Cinematic memories…

It’s the eighteenth of January, 2025.  David Lynch recently left us.  My body aches, I’m unemployed, unemployable, and yet somehow moving forward with my current life goals: to make a feature film this year, the year I turn 40.  The winter holidays came and went without much noise.  There was sparse commotion, yet the impending cloud of American fascism on the horizon made me want to revel in Christmastime, to enjoy the songs and the ridiculous, commercialized traditions.  This might be the last time, for awhile, at least, I would be happy, where things would feel safe, at an equilibrium.  So relish this quietness, embrace the nostalgia for once without guilt.  

Despite having a reticence to any new films on the release schedule for the end of December, I ended up spending a week at the cinema and saw these films: The Brutalist, A Real Pain, Nosferatu, Babygirl, Ikiru.  I wasn’t particularly excited about any of these films (save for the Kurosawa picture I’d never seen on 35mm before, which I greatly anticipated), because Anora and Megalopolis were two peaks that I wanted to remain in, for awhile.  Plus, earlier in the year, seeing the rare screening of the Palestinian film, Nahla, and the restoration of the Iranian film The Stranger and the Fog, I’d already had a stellar year of going to the cinema.

Another Robert Eggers film, another Dracula adaptation didn’t really interest me.  A film by a relatively unknown filmmaker, Brady Corbet, about a fictional architect in mid-century America, being touted as a “monumental” film, had me immediately skeptical.  Says who?  The marketing department of the distributors?  The critics?  The filmmaker himself?  I don’t like being told that I should appreciate a particular film over another out of some arbitrary set of standards.

In any case, I knew that I’d rather like to spend my holidays at the cinema, so why not be open-minded and see the films you have no interest in seeing.  So I saw a 70mm screening of The Brutalist at Village East Cinemas (I still call it that, but in 2021 it was bought out by Angelika, and has now been rebranded as “Village East by Angelika”) on a Monday afternoon.  The theater was 80% full, I’d say, with a crowd that looked diverse, both in age and cultural background.  I sat on the aisle seat, near the back of the auditorium, near the wall, and luckily had the entire row to myself.  The film started late, issues with the projectionist.  Fine.  No one was in a real rush, but to start twenty five minutes late felt unprofessional.  When it did begin, it was fine.  The film was just that — fine.  It didn’t blow me away, it didn’t exceed my low expectations.  It was aiming higher than its own reach could span.  Almost every aspect of the film felt cliched and surprising to me in that it wasn’t new, despite its impressions in the media for being a work of great art.  The cinematography was beautiful, but the writing, the acting styles, the overall tone was retrograde.  I sat there shocked that people had been raving about this, and that the film was baiting the audience to see it as historically significant, when it felt slightly immature, fake, a movie about making movies by people who haven’t done anything in their lives except work on movie sets.

The ending of the film, rather, the second part of the film, after intermission, was a cascade of a mess, a rolling stone that gathered too much air and spun rapidly through the air before crashing into grass and mud, drowning in a forgotten reservoir.  One scene after another felt like Corbet was aping P.T. Anderson’s latter epics, There Will Be Blood and The Master, with seemingly intense scenes of protests by the free-thinking artist against the literal-minded financiers and engineers. Toth’s wife, whom we’d only heard about through voiceover and in conversation, arrives and is wheelchair bound, accompanied by a mute niece. Tick every box of tropes that Oscar voters sate for, and that’s been done to death. Themes of art versus commerce, the American immigrant experience, being Jewish in a Gentile America. Big themes, big ideas, not enough experience to convince me any of this had the weight of reality.

After the screening, in the lobby, we were given a unique poster of the film, and a small booklet on the project Laszlo Toth designs for the Pennsylvanian titan in the story of the film.  I’d have been disappointed by the film if I had anticipated its arrival, but I didn’t, and so what I left feeling the cinema was a certain depression.

So many people would think this film was a masterpiece, and perhaps as an antidote to the superhero bullshit that we’ve been culturally fed the last decade or so, this would be a masterpiece.  However, it read as a most pretentious film.  A film by someone who had just gotten into arthouse, international cinema, and has their take on “proper art film” to be the most basic, textbook version of that concept.  Was there a collective cinematic amnesia that Netflix and Marvel had given to the public?  Perhaps. Or, perhaps, Brady Corbet was an ambitious filmmaker with delusions and a bloated, self-servicing idea of movies.

Monday wasn’t a good start to the week of movies, but Tuesday was better.  I’d see A Real Pain at Cinema Village, on 12th street, just off of University Place, near Union Square.

A film which I’d even little desire to see, Jesse Eisenberg’s picture on two American Jewish cousins who travel to Poland on a Holocaust tour and visit their Grandmother’s birthplace, didn’t interest me in the slightest.  It sounded like a downer. However, it was leaving cinemas soon, and I’d recently listened to some interviews featuring the two main actors (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin), and their rapport made me want to see it. How they interacted with each other felt genuine and real, and that compelled me. Also, at this point, I simply wanted to be aware of what was in the cultural zeitgeist so that I knew what people were referencing. The only theater that was playing it was Cinema Village, and so after ambling around the holiday village in the park, and having a slice, I ventured through the cold, empty streets.

