The first film of that year, 1975, was screened on a sultry afternoon in February in the old Radio Theatre, a 1940s relic in RMIT’s Bowen Lane. The film was Sydney Pollack's 1969 psychological drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? In that same month, on the other side of the world, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville and Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor were being shot or were in post-production. As was Jaws. Film students yet to be born would in some future or extant cinema critique those productions.
The theatre door, heavy as that of a bank safe, had closed with a heavy wheeze when I entered out of the blinding sun and, feeling my way, found a seat I could barely see. In the dim luminescence of the uncurtained screen, a film lecturer called Doug who, apparently relishing the prospect of sharing his cinematic favourites with a new intake of students, was enthusiastically introducing the film before signalling the projectionist - “Roll it, Sid!” - and taking his customary middle seat in the front row. I thought he might have been near-sighted, but he turned out to be one of those cineastes who like to be as close to the action as possible without pulling a gun.
A week later, I was a back-seat passenger in a car heading south-east on Keilor Road when it swerved and struck a telegraph pole. We were two couples who had been to a movie show (Airport? Towering Inferno? Earthquake? I don't remember) at the long-gone Tullamarine drive-in cinema. One couple in front, one in the back. We hadn't seen much footage, but those '70s disaster films were all the same. Heroine runs around screaming; and her white singlet never gets a mark on it.
Whatever it was, it was the last film I would see for a few months.
This evening, the Classic cinema is screening Nashville as part of its Robert Altman retrospective. I'll be in the front row, middle seat. No, not near-sighted.
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