A Trip to Chicago
A few words about a weekend of cinema and nostalgia
On Friday morning, I flew to Chicago. I’d never been there, to the Windy City, though I wasn’t really going to visit the city. I was heading to Filmspotting Fest, the 20th anniversary celebration of the longest running movie podcast. Original hosts Adam Kempenaar and Sam Van Hallgren launched the podcast early in 2005 after learning about the then pretty brand new medium and deciding it’d give them a great venue to talk about their shared love: movies. Just a few months later, Apple added podcast support to iTunes, bringing podcasting into the mainstream. On day one, iTunes featured Filmspotting, being that it was, I believe, one of two film shows in existence. That day is when I, too, discovered Filmspotting, and I’ve been listening ever since, for twentieth years. That majority of my life.
When Filmspotting Fest was announced, with a lineup of great films—Brick on 35mm, Tangerine, Pather Panchali, Take Shelter, Columbus, and Before Sunrise on 35mm—I knew right away that I wanted to attend. I’d met Adam a couple times back in the day, so there was that, but it was really the nostalgia of it all. Thinking about the beginnings of the show, back when it was actually called Cinecast—a legal dispute led to the name change—memories flooded in of listening to the show on the GO bus to Canada’s Wonderland, where I worked as a lifeguard during the summer of 2005. I was 16 and it was my first job. I’m 36 now, and when I think about the stations of my life, Filmspotting holds an important place, encouraging my love of film in ways that I can genuinely say have led me to where I am today, as a writer and as a person.
The experience of the festival was amazing. Seeing Adam again, and meeting both Sam and Adam’s current co-host Josh Larsen, was a treat. As was seeing others, I know, like Slate’s critic Dana Stevens, who I’ve also been an avid reader of for most of my life now. I met new people, and some I’d only ever known online. More than that, though, I got to experience those movies again (and in the case of the Satyajit Ray film, for the first time) in the most wonderful circumstances. Rep screenings already tend to bring out avid crowds, as do festivals, but the celebratory mood throughout that Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning was something different.
A couple years back, the Lightbox in Toronto screened a digital print of Brick as part of their Next Wave program for the youth. It was a fun screening, and a great reminder of Rian Johnson’s highly assured beginnings as a feature filmmaker. But it was a whole other thing to watch Brick in the beautiful old movie palace of the Music Box in Chicago, with a packed house, on 35mm, hearing Rian Johnson himself, down the row from me, laughing uproariously along with everyone else throughout the movie. It was utterly electric. As was the conversation onstage afterward. This was cinema as true communal experience, a mass of indivuals becoming one under the glow of celluloid projected onto a big screen.
Before Sunrise, closing out the fest on Sunday morning, was transcendent. During the listening booth scene, I thought to myself, “This might be the single best scene in cinema history.” A ridiculous statement, but maybe true anyway. Again, there was so much laughter, and the charge of romance was in the air. And cinematic nostalgia, too. It was a reminder, to me, of what movies really are at their best, and how intrinsicly they are tied to that communal experience, there in the movie theatre. Which is why it was so heartening to see Sean Baker make the plea to Hollywood and the public to help save movie theatres when he accepted the Best Director prize at the Oscars yesterday. I hadn’t seen the first couple hours of the show, because I was flying back into town when they started airing, so I’d missed Baker’s earlier two wins.
“We are all here tonight because we love movies. Where did we fall in love with movies? At the movie theater,” Baker said. “In a time in which our world can feel very divided, this is more important than ever: It’s a communal experience you simply don’t get at home.”
He then called on everyone, “Filmmakers keep making films for the big screen, I know I will. Distributors, please focus first and foremost on the theatrical releases of your films. Parents, introduce your children to feature films in movie theaters and you will be molding the next generation of movie lovers and filmmakers. And for all of us, when we can please watch movies in a theater and let’s keep the great tradition of the moviegoing experience alive and well.”
Later in the night, I managed to go back and skim through the parts of the Oscars broadcast that I’d missed, mostly to see Conan O’Brien’s hosting bits, which were hilarious and great. It seemed to be a relatively fun show, and the way the awards themselves shook out was satisfying enough. I’m not as hot on Anora as many others, or even as much as I’d like to be. It’s maybe my least favourite of Baker’s movies, actually, but I say that as someone whole loves all of his work. If cinema has a future, it’s in great independent artists like Baker, I was delighted to see him win four Oscars, placing him in rare company. I was similarly delighted by the wins for The Brutalist, and Conclave, two movies I love in their own special ways.
And I was happy to see No Other Land win the prize for Best Documentary Feature. I had predicted it’d win, but to watch directors Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham take the stage, along with co-directors Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, was an emotional, inspiring thing to witness. Their speeches, bravely calling out Israeli apartheid and making the plea for a different kind of political imagination, were incredibly moving to watch. The film itself is an incredible, anger-inducing document of Israel’s oppression and dehumanization of Palestinians, as well as a clear-eyed portrait of a complicated friendship forged in solidarity. It’s the kind of thing the movies were made for, an empathic window onto the world around us, whether through fiction or non.
The power of that was reflected in the Oscar win. Of course, winning an industry backpatting competition is a trivial thing in relation to the grave reality of the crisis for Palestinians, but it holds some meaning still, I think. Its victory is a further sign that currents are shifting. That witnessing the reality of the situation over there does have an impact. And the Oscars in turn gain something by having No Other Land among its long list of winners across its history. Not legitimacy, exactly, but some smidge of evidence that cinema’s power can and does often leap over the cynical and right into people’s hearts. Which is, of course, why I love cinema in the first place. Sometimes that comes in the form of a politically radical work. And sometimes it’s just watching two actors, playing fictional characters, in a listening booth, falling for each other.