I’d like to propose a season of films—The City, the Country, the River & the Road. The title is unashamedly poetic, and if I’m honest I’m not quite sure where it came from, or how it suggested itself. Was I influenced by the fact that I was coming to Dublin? I think I was. But I was also thinking about cinema itself and its capacity for taking us to all of these places—often within the course of a single narrative. Think of Truffaut’s Les 400 coups, which starts in a grey and overcast Paris and ends as its young truant embarks on one of the great runs in all of cinema, his momentum halted only by the sight of the ocean. Truffaut’s film was auto-biographical, his truancy redeemed by his discovery of cinema and by his befriending Andre Bazin. Well, not everyone can call upon such a friend, though we all should have access to the cinema and its treasures.
This started me thinking about the role of your organization—its mission, its goals—with its roots in Dublin but its remit to travel far and wide. So I wanted to propose a season that might on one level enact this very goal, this on-going journey—or at least try to: a season that begins in the city—about the city, about what movies mean to the city, and cities to the movies—and then moves out to the regions, to the country, with films that reflect this movement, picking up passengers along the way. And so I have selected some films that not only live up to the rich possibilities of my title but that might talk to one another in some way, if that is not too abstract a notion. (I wonder how much I was influenced by my own beginnings: when I was younger, we took movies to the people: Consett Mobile Cinema.)
There is fiction and non-fiction. From the latter I have chosen a particular strand—the essay film. This is partly due to my love of the essay form itself; it also stems from my interest in the idea of the flaneur. The essay-films that I would like to play are notable not only for the metaphorical stroll each director takes around their city but for the quality of the words as well as the images: Thom Anderson’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg. To this short list I have added Kieran Hickey’s documentary about James Joyce’s Dublin, Faithful Departed (1967), and a programme the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik wrote and presented for the BBC—Lighting Up New York. The reason for choosing Hickey’s film is in some ways because it is a bridge to one of my fiction choices—Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise. (And where there are rivers and roads there should be bridges.) Before Sunrise is set in Vienna, but its narrative unfolds over twenty-four hours on the 16th June—or Bloomsday as it is otherwise known. Thematically, both films play on the idea of absence, or the eventual absence of the protagonists, while absence—“What happened to my city?—is surely the defining characteristic, and lament, of the other films I’ve already mentioned. This is certainly true of the Davies, the Maddin, and the Gopnik.
But there is another, more recent film about New York that I have included: James Marsh’s Man On Wire. One, I think it makes a perfect companion to Lighting Up New York. But I also like the way it deliberately withholds—yet somehow redeems—a city’s overwhelming absence. And nothing gets absence, or transience, like the cinema. One only has to think of Andy Goldsworthy’s Rivers & Tides, Wenders’ Alice in the Cities, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and another Linklater film, Before Sunset. Even Chris Petit’s Radio On, which began as an Englishman’s attempt at a Wenders-like road movie, now seems like an historical document of how certain parts of England used to be.
(To be continued…)
—MM
Running From The Reels 