was in some respects the worst I've ever experienced anywhere. The obsession with enlargement was so great that problems with sub-titles disappearing off the bottom of the screen were regular, and whole films were ruined when the visual style was calculated to use the edge of the frame. Characters appeared regularly half-in, half-out of the frame, with the tops of their heads lopped off, and with even some instances of from-the-nose-down-only appearances.
As things stand, I'm tempted to ask for assurances on projection standards before forking out this year, and I hope that films like Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge, with its astonishing use of screen space, won't appear in retrospectives until the problem is remedied. (Film Festival director Paul Taylor explains that these problems happened because the cinema could not show films made in the "academy ratio" size - he has assurances that this year it will - Ed).
The last two years have been difficult ones for the festival and its fans. Traipsing up and down O'Connell Street between the Screen and the Ambassador on a tight schedule was no-one's idea of fun. And last year's programme included an unaccountable number of films that simply didn't seem to be worth seeing for any reason whatsoever.
A festival programme is a delicately balanced thing. My own experience from festivals - of whatever kind, at home and abroad - is that they need to give you the feeling that they're surpassing, no matter how slightly, your expectations. If the surprises are pleasant, the risky if flawed endeavours seem to have been worth the trouble, then the cumulative experience will be a good one. Tilt the balance slightly and the negativity is multiplied.
I haven't looked in detail at this year's programme yet, but I see that it's narrowed its focus - two films at a time to choose from at UGC rather than the three of the past. But with a total of some 92 feature films in the programme (when you include screenings at the IFC and UCIs in the suburbs), they can't really have got it wrong again. At least, I hope not.
