THE pictures were always a refuge for me. This is strange, given my introduction to the silver screen which had all the subtlety and serenity of Mike Tyson with a grievance.
The first visits were to the State in Shettleston for the ‘minors’. These were occasions of gratuitous violence that obviously influenced Quentin Tarantino.
The fare was cartoon shorts with the odd, grainy serial. It mattered little. The State could have had Elvis on stage with the Beatles as his backing band and attention would have been focused elsewhere.
Frankly, survival was the priority. The local mischief of choice was to launch jubblies (a fistful of hardened ice infected and injected with diluting orange) on to anyone who sat in front or below the throwers. These objects would have settled a medieval siege within hours.
They reduced the callow East End cinephile to a quivering, quaking shell. Albeit a shell with a haematoma resembling a size five Mitre ball.
Later excursions were disappointing on occasion. One of my aunties (I cannot disclose the full name to protect the guilty) worked at the Cosmo, now the Glasgow Film Theatre. We were allowed to sneak in once the lights went down.
I remember vividly being underwhelmed by Visconti’s Death in Venice which I had presumed would be a racy whodunnit with Sophia Loren in a v-necked semmit.
Instead, it was a discourse on existential angst and ambiguous sexuality. And if I had wanted that I would have stayed at home.
But the pictures quickly became somewhere I could be alone while being out. Even a trip with a pals or with a girlfriend had that interlude of being utterly consumed by what was happening on the screen.
I even liked the bad films. Still do. There is nothing better than going to a film called Everest and rooting for an avalanche just because you were there.
Later years have been illuminated by going to films with my son and daughter. At the post-match debrief, they explain what just happened, witter about mise en scene, and gaily discuss the symbolism of fruit in the second reel while I finally extract my nose from a box of popcorn that would have fed the Von Trapp family for the duration of the war.
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This idyll has ended. The cinema is now so loud that the voices form the scene can now be justifiably viewed as a distraction. The other week my son and I went to see that Sopranos thingy that was ambitiously filmed without a coherent script.
It could, though, have had a screenplay by William Shakespeare and Ben Hecht and it would not have mattered a jot to those of us sitting amid the sort of bedlam normally the preserve of jet fighter in combat.
There were the guys behind who chatted amiably throughout, pausing only to open a packet of crisps by means of some sort of explosive detonation. There was the guy in front who regularly checked his phone and on several occasions texted, Tweeted or otherwise communicated with the wider world.
His screen lit up so often I was convinced he was communicating War and Peace to the rest of us by means of Morse Code.
Huffy mutters were ignored, more robust observations were treated with an air of incredulity.
Then suddenly comprehension dawned on me. No, I didn't finally understand Inception. No, I didn't finally see the point of Titanic. And, no, I didn’t figure out the economics of the pick n mix except to appreciate its bold, even merciless larceny.
It was this: this is not just another column from an old eejit about noise in a cinema. (Spoiler alert: it is)
It is about something more invidious. The guys (they all identified as he/him) were baffled by our protests. It was as if we were in a shop and asked an assistant to turn down the music as it was interrupting our concentration on purchasing socks.
They saw our increasingly vocal (and, yes, I see the irony in this) attempts to induce silence as baffling, possibly even eccentric.
The notion of devoting two hours to watching something on a big screen was absurd. There might be good bits but there would be occasions when the merits of car leasing might be discussed or Twitter must be checked.
Their view of what a night at the pictures entailed was different to mine. I went last week to another film and the experience was much the same. Nobody seemed to bother much, except me. It was, too, the sort of art house film that one would have thought appealed only to the committed. But, no, they’re was so much noise I looked around to see if there was a tumbrel approaching packed with members of the French aristocracy.
There was nothing of the such of course. I could see all this clearly because the cinema was illuminated by mobile phones. It was as I was sitting in London of the Blitz with roving lights searching in vain for a Messerschmitt. Though, obviously louder.
This, then, may be the new way to watch films. The demands of concentration may have been deemed excessive and it is only reasonable to find diversion when one is bored.
It may be that this railing against the prevailing orthodoxy is old-fashioned, mean-spirited and doomed to failure.
I must, then, remain philosophical about the noise and the intermittent light. I must be mature. But somewhere inside there is the child who is searching frantically for a jubbly to throw in a homage to the spirit of Shettleston in the sixties.
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