The weather that day was brittle, and it was so inviting that the auditorium inside the small two-screen cinema was toasty warm.  Now, most of the transplants had left the city, and it felt a bit hollowed out, like it does most holidays, so that day the cinema was sparsely populated.  Good news for me, not so great for the filmmakers. Again, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to the movie, which I had no real impressions of aside from the interviews I’d heard, but I was safe and warm in the confines of a gentle cinema surrounded by people forty years older than me.

What lacked in The Brutalist, was found twofold in A Real Pain: truthful humanity.  While the subject of Jewishness in America was dealt with in the former film, it was painfully obvious, unsubtle, and disingenuous.  This isn’t to say that one who isn’t part of a culture can talk about, make films, art, etc., about that specific culture (without having it feel exploitative).  I’m assuming Corbet isn’t Jewish (because if he was, he’d tell every journalist in every interview), and while he may have done tons of research on the essence and reality of what it meant to escape war, survive the Holocaust, and move to post-war America — even if main actor Adrien Brody can pull from his own background and find truth — Corbet’s take on it felt too cinematic, unreal.  This was is in stark contrast to Eisenberg’s film — which he wrote — that was culled from his own personal experiences.  Eisenberg went on one of these tours, his grandmother survived the camps and lived in Poland — the house the characters visit at the end of the film is, in fact, the actual house his grandmother lived before leaving for America.  Because of the relevance Eisenberg has to being of that culture, the entire film exuded truth. The truth of dealing with grief of death, facing it head on and making it palpable through physical interaction, not some esoteric dream. Sure, some of the dialogue was overwritten, perhaps, but considering that it started as a stage play, it made sense there would be long scenes of dialogue. Whereas The Brutalist had characters spouting out literal phrases of what was happening to them, some scenes being just expositional without any subtext at all.

I hadn’t expected Eisenberg’s film to be as good as it was, either.  The editing was tight, the cinematography was crisp and beautiful, and the soundtrack (mostly Chopin) ethereal — a contrast of beauty to the gut-wrenching pain of grief that some characters confronted on their tour. The comparisons between the day’s screening and the one previous had me considering if every film I saw would play against the other, if I’d be able to find connections, thematically, technically, between such a disparate slew of films: a period piece, a film about grief in the 21st century, a vampire horror film, a satirical erotic thriller, and a film about the life un-lived, striving for meaning in the face of death.

On Christmas Day, I saw Nosferatu and Babygirl at Brooklyn Academy of Music.  At BAM, I got there early and sat in the middle, right side.  The audience that filtered in was all dressed in black, ready for a seance, it looked like.

It’s not fun to not enjoy a new film, nor rip on the director/writer of the film that’s not met your expectations.  I want to like new films.  I want contemporary cinema to be exciting and progressive.  I don’t want it to suck.  Not vampirically (is that a word?), but elementally.  To be continually disappointed with my generation and their films is disheartening, especially considering the big names of American filmmakers seem to all be making period films (Eggers, Corbet), uninterested in the present.  I listen to their interviews, and they all say the same thing, “It’s really boring to film a cell phone,” and “cars are ugly,” well look at Coralie Fargeat, look at Halina Reijn.  They’re able to make films that exist in the current world and make them exciting, unique, with ideas, images and stories that are breathtakingly subversive.  It’s not like it can’t be done.  Maybe the filmmakers who are getting the most attention from the “cinephile crowd,” the “film bros,” are the pretentious men stuck in their own fantastical worlds.  Gia Coppola, Lynne Ramsey, Luca Guadagnino, Sean Baker — all contemporary filmmakers who can live in the real world of the present and still make soulful films.

So to reiterate, I didn’t like Robert Eggers’ take on Nosferatu, and the process of explaining why, or re-living that film, parsing over my impressions, that’s not a place I want to return to now.  It’ll have been done to death in some circles, and I don’t want to pile onto the dialogue with my own impressions. Suffice it to say, obviously, other people have enjoyed it, and that’s great.  Let them enjoy it.  At least now Eggers can make more films, and at least that’s one more win for avant-garde film to become mainstream (Ari Aster dropped the ball on that one).

The film ends, I’m once again disappointed, I walk through the lobby and outdoors into the wintry mid-day sun.  I stand and contemplate what next I should do.  Babygirl isn’t showing for another couple of hours, so I could walk back to my apartment, take a nap, eat, in enough time to walk back through Park Slope and Fort Greene to the movie theater.  As I’m mulling over all of this, I see a familiar face walking towards my direction.  It’s a filmmaker I once knew.  It’s the second time in a couple of months I’ve seen this dude, and I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing.  He and his friend walk into the cinema to see whatever’s new on Christmas Day, and I brush it off.

