I do love the cinema! and especially cinema under the stars. It’s really a case of”force is no choice” because I spend my weekday evenings during the year teaching, so there’s really only the weekend left .I don’t really like those mega-cinemas, though the seats are comfy. I found a small cinema near me with moderately comfortable seats ( not a lot of stuffing) but that’s ok because the price is really reasonable, and I got into the habit of going regularly. It was a bit like the atmosphere I remember when I used to trek across London with my boyfriend to see a Bergman season. Or at the university cineclub where you could see art films that no one else wanted to see, but there were the great Russian filmakers Eisenstein’s “Ivan the terrible” and the wonderful “Alexander Nevsky”, with music by….wait for it…Prokofiev!
Then nearer to now, more trekking to some weird parish cinemas with my ex to see a Shakespeare festival. “Hamlet” (Kozintchev) most of all which had me scurrying home to read my Shakespeare to check out where that idea of claustrophobia came from. But it’s there ,it’s there in the text. Another eye-opening moment was Roman Polanski’s “Macbeth”, Ive always thought the witches were ridiculous but my small daughter (who I had hoped was too young to understand anything-I must have been in one of my depressed moments where I was dying for a bit of culture) anyway she hollered and I had to leave. The extraordinary thing was that it was shown the next week on tv and she sat and watched, much to my chagrin. This convinced me that cinema IS the big screen, the dark, the undivided concentration…
English that grows 