Hooked to the silver screen

I have innumerable stories about going to the cinema. I started young and I'm still adding to the store. As an eleven year old I marvelled as my Auntie Lizzie sobbed while watching The Sound of Music. When I was fourteen my dad insisted that we went to a bigger cinema in Leeds to get the full Cinerama effect of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I was well over 30 when I tried some sort of gruel that Poles prefer to popcorn as I watched a Swedish film with French subtitles in a Warsaw cinema. In Banjul I wondered if the running and shouting antics of the audience for a Kung Fu film would turn violent. As a student in the 1970s I recall scraping together enough loose change to see Last Tango in Paris with someone who really thought it was about dancing. In Madrid, in the early 80s, I sat, rifle-less, on a grassy knoll one August evening for cinema in the park. Hooking the speakers over the wound down car windows at a drive-in in Pennsylvania. Delighting in seeing season after season of black and white classics as they should be seen, on a big screen, at the Regent in Leeds. In fact, to this day, every time I see Big John twirling that Winchester and flagging down the Stage I'm reminded of the red plush of the Regent. Then there was that bloke who came to sit next to me as I watched Robocop in a huge, and almost empty theatre, in Mexico DF and asked me, in Spanish, what had happened so far. The gentle strangeness of the Cambridge Arts Cinema in the Market Passage or the time Timothy Spall sat next to us as we waited at the new Cambridge Arts. Laughing as the neighbour from No7 tried to keep his head down so we wouldn't recognise him as we watched the re-release of Deep Throat at Elland Rex. The planning that went in to seeing four films at four cinemas in one day at the London Film Festival and still getting back home on the last train. Knowing enough of French etiquette to tip the usherette in Paris as we watched the first Emmanuelle or those splendidly solitary evenings at the Grand in Ramsey with a beer and a cigar. I'd better stop now but, literally, tens more spring to mind. Just before I stop though special mention for the exit from a cinema here in Spain, in Ciudad Rodrigo, that went through the Bishop's Palace.

From home in Culebrón our regular cinema became the Cinesmax in Petrer about 25 km away. It was a second tier cinema so, instead of getting the Hollywood and Spanish first run releases, it programmed art house and foreign films. The staff called us by name and we asked after their children's exam results. The Yelmo, across the road from the Cinesmax in Petrer, also attracted our attention when they started to show films in English. We became regulars. It all went phut, of course, because of the virus. The Cinesmax, which must have been struggling anyway, has been closed for over a year now. The Petrer Yelmo hung on, valiantly, for a while, then tried reduced opening times before closing for a spell. They are due to re-open today. The same chain kept another cinema in Alicante open a little longer. When the Yelmo closed we discovered the Kinepolis, also in Alicante and also with English language films; they closed that too. Finally there was just the ABC in Elche left. That had been our mainstay this year until it too gave up the unequal struggle. 

With all our closest cinemas closed it looked like our film going was going to have to wait for better times. Google told me the cinema in Torrevieja was still open but travelling 90 kilometres smacked of desperation. Google is a wonderful thing though and, on Tuesday, I discovered the Cinemas Aana in Alicante. It's a small chain with three cinemas and they are soldiering on. 

There's a programme on Spanish TV called Cine del Barrio, which shows Spanish B Movies from the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. If you're British think of the Doctor in the House series or the Carry On films and you have the idea. The films, and the cinemas they were shown in, were the stuff that turned Spain into a cinema going nation. The Cine Aana was cast in that mould. It is not like the majority of cinemas that I've gone to for the past thirty or forty years. It does have three screens but basically it's the one bedroomed house described as a three bed. The main bedroom is fine but the two smaller bedrooms only have space for single beds and no wardrobe. The cinema seats weren't raked, as they are in most multiplex cinemas in a football stadium style, they were tilted backwards so that we were looking up towards the screen.

I'm not sure if it was the special, Wednesday, price or the location but there were a reasonable number of people, widely spaced as you may imagine with the restrictions, for the screening of the French Canadian film, Il pleuvait des oiseaux. Like the majority of non Spanish films it was dubbed into Spanish. The event was very neighbourhood and very Spanish despite the foreign film. The majority of the spectators were older women, in pairs, but there were plenty of men too. The man who turned up ten minutes after the film had started and as well as having trouble with numbers seemed unable to understand the difference between left and right and had a very loud voice. We thought the film was good but the man on the other side of the aisle wasn't that impressed; his snoring was an obvious critique. 

From my point of view the seats were comfy and we were seeing a film up there, larger than our imagination, and that made it all alright.

Sex and violence

Spanish cinemas tend to have shows at around 6, 8 and 10 in the evening. At the weekends, and on Monday or sometimes Wednesdays, which are "el día del espectador" - spectator's day, when tickets are cheaper - there is often an earlier showing around 4 and a late show at midnight. As you may expect the most popular show times are at 8 o' clock and 10 o' clock. Actually I've never been to a midnight show so I could be wrong.

We tend to go to the early midweek shows, to the less than blockbuster films and to one of the second tier and less popular cinemas. It's not at all unusual for us to get the theatre to ourselves. Not always of course, If we choose Tom Cruise even at 4pm there may be a handful of us but we've just seen The Limehouse Golem for instance and we were alone.

