Cinemania

CINEMANIA is a film for its subject matter: film geeks. I absolutely loved it, which tells you a little about me. This is a great film for anyone who's ever hopped a cab, bus or subway train in a mad frenzy to get from one movie to the next, for everyone who's ever made a list of all the films they've seen in a year just out of morbid curiosity as to how wisely they've spent their time, for anyone who's ever sacrificed a social event to see a movie alone. Yes, I've done all these things and more, but despite my identification with the weirdos that are the subject matter of CINEMANIA, even I was amazed at the absolute compulsion many of them have for cinema. One man is said to choose a carefully orchestrated "constipating diet" in order to avoid the inconvenience of missing the beginning of a film due to the necessity of bodily function; another places a personal ad in which he writes almost exclusively about film; the only woman among them, Roberta, has been known to physically fight ticket sellers at theatres that inconvenience her goal to save the ticket from every movie to which she's ever been. The astounding thing is how proud the cinemaniacs seem of their obsession and the utter lack of anything else in their lives. One film buff proclaims himself a "writer and philosopher", yet we never hear about him writing anything other than the aforementioned personal ad. Another has an extensive collection of movie soundtracks on vinyl, carefully arranged by composer, but doesn't own a record player. But this is not a mean-spirited, satirical film out to expose or poke fun at the "losers" and their passion for passive entertainment. As I have said, it is a film for those who identify with these so-called "losers", hopefully to a somewhat saner degree. Perhaps the most touching and important moment in the film is a scene in which one film buff (proponent of the constipating diet) discusses the escapist quality of film. "In a movie", he says (I'm paraphrasing) "you can just walk out of the restaurant and blend into the crowd, then walk across the street as if moving on into your new life, but in real life, you know, you have to go home; you can't put real life in a frame and make it art." But sometimes real life is art, sometimes it's better without the frame, and I'm happy to know that the tragic, comic and wonderful "characters" of this film are really out there, still passionate about this great art form, even to the point of insanity. Right on, brothers (and sister)!

The most impressive thing is that these people are real. No CGI or Stan Winston animatronics, and Frank Oz doesn't have his hand up their back, they are real people of flesh and blood just like me and you! Scary, I know.

My favorite has to be Roberta. Maybe because I don't come across to many women who love movies like I do, and Roberta REALLY loves movies. And on the positive side she doesn't freak me out as much as, say Jack. Jack (better than any character Woody Allen ever created) actually eats constipating food so he doesn't have to go to the restroom as often during the day. Which I can understand since he has to get through a gazillion movies each year, so when will he ever find the time to take a dump? But that's only answering one question. Answering that other question: I guess he just pees in an empty bottle during the movie. Hey it's dark in a movie theater, so who would notice?

"Cinemania" is really both sad and beautiful at the same time. And at times it even scared the hell out of me! If you call your self a movie buff, and have a wife or girlfriend who thinks you should spend less time on your hobby: take her to see this and she will realize that she could do a heck of a lot worse.

A homage to the obsessive-compulsive essential New York normal schizophrenic in the form of a film buff. How better to characterize this great town than with portraits of it's neurotic citizens. We love New York and New York loves the movies.

Cinemania, screened recently as a world premiere at AMMI in Queens (where it was partially shot), deals with the marginal world of true movie nuts: New Yorkers who attend anywhere from 500 to 1000 feature films in cinemas per year at the cost of leaving no time for virtually any other activities or "normal" social life.

I am a "recovering cinemaniac" who attended 600 films per year throughout the '70s and '80s, but not now -I've moved on to other pursuits, mainly music. I personally know four of the five principals featured in this documentary. We used to meet on a nearly daily basis at MoMA, Film Forum, Walter Reade, the old Thalia, or many other now-defunct Gotham revival houses including the Gramercy, Regency, Theatre 80 St. Marks, Jean Renoir Cinema, Fifth Avenue Cinema, The New Yorker, Bleecker St. Cinema, Carnegie Hall Cinema, etc. Each of these true "characters" is quite serious about this avocation, collecting memorabilia (Roberta and Harvey), or making endless preparations and cross-referenced lists of upcoming showtimes so as not to miss anything important or rare that is screening (Jack). Eric has sadly succumbed to watching videos, but is still included here as sort of an "emeritus" cinemaniac.

