Recently, I decided to rewatch the Italian movie Cinema Paradiso. For those who haven’t seen it, the film follows a young boy, Totò, growing up in a small Sicilian town in post-Second World War Italy through the prism of his friendship with the projectionist of the local cinema. A period when clerical censorship was the norm and even a chaste kiss ended up on the cutting room floor.
Trading heavily on nostalgia, it is both a coming-of-age story and a love letter to the movies.
Watching it again, I was reminded both of my own early experiences of going to the cinema and that of a well-polished anecdote in my family about my grandfather.
Like so many other residents of Dún Laoghaire in the 1950s, the latter enjoyed visiting the Pavilion on a Sunday afternoon after his lunch. Having placed himself at the front of the balcony, leaving his hat nestling precariously on the wall, he would proceed to fall asleep.
Upon waking, he would peer down to spot his hat lying on the floor of the stalls and begin bellowing at the poor unfortunates below to throw it back to him. Much to the mortification of his teenage sons, including my father, sitting a few rows behind him.
My own earliest memory of going to the cinema is of the queue stretching down O’Connell Street, waiting to get in to the Savoy to see E.T. In fact, I had already seen Popeye, starring the late Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, but have no recollection of it. Thus my movie-going career began with pictures directed by Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg.
The standard wasn’t always so high.
Another early memory is going to see Octopussy in the old Green Cinema on St Stephen’s Green in 1983. Given the choice between Bond and the odd-sounding Raiders of the Lost Ark, which must have been rereleased, my seven-year-old self made a grave error. Detecting a whiff of catechising in the title of the first Indiana Jones movie, I plumped for 007.
The surroundings, if not better than, were at least worthy of the stale cheese up on the big screen. The Green, which opened in 1935, was only four years away from being demolished and looked it – a bit like Roger Moore’s Bond career.
Cinema-going in Dublin was a less luxurious affair in the 1980s but it did give one a stock of war stories. Many of the old movie palaces that had arisen in the early part of the century were in need of repair. I remember one poor soul of my acquaintance visiting a well-known suburban cinema, only to find he needed a tetanus shot having injured his posterior on a rusty spring that had come through the cover of his seat.
The arrival of the original Light House Cinema on Middle Abbey Street was a welcome addition in 1988. Along with the Screen and the Irish Film Centre (later Irish Film Institute), which opened in 1992, the Light House offered movie buffs a selection of independent and foreign-language movies, an alternative to the Hollywood fare served up in the Savoy and the Adelphi. The only problem now was trying to get into the movies.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was still too young to get into 18 cert movies. As a young cinephile, I took this bureaucratic imposition personally. The anxiety about whether I would get in to see Goodfellas on the big screen remains vivid. I did. By the skin of my teeth. And then the first titles swooshed across the screen. We’re introduced to the main characters in the most violent fashion imaginable and Ray Liotta, looking like the Devil himself, utters the immortal line, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster”. The orchestra swells. And Scorsese had me before Tony Bennett even began singing about moving from rags to riches.
But it wasn’t just American gangster movies. There were the first iterations of the French Film Festival and, thanks to the VHS player at home and a top-notch local video shop, deep dives into Italian neo-realism and the New German Cinema.
One of the famed auteurs I never quite took to then was Fellini – it is only in middle age that I have come to appreciate him. But it is perhaps he more than anyone who used the power of cinema to unlock the secrets of memory and nostalgia. The title of the best of his later pictures, Amarcord, is a phrase from the dialect spoken in his native Italian region of Romagna. It simply means, “I remember”.