A vast red oxide desert passed in front of my eyes. I'd seen it another time, but that was in another place. I'd once crossed a red plain in South Australia in a car, but that barren flatness looked the same as what I was looking at now, a movie set in another continent; an endless sky looming over a sea of hot red nothing, a widescreen alien landscape too big to comprehend. Later, about eleven that night, I stumbled out of the theatre onto a wet, cold, monochrome a'Beckett Street and walked up the hill through street-lit silver raindrops to where I'd parked my old Volvo. Single carb, manual transmission, choke. Home before midnight. Supper: a glass of red wine and a plate of pasta with the evening newspaper spread across the table, but my mind is still half-away in that hot red desert. The disconnection of cinema from life is the real addiction.
On those cold, wet, bleak Tuesday nights in the winter of 1979, we travelled from the 1930s to the modern era, but it was not enough. It would never be enough.
6pm. I pushed open the heavy soundproof cinema door and slid down onto the upturned seat of a tired leather seat that clunked loudly down into position. On the small stage in front of the screen stood a slender highly-animated Oriental man wearing spectacles and sporting a long black ponytail. He looked like he'd just walked out of an opium den. He paced up and down and spoke excitedly, as if everything he said were a revelation, or he'd just found gold. His name was Douglas Ling, and he was one of three cinema lecturers employed by the faculty. Ling knew movies like no-one else on earth. The fact that he never used an unnecessarily academic turn of phrase made him probably the best lecturer I had ever witnessed.
This night he was talking about a John Ford movie, a film that was then only forty years old.
Comments
Post a Comment