Movie Of The Day:
To Each His Own Cinema (dir. Various Artists): Whenever a movie at the festival is projected on digital video, the company responsible for the equipment, Christie, is emblazoned on the screen with the Videodrome-esque tagline, “Welcome To The New Reality.” And every time, it makes my teeth grind, not only because I’m about to see a movie in a format that looks substandard 95% of the time, but because of the blunt (and, sadly, true) assertion that celluloid is on its last legs. I’ve always been critical of the speed at which the digital revolution has taken hold, because the “new reality” hadn’t nearly caught up with the old one in terms of quality, but the technology has improved and presumably will continue to improve until the differences are negligible. But the zeroes and ones simply can’t approximate the tactile wonder of celluloid zipping through a projector at 24 frames per second. As a projectionist in high school and college, I spent untold hours just staring at the film as it ran through the aperture plate, mesmerized by an optical illusion that’s never lost its mystery to me.
Judging by the majority of three-minute shorts that comprise To Each His Own Cinema—an anthology on theaters and movie-going produced in honor of the 60th Cannes Film Festival—I’m not alone. Anxiety over cinema’s imminent death has caused many of the world’s best directors to indulge in depressing nostalgia, paying tribute to outdoor communal movie nights or once-vibrant single-screen palaces that have since gone to seed. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “The Electric Princess House” expresses the crisis most eloquently, opening with exterior shots of patrons gathering together and buying snacks under a gorgeous canopy of vintage billboards, only to cut to a theater interior of splintered wooden seats and debris scattered around like it was hit by a tornado. There are plenty of brighter bits, too, like Zhang Yimou’s gorgeous short (“Movie Night”) about villagers who gather excitedly to see a movie in a makeshift outdoor setting in the mountains. The tone in films like Zhang's is spirited, but you can’t help but think about the other side of the equation, which relegates the cinema to a bittersweet memory.
As with all anthology movies, To Each His Own Cinema is a mixed bag, though the repetition of these death-of-cinema shorts turned me against it overall. The best clips are the funny ones: The Coen Brothers’ “World Cinema,” starring Josh Brolin (still in No Country For Old Men mode) as a cowboy trying to decide between seeing Jean Renoir’s Rules Of The Game and Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates (His message for the usher: “Tell him the guy in the hat enjoyed the hell out of Climates.”); Roman Polanski’s “Cinema Erotique,” about an inappropriate disturbance during a screening of Emmanuelle; and Elia Suleiman’s “Irtebak,” which reveals the director’s gift for subtle visual comedy. Not too many outright stinkers in the bunch, save for Amos Gitai’s embarrassing scene of a Haifa theater struck by a terrorist bomb and Youssef Chahine’s stirring tribute to himself.
And, oh yeah, the entire anthology was projected on digital video. Welcome to the new reality, suckers. (C+)