"When he grew tired of walking he went to the cinema. (Ah, cinema, solace of the lonely young men and women of all great cities.) He saw a film a day, sometimes two. He became a connoisseur of the non-time that preceded the films themselves, especially in small cinemas where there were no advertisements or previews, where the audience was made up of four or five people, all of them alone. It is easy to see why, in films, fugitives and wanted men went to the cinema: not just to hide in the dark but because these intervals between performances were out of time. To all intents and purposes you might as well not have existed - and yet, simultaneously you were acutely conscious of your existence. When the lights faded - always that same sequence of perception: the lights are fading, no they're not, yes they are, yes - and the curtains cranked back slightly to extend the tiny screen, there was always a moment, after the studio logos had been displayed, when the blaze of projected colour lit up the screen like Eden on the first day of creation. Disappointment and boredom often set in very soon afterwards but, for a few minutes at least, Luke's head filled with verdant images of city and sky, landscape and trees, and he believed utterly in the cinema's loneliness-obliterating promise of brightness and colour."
Geoff Dyer, Paris Trance
March is humidity and heat, peaches and ginger, university and work, counting pennies and splurging recklessly, and - of course - the french film festival. It is all of these things but it is mostly the french film festival. For the whole of March my mum and I walk up our street to the cinema in the town hall, we queue up amidst the crowds of people gabbing away in impassioned, mellifluous tones that could only be French, we file in and take our seats (red and squishy) in the darkened hall, we check our phones and munch our popcorn/smuggled goods like Mazet chocolate, we bite our lips as the lights dim, we sit through 20 minutes of awful advertisements for Tefal and Renault cars, and then (then!) we catch our breath as the screen lights up and for one brief moment we could be anywhere, but mostly we could be in Paris. Oh, what is this light that holds us fast?
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