Recently all my discussion on cinema with friends and randoms has shifted towards achieving simple answer to simple questions. For example, what is Cinema? Is it what Godard would like us to think, truth twenty four times a second? Or is Haneke’s opposing musing that film is twenty four lies a second to be believed? What is the future of Cinema? Is it going to become blander or more diverse? However, the question that I’ve found most intriguing has been where does film (or movies, cinema, the picture etc) exist? There seem to be many answers to this (on the screen, inside the viewer’s mind, somewhere in between…) but consider one that came from a woman from Liverpool eating a chip and chilli butty on the number 29 night bus: “inside the cinema” was her swift response, adding “y’know the buiding like” (the addition clearly for my benefit so I would understand that it was a joke). Before you think I’m about to slag off the northerners, I feel she has got something here. Plus she let me have a bite of said butty which was surprisingly rich in flavour.I know with her answer she wasn’t trying to suggest that film is a self referencing art form with its centre residing in a kaleidoscope of Echer style drawings; she was proudly stating the obvious. And sometimes, as Sid Field would surely agree, the simplest and most obvious solution is the correct solution.Yet I’d like to think that “inside the cinema” could mean more than just an attempt at wit though and if you can be bothered to read on I will present some lukewarm analysis coupled with some amateur comedy and a hint of plagiarism along these very lines.
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