We were halfway through Sunset Boulevard (1950), Billy Wilders’ noir masterpiece on a past-her-prime film star, Norma Desmond, gone mad due to her forced retirement. A great white light ripped across the screen left to right. The film had burst into flames within the projector.
Ümit Mesut, the projectionist who runs the film club Ciné Real – one of the last to play films in their original 16mm format – swiftly yanked the film out of the Bell & Howell projector, cut off the ruined bits, and handed us a fragment while relacing the reel.
Holding this salvaged bit of 16mm film to the light above, you could see the individual frames of the scene just before the movie had ignited: in Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond conducts her own screening of the flicks she starred in during the 1920s silent era. Wilder shows her desperately, tragically trying to recapture lost time. Norma rises, her face illuminated by the projector light. She seems, for at least a second, a frame, to be restored back to her original stardom… Like with Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, Wilder crafts a dizzying film-within-a-film in this dark noir – dark not just for its traditional chiaroscuro lighting, but its blackly comedic tone too.
The timing was intriguing. The celluloid film enkindles, within the projector, the very same moment we were watching a scene concerning projectors and screenings, fantasy and insanity. It is the nitrate within old film which is responsible for this flammability. This famously serves as the plot of Cinema Paradiso (1988).
It is only by watching classic film on actual film, with its sporadic flickers, the dusty light crawling its way towards the screen, the crackling of the projector’s motor running, that you get such moments of magic and chaos. And, like Norma Desmond, it now feels tragically confined to a bygone age, outmoded in a digital era.
Susan Sontag’s 1996 essay, “The Decay of Cinema”, laments the end of cinephilia. In common parlance this means a love of films. The essay speaks more to an infatuation with the movie theatre as an institution, a physical, communal space, allowing for the true aesthetic experience of film:
Until the advent of television emptied the movie theaters, it was from a weekly visit to the cinema that you learned (or tried to learn) how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve. Movies gave you tips about how to be attractive. Example: It looks good to wear a raincoat even when it isn’t raining. But whatever you took home was only a part of the larger experience of submerging yourself in lives that were not yours. The desire to lose yourself in other people’s lives . . . faces. This is a larger, more inclusive form of desire embodied in the movie experience. Even more than what you appropriated for yourself was the experience of surrender to, of being transported by, what was on the screen. You wanted to be kidnapped by the movie – and to be kidnapped was to be overwhelmed by the physical presence of the image.
Mid-century moviegoing is conjured as almost an ecstatic ritual. There is a certain phantasmagoric quality with the blurring of reality and fiction, audience and actors, as you ‘lose yourself in other people’s lives… faces.’
As Sontag contextualises, the ‘advent of television’ is a technological “advance” that has allowed viewers to watch film from the lethargic ease of their own sofa. Streaming has continued this; it seems a petty thief, though, in comparison to Sontag’s paean to film’s ability to kidnap us when within the hushed crowd of the movie theatre.
One of the last holdouts where you can experience this – to be ‘kidnapped by a movie’ – is at Ümit & Son in Hackney, London. The film club, Ciné Real, based there is run by Ümit Mesut alongside filmmaker Liam Saint-Pierre. They have collected 16mm prints of classic films – from Nosferatu (1922) and Metropolis (1927) to King Kong (1933) – over the decades.
After passing through the main shop which has VHS tapes, reels and movie posters wherever your eyes land, you enter through a red velvet curtain into the theatre. Cramming into the dozen-or-so scarlet seats, Ümit provides an introductory talk, hits the motor, then the lamp, and… the image rolls onto the screen.
If cinephilia is dead, then movies are too, concludes Sontag. And if cinema is to be resurrected, it will ‘only be through the birth of a new kind of cine-love.’ Perhaps by cramming into that darkened theatre and savouring film’s rich textures – even its pyrotechnic inclinations – that thrilling renaissance can begin.
‘Film has heart, it has soul’, Ümit remarks. Hear his own words on the significance of watching film on original film in a streaming age, his passion for keeping the art of projection alive, and the ‘death of film’:
