MATT'S EDITORIAL - 30/10/2014 - Get me my film fix, now!

Up to my first year of college, I had never properly sat down to watch a film by Woody Allen. Now, I can consider him one of my biggest fans. I don't only consider him one of the greatest filmmakers ever, one who despite his prolific nature having been hold against him in the past, still has a remarkable body of work that is able to forgive even the worst of his films. I also consider him one of the most distinctive figures and character actors in the history of cinema - and I do indeed consider him on screen persona as one that follows up on the tradition of the best of slapstich vaudevillian comedians, more distinctively a worthy mixture of the hopelessly deadpan romanticism of comic Buster Keaton, minus the physicality plus the up front fearless shyness (if such a term can be used) of Harry Langdon and the black rimmed geeky glasses of stumbling chivalier Harold Lloyd.

 

Annie Hall was indeed the first film of his I watched, and still is one of my favourite films of all time. The representation of relationship realism is so stunning that it is painfully real as well as intensely creative with plenty of great touches that make it all the more timelessly appealing and endlessly compelling. Now, a most fascinating factor in the vast majority of Woody's work is the way in which it is born out of a New York bourgeois of modern times, one that likes to watch subtitled movies, drink wine and snort a little coke on the side whilst struggling with adenoids and believing that they are indeed cooler than what they really are, and more alone than what they really think (New York is the loneliest planet of all).

 

The infectuous compulsive obsessive movie watching world is very much a part of the Woody Allen world. It is Woody Allen, and it is presented as unglamorous alienation - which one would presume to be the opposite of another one of my favourite directors of all time Michelangelo Antonioni. Cinema, of course, being a medium that allows one self to leave one self and almost literally become someone else. But at what point do we start craving such needs - how long does it take for us to willingly subject to this meta-physical experience before we can truly call our cine-fixation unhealthy.

 

A few days ago, I started a feature named CineCola Darlings, where I pay a monthly tribute to films I think have never, for one reason or another, gotten the attention they deserved, settling all too easily for a niche audience, or simply being forgotten. The section will indeed include films that people downright hate, and are waiting to be re-evaluated. But what interests me now, for the purpose of this editorial, is further deepening my examination of the first inducree in the CineCola Darlings hall of fame Cinemania.

 

Directed by Angela Christlieb and Stephen Kijak, this is a film I purposely picked as number one film for a number of reasons. I am not one to deny that I am a cinephile, sometimes to unhealthy degree, but I treat my obsession with passion and I love the rugged down and dirty side of film and filmmaking more than I do the red carpets and bright lights (although I professionally exploit that, as I hope some reading this might know...) However, you will never necessarily hear me complain vocally about the very particular quality of a film. You will also, never hear me complain about people talking in the middle of a film - in fact I long for greater contrast and debate among people while the film plays in the cinema. I have noticed in the last while, that in my editorials my main concern seems to be the popularity of cinema and how cinema going needs to shake off the goddamn snobbery off itself and reach out to the working class once again. Through these editorials, I attempt to advise people into appreciating a cinema going experience as an afore mentioned meta physical and downright spiritual experience, but at the same time I notoriously advise people to make out with each other at dull moments in films, or talk to each other during montages, or whatever...

 

I have met over the years individuals that would behave like the people in Cinemania, people who would have a panic attack if the film ended up being shown on digital, or if the frame speed was slightly off, or whatever. I have also seen them stare blankly at reality with slouched shoulders and dirty, cheap clothes. In Cinemania, Christlieb and Kijak respectfully look at people who have very little ambition aside from watching the fifth film of the day, a film they may already have seen twenty times before. I have talked to these people, and their conversations are - hear ye hear ye...fascinating! Passionate! Wonderfully eccentric! Evem awe inspiring! Why, oh why, do we only get this type of debates when the subject of politics arises? Why oh why do we only get this type of angered repressed passionate outbursts at Martini drenched art exhibitions?

 

The difference here is that Woody Allen, for cinematic sakes, even at his most cinephiliac always has an ambition. That ambition may be romantic or professional, but his characters are never truly down and out. In Cinemania, the titular cinemania is an obsession that borderlines loneliness and depression. It is a decadent state of mind - better yet a lifeless state, hypnotic vegetation. I have met cinemaniacs. I have also met people who smoked weed constantly. Guess which ones I'd like to hang out the most! Maybe I'd get them to obsess over vinyl records like I do as well.