My Self-Education in Cinema

Three movies day and night

The Electric Cinema, Portobello Road, Notting Hill, London. Est. 1911. (In better nick than during my days there) | Photo by Ewan Munro on Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0)

I wasn’t born into a home with a TV. I saw a film on the big screen before I ever watched one on its smaller counterpart. And what a film it was!

Not long ago, in an interview about his relationship with his father, Robert Downey Jr. looked down at fathers who took their sons to Fantasia as their first film, his own dad having taken him to an X-rated movie as his starter flick. Well, it was Fantasia that my own father, whom I loved, took me to as my first film, so this dismissive comment hurt quite a bit.

I’ve since reflected though, that given Downey Jr.’s barely disguised anger as he spoke, the subtext of his throwaway comment could have been that he secretly wished he’d have been taken to something less odd for a kid than porn — such as Fantasia perhaps.

Dad had left school at 14, was an autodidact, an unsophisticated twenty-five year old, and from a very different, culturally more modest world, than writer Downey Sr. Seeing that film with him when I was three years of age in a cinema in Battersea, South London, and sitting mesmerized in the front row of the balcony, the dark abyss of the stalls below, couldn’t have been more terrifying, more overwhelming, or more consequential…

That was the afternoon I was born. Everything before had been a pre-existence. When Thor threw down his thunderbolts when the brooms danced to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, my wonder, terror, astonishment exploded.

London was blitzed still, bombed out and grey, its architecture stained with black grime — the taint of its black deeds the world over. The whining of Nazi V1 drones and the screams of the V2 scud missiles echoed on, long after the demise of the Reich.

The gas mask in the coal cellar stared through cobwebbed dust with hollow menace. Shadows lurked in every recess of the family flat’s dank hallway, waiting to pounce… and do what? I dreaded to think. The bathrobe hanging on the back of the bedroom door awaited its sudden moment. Fridge-less milk soured in the kitchen sink, place of ablution for dishes, and the three generations of us resident there. Candles sputtered without conviction in the outside loo…

I’m a boomer? There was no boom in fifties’ London. Families, smaller than those of previous generations, knew only ration books, tasteless meat and two veg, blanketing cloud, glottal-stopped cheer, monochrome dreariness. The single car in the street, a sit-up-and-beg, never moved.

No boom was discernible until Thor rained down those fiery projectiles.

Then, for me, cinema arrived… and Cinderella and Gulliver’s Travels soon followed.

England transitioned into the brighter sixties and there came visits to the Odeons, the Granadas to see Tom Thumb, Darby O’Gill and the Little People, Jason and the Argonauts, HMS Defiant.

Next, Lawrence of Arabia twice, the first week of release — terror, moral confusion, spellbinding wonder for this ten-year old. (Dad and O’Toole the spitting image.) White savior-ism before the term, although not of course before the phenomenon.

From London to Hampshire’s New Forest for grammar school. TV brought the next steps. Wilder’s Double Indemnity. (Could this be the Fred MacMurray of The Absent-Minded Professor?) Mum’s love of 40’s Hollywood and her naming of every actor in the shot.

Friday nights, BBC 2 and Polanski’s Repulsion. Rossellini’s Rome Open City. Hammer Horror on ITV. Peter Watkins traumatizing with Culloden. Psycho practically mummifying this terrified youth. Quatermass and the Pit at the local “picture house”. Nightmare upon nightmare — we English don’t dream. Dreaming is for optimists. Easy Rider in seaside Bournemouth, universes away from Fonda’s redneck USA.

The seventies. Drama degree at University up in Hull. Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad. Lang’s You Only Live Once. Franju’s The Blood of Beasts. A Clockwork Orange in Leicester Square, twice in its first week on a class trip to London. Pretty much left to one’s own devices to assess and understand. Still assessing, understanding, feeling…

Back to London post degree. British Film Institute mail room. Watching from the projection box. Bresson. Cassavetes. Boorman. Borowczyk. Pontecorvo. Wenders’ Alice in the Cities. Salo at the London Film Festival. Writing b-movie reviews for the Monthly Film Bulletin.

Onwards and three screenings a day when not set PA-ing at BBC TV, White City. The Gate Cinema (double bills starting 10 pm). The Coronet next door. The Academy in Oxford Street. That place off Tottenham Court Road near Charlotte Street (forget the name). The National Film Theatre on the South Bank. The ICA on The Mall. The Electric Cinema, Portobello Road (see above) — fleapit of Mum’s North Kensington childhood now screening silents accompanied by arbitrary Beethoven, Chopin piano round and round, round and round. Random score — try it!

Racing, breathless, between venues. On foot, bus, tube — Central Line, Piccadilly, Bakerloo, Northern Lines. Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, The Life of Oharu, Sansho the Bailiff, The Crucified Lovers, Last Tales of the Taira Clan, Capra, Sirk, Fassbinder, Peckinpah, Altman, Chabrol, Siegel, Rosi at the Gate. Von Stroheim, Renoir, Bellochio, Lang at the Electric. Rivette, Dreyer at the NFT. Ophul’s Reckless Moment at that place off Tottenham Court Road (forget the name), plus Oshima’s Ceremony, The Boy, Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge. Angelopoulos, Bertolucci at The Academy. Tarkovsky, Ferreri at The ICA.

New releases. One year alone, 1976: Taxi Driver, The Tenant, All the President’s Men, The Missouri Breaks, 1900, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Illustrious Corpses, In the Realm of the Senses. All this after Barry Lyndon in ’75.

1976 marked the beginning of VHS. Then followed DVD, BluRay and on to streaming. The Criterion Channel. More and more accessible content. More cinema in amongst it.

But could I ever learn as much as I did from those years of dedicated filmgoing around London? From barely catching a breath between one glory and another?

With so much amazing new work, I think I can. The pace of discovery may be less frenetic these days but cinema never ceases to reveal its possibilities. There for each new generation, it’s the gift that keeps on giving — for as long as we have it.

Returning to Robert Downey Jr., I saw Oppenheimer three times after seeing that interview, and there he was, commanding the screen, scene after scene, working with cast, camera, and director and revealing the depths and dimensions of a distinctly reprehensible but all too human character with his unflinching craft...

We may disagree or not on fathers and Fantasia, I reflected, on one movie or another, we may come from very different social and cultural backgrounds, privileged or not, from different countries even, but what film can teach us, whatever our taste and sensibility, is our commonality.

All of which is to say that my self-education in cinema hasn’t only taught me about cinema, it’s taught me about us.

Peter Markham

October 2024