Cairo Station: The Death Of Cinema
Cinema has been killed many times by a variety of murderers: talkies, television, home video, Netflix, Covid-19. Each time we attend its funeral, hat in hand, each time we assist in its resurrection on a larger screen. Here are three movies about the many lives and deaths of cinema.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn ( 不散 .)
Bu San, Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan. 2003.
Master of composition and master of nostalgia Tsai Ming-liang reflects upon the Golden Age of cinema as popular art with a delicate and eerie portrait of an old cinema in Taipei, where a few spectators assist in the last projection of the film Dragon Inn by King Hu. Who are they? Ghosts. Do they belong to the past? Or do they come from an empty cinema in a distant future?
Splendor
Ettore Scola, Italy. 1989.
In this rather clumsy movie, we see the history of film unfolding for us on a big screen, here including the usual fauna navigating around it. The owner is Mastroianni, the projectionist is Troisi and the cashier is Marina Vlady. There is also a film critic, just to give you an idea of how old this movie is. Fear not, film criticism is now clinically dead. Another microplex shutting down, another nostalgic tale of lost desire.
Labyrinth Of Cinema (海辺の映画館 キネマの玉手箱)
Nobuhiko Ōbayashi, Japan. 2019.
“Guided by Chuya Nakahara’s poems, we’ll visit Japanese war movies of the 20th century”. The swan song of the late avant-garde surrealist and utterly unique auteur Ōbayashi is an example of a film you won’t see in a cinema near you because the cinema near you is playing indie rubbish. This feast for the eyes, wacky, flamboyant and more emotional than you can ever imagine, seems to scream for relief: cinema is dead, long live cinema!
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