The filmmakers, who stated at the q&a post-screening that they were independently filming Jack when they joined forces on this single project, miss a great opportunity to really dig into the subject -the Golden Age of movie culture in New York, which existed back in the '50s, '60s and '70s. Pioneering figures like Anthology Archives' Jonas Mekas are still on the scene and could have been interviewed, and a study of the days of Amos Vogel, Sid Geffen, Richard Roud, Andy Warhol, et al would have made for a riveting documentary even if the "documents plus voices" approach of Ken Burns were all that could be conjured up of the past.

Instead, the directors took the lazy contemporary approach, for which the audience rightly took them to task at the q&a. The five very interesting individuals are trailed around town during 2000/2001 in lame cinéma vérité style, revealing more silly foibles than insight. I felt very bad for my friends and acquaintances, who deserved a lot more than being treated as figures of fun. Ironically, what the 5 Cinemaniacs had to say at the Q&A (NOT recorded by these filmmakers) was vastly more interesting and revealing than anything shown in the film itself.

The premise of this film is sadly off-target: the claim is made that cinemania flourishes in New York in this new 21st Century, when in fact anyone with any memory knows the Good Old Days are long gone. As Jack frequently points out, print quality is a serious problem. Absence of talented and dedicated projectionists is equally harmful. As imdb fans must know, everything today is driven by DVD, video and new technology. The great revival houses are gone. Sure there are dedicated restoration projects devoted to individual film titles, but the endless feast of revival films is no more, when the collected works of Bergman, Truffaut, Dreyer, Chabrol, Kurosawa, Antonioni and all the American masters were constantly on display right back through to the Silents. Heck, back in the '70s it was routine for COMMERCIAL FIRST-RUN CINEMAS to run Garbo, Keaton, Chaplin and Marx Bros. festivals. I was living in Cambridge back in the '60s when the Bogey and other revival cults really took hold.

Nowhere in this flimsy documentary do we find about the Thousand Eyes film society, the history of midnight movies (begun at the old Elgin Theater, now the Joyce Dance Theater in Chelsea), Cinema 16 and the Underground Film movement (which presaged the Midnight Movies) or even a hint of the once rich ethnic cinemas (foreign language films shown without subtitles, Spanish, Indian, Polish, etc.) that were all killed off by video.

Alas, I hope someone delves into the fun by-gone eras of movie fanaticism -when GOING to catch a rare film was the impetus to self-education about the cinema. Even drive-ins were a great source in "them days", right up through the '70s. Today a movie nut is likely to be building a COLLECTION (undreamed of decades ago) of adulterated VHS or revisionist (how much added footage & commentary can be tossed into the pot) DVD material. As a purist, I never counted seeing a film on tv as actually SEEING it - it had to be on a screen (Marshall McLuhan had an explanation for this but I was merely intuitive). Today's movie buffs have settled for the illusion rather than the real deal (driven by our society's ever-reliance on planned obsolescence, as exemplified by the imminent end of the VHS just as BETA disappeared and DVD will be later destroyed (how about those self-destructing inferior quality laserdiscs??).

Punchline is that this documentary was SHOT ON VIDEO (and then transferred to film), a fact commented upon derogatorily by Jack & others who revere 35mm (or 70mm). The current generation is treating film and video as interchangeable; a near-future generation will not even know what film is (was) once digital technology completely takes over in cinemas. All in the pursuit of (or worse, cutting corners to save) an almighty buck.

And I thought I had a problem.

I guess obsession is the same no matter what the object is, and many documentaries have dealt with that theme, but obviously this one is much more of a meta-doc.

What I wonder is, are these people so dysfunctional because they continually go to movies; or do they go to movies because they're dysfunctional? There's something really disturbing if the former is the case -- that we consume movies and TV (more than we should) and the result is this deterioration of the mind and total disconnection from society. Are these people examples of over-consumption taken to its logical extreme? Do most of us have the exact same pathology but just watered down?