The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears (Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, 2013)
I'm at the cinema. But something's wrong, I thought this place had closed down a long time ago.
I'm reading a book of essays on the difference between going to the cinema and watching movies at home. It's interesting, but the academic side of couching lived-in experience can be a bit dry sometimes. Whereas the real experience has qualities which are sometimes difficult to evaluate. For example...
The lady who sells me my ticket is as old as Paris, but at the same time you can see what she would have looked like when she was much younger: pretty, in a word, but the truth of it is probably greater than that encapsulates. I slide some money over to her and she hits a button that makes a heavy 'click'. My ticket appears in front of me, pushes its way through a metal slit, but again something's strange: it's one of those old-fashioned tickets, a tailored rectangle of rough red paper. These things are like coke in green glass bottles, they don't make them anymore.
I make my way to the doors of the cinema. There's an Usher standing there who says "Hello again" and I'm wracking my brain for where I've seen them before, but it's not coming to me. I'm entertaining the possibility that this person must be related to the lady who sold me my ticket: maybe a niece (for some reason a Mother/Daughter relationship feels implausible). She shows me to my seat with a red flashlight. Normally I'll sit front and centre, but I seem to have accidentally found a seat at the back. I'll wait for the movie to start and then move if possible. It looks like it will be. There's no one else here.
No one that is save for the young woman selling ice creams. This is a litany of past forms now, even the decor of the cinema itself felt like something outdated: all deep red carpets and curved wood handrails. I can't remember the last time I saw someone selling ice cream *in* the auditorium. I'll have to come back here some time. I wander down the aisles to reach her. From afar she seems to resemble the other two women, but it's hard to tell in this half light. Also, the floor seems to be sticky or something, and I have to keep one eye on my feet in order to be able to keep moving. This means I can't keep watching her, and every time I look up she seems to be farther away than ever. I keep chasing her around the aisles, but for naught, and eventually the lights begin to come down and the film begins.
I can't find my seat now, it's too dark, so I stay standing. The only light in the room is that coming from the projector. It looks like digital projectors haven't found their way here yet. I can hear the whir of the mechanism, and the beam of light that cuts its way through the room is filled with thick, swirling cigarette smoke. Ah... you can smoke in here. I take this as an opportunity, but I only seem to have two matches left in my matchbook. I don't remember using the others. I light the match in the dark and then my eyes flick to the screen. It's a projection of me, in the foyer, buying my ticket. All of the parts are being played by actors, this is a recreation of something, it is not the actual thing. This spell lasts until the flame from the match reaches my fingertips. I drop the match, and we're back into darkness.
I look up at the small window where the light is coming from and yell for the Projectionist. No one responds, so I head up to see him (I know it's a 'he').
I leave the theatre, but it's dark out here now. The sound of the projector is much louder, completely filling the space. There's no one else around: no one manning the popcorn stand, no one using the bathrooms. I'm trying to find my way up to the projection room, but these stairs seem to go everywhere apart from where I want to go. All the doors I find lead into more empty theatres, each one showing the same scenes: my own journey through the cinema. But each version of the film is using different actors. With a different score. It's always the same, but the slight changes are fascinating. I make sure to spend some time in each room watching the film before I leave and keep looking for the projection room.
The whole thing reminds me of something else that happened to me one time: I was at a zoo with my wife, but she wasn't my wife. Again, there was no one else there, and the animals were loud, screaming, chattering. But when my wife entered the room everything became completely silent, or perhaps the cacophony reached such a pitch that I simply couldn't hear it anymore.