It’s strange, though, when you see people you knew in a past life, another time, and fail to acknowledge it.  I don’t know how to rationalize it, this reaction to life and my aversion towards the unexpected.  I see someone I know, maybe we make eye contact, and then I let them pass by, whatever interaction we could have, I let slip away.  Is it always up to me to start the conversation?  Maybe I look too dour to be approached?  Regardless, the moment arrives and passes and some interaction with life goes untouched, a thread of something tangible that no longer will be.  The interaction could be with anyone, for any number of reasons, to tie together any amount of disconnected, unresolved stories from past experiences.  That day, it was with a filmmaker I’d once known.

Someone on the rise in the independent film world, someone who was gaining clout, but had not made appearances yet.  Someone I’d known since 2005, and had kept brief, sporadic communications with, and subsequently lost communication with, walked away. What do you do in those moments? Genuinely. What do you do? Speak up? Put yourself in a position of vulnerability and say “hi”? How do you come across as genuine and not someone seeking something else? (everyone’s out for some gain, it seems, in the city) I don’t know. I don’t know how to be myself to the outside world anymore, let alone one person, so I remain silent.

Making and keeping friends well into your 30’s was difficult. Now turning 40, my circle of friends is even smaller than it was ten years ago. Simply finding people whom you can talk about writing with feels like an impossibility, let alone filmmakers, or people with similar tastes in art, cinema, music, whatever. Of course, my obsession with class and my place within it, where I come from versus where I want to go, all culminates in some weird persona that could be difficult to approach. Maybe, I don’t know. A few hours went past before the sun fell below the horizon and I stood in the lobby waiting to see Babygirl.

The lobby was full of people waiting for A Complete Unknown and Nosferatu. I was the only one waiting for the new Halina Reijn film. Our cinema was, eventually, full. Awkward fits of laughter at anything sexual, but everyone seemed into the film. I couldn’t help but relate to the power dynamics of the relationship in the film, the relationship that was an affair, or the affair that became a relationship. I watched through dewy eyes, that I wasn’t living anymore. I hadn’t been living. Not even the undead. I may as well have been. The night was cold and the wind was hard, frigid. I recorded my thoughts, which was overcome with the sexuality of the film, and not the underlying core of the text: attraction, suppression, eroticism, desire, the release of an underground want. It was Christmas night, and I went home and watched Sing Sing, falling asleep in a haze afterwards. Tomorrow would be an Akira Kurosawa film at Metrograph.

Briefly, a man sat next to me in the cinema and would not stop laughing throughout the entirety of Kurosawa’s Ikiru. I probably spent more time noticing that when one person on the opposite side of the auditorium laughed, it became contagious to the man next to me, and he had to laugh, too. And not just a chuckle or chortle, a gut-busting guffaw. I suppose I could’ve moved, but I chose my seat for a reason — no one else had purchased seats next to me. Then, obviously, in the time from when I purchased the ticket until now, people thought, hey, I’ll buy a ticket and sit right next to this random person. The distraction of wanting to knuckle punch this doofus in the nose ruined the movie for me, for a bit, not entirely, but I genuinely wanted to tell him, “shut the fuck up, stop laughing.”

Despite that, I fell back into the groove of Kurosawa’s humanist film.

I think, me wanting to have this film create meaning for myself attracted this asshole cinephile to sit next to me. The meaning wasn’t going to be found in the film, but in the moments afterwards, in the silence of my memory of Takashi Shimura’s singing, and the fading light of day. In the people I encountered and the paths I chose to take which weren’t rote, which were alternative to my routes. In the embrace of life, I’d find meaning for myself and try to live. But even now, as I write this, I may as well be a mummy, wrapped up in dry tea leaves and unfulfilled promises.

January was beset with one chaotic letdown after another. I wonder if it’s become a trend to make the month lose its once held stance as the boring month, and make it as fucking exciting as possible in the most horrific ways imaginable. A filmmaker dies, a wildfire starts and obliterates entire townships, another filmmaker dies, America embraces the far right fascists and does away with Democracy, people fall ill, people die, the weather becomes intergalactically cold. A filmmaker dies, an artist dies. The end of an era, the beginning of artistic growth, the release of peace unto the world.

For a majority of January, I’ve spent it depressed at all of this loss. However, what mindful thought I’ve arrived at is a reminder of something I’d forgotten. If nothing else is working out, if you can’t interact with people in real life, if you can’t get a job, if you’re poor, if you’re despondent and hopeless, at least you have your health. If you have nothing else, you’re not sick (knocks on wood). Foster a positive, healthy outlook and see what happens. That’s all you can control, that’s it.

I would’ve had a more in-depth, insightful obituary for David Lynch, but I’ve droned on long enough. His films, insights and inspirations have had a profound effect on me since I was a kid (I think the first films of his I saw was Dune when I was 4 or 5), through adulthood. Lynch’s aura will always be with me in film and sound.

Despite the dreariness of a snow-less New York, in spite of the depression of living a time that feels oppressive,I took advantage of being in the one place I knew where I’d be accepted and be happy — at the cinema. It’s a real refuge and a dream machine.