Last Wednesday we were in Elche at a shopping centre cinema that doesn't show many of the French or Latvian films so popular in our regular cinema. We chose to see "It", a horror film that was the best selling cinema film of the week in Spain having knocked Tadeo Jones off the top spot. Tadeo Jones 2: El secreto del Rey Midas is an animated kid's film featuring a slightly nerdy Spanish version of Indiana Jones. For the past few weeks we've often had to negotiate hordes of children heading to see Tadeo do battle with the baddies. I've thought, more than once, how fortunate we are not to be in the same cinema as those children. Spaniards in general and children in particular are pretty talkative and quite loud. I like a cinema to be quiet apart from the sound coming from the film.

When we got to the box office, actually the popcorn counter, the woman told us the cinema was pretty full - either odd seats at the side or the first two rows. We chose the second row. Someone was in our seat but we didn't bother. The cinema was loaded with little girls. I thought they looked about 9 years old though Maggie tells me they were seasoned 12 year olds. It's the first time I've been in a cinema so loaded with children since I went to see Indiana Jones, the first one, in 1981. I remember thinking then that they added something to the film - hissing at the baddies and cheering the goodies - so I wasn't too concerned at the idea of seeing a horror film alongside phone toting, popcorn munching children. The children were OK really, the film was rubbish though.

I was a bit taken aback that there were so many obviously under 18s. To be honest I'd presumed that the film would have an 18 certificate. In fact "It" has a 16 certificate. I've just checked and it's more or less the same in the UK where it has a 15 certificate. I was surprised to find though that the Spanish certificates are just recommendations, orientation for the viewers, and they have no "legal" status at all. I well remember the arguments between anguished youngsters and the staff at cinemas in the UK as to whether they were old enough to see a 12 rated Batman film. It seems that, apart from going to see an X rated film, and it looks as though only three cinemas still exist in Spain to show X rated films, anyone of any age can go to see any film they like. So there's no reason to get a babysitter if you fancy taking your children with you to see a blood and gore 18 film. Well there is actually, there aren't any to see. Fifty Shades of Grey was the last film on general release in Spain to get an 18 classification and before that it was 300, the film about the Spartan stand at Thermopylae.

I thought it was interesting that when I went looking for an explanation on the Internet of the purpose of the certificates there were several discussions about the use of ratings, like the ones in the UK and the USA, that have a legal status. There was absolutely no support for them in any of the discussions.

En versión original

I'm going to talk about going to the cinema. Nearly all of this I've talked about before so, old, in the sense of long standing rather than aged, readers you can save yourself some time and stop now.

I've always liked going to the cinema. At the height of it I might go 130 times in a year. When we got to Spain that more or less stopped. Films here are almost universally dubbed into Spanish. There are a few cinemas where it's possible to see films in their original language with subtitles and even a few where you can use a pair of headphones to tune in to an original language version whilst the sound in the cinema is in Spanish. For the main part though, if you go to see a film in Spain it will have a Spanish soundtrack. When our Spanish was worse than it is now we were basically wasting time and money because we couldn't understand much of what was going on.

The dubbing causes problems at times where there is some interplay between actors of different nationalities. For instance I saw one the other day about looking for a lost city in the Amazonian Rainforest. The main protagonist was English and there were lots of references to the Royal Society and suchlike so, when the explorer bumps into some tribe in the middle of the jungle he doesn't say "Do you speak English?" or "Do you speak Spanish?" instead he says "Do you speak my language?" Although it jars a bit it usually works alright.

Obviously enough a large part of any actor's charm is his or her voice. Hearing someone well known speak with the wrong voice, or hearing some well known section from a film spoken with strange words, wrong phrasing and a different rhythm and tone can be most offputting. You get used to it though.

Years ago we went to see Slumdog Millionaire. I mentioned that we were about to go or that we had been to someone who had seen it in the UK. They said that they had had some difficulty in understanding the film themselves and that they thought it would be doubly hard in Spanish. In fact it was an easy film to understand. The difference of course was that, whilst in the original, the Indian actors were speaking in heavily accented English with Indian pronunciations and structures once it had been dubbed into Castilian Spanish it was pretty much grammatically correct.

The same tinkering with what is said happens on the telly. Lots of the programmes are broadcast in dual language. So English language programmes are available dubbed into Spanish for the bulk of the population. All we have to do is fiddle around with the menus a bit and hey presto we have the programme in the original English. This doesn't work so well for us if it turns out to be a French or German series! We watch The Big Bang Theory in English. I usually keep the subtitles on and the subs are, obviously enough, in Spanish. This is so I can understand what Bernadette is saying and so I can pick up on any good slang type expressions. The subtitles do not speak well for the Spanish people. Mention of Wendy's or Dairy Queen is translated into hamburger joint or restaurant or maybe McDonald's. It's not an advertising thing it's because the subtitlers are sure that Spaniards will not know what a Dairy Queen is. I don't know exactly what Captain Crunch is or Fig Newtons either but I can hazard a guess and using cereals and biscuits seems, to me, like some form of subtle elitism on behalf of the subtitlers. It can only help to maintain the parochial nature of Spanish society.

Our nearest cinemas are about 25km away. There are two multiscreen places there within a couple of hundred metres of each other. One is part of a big chain and the other is an independent set up. Both get new release films but the Yelmo, the chain, gets them without fail. The Cinesmax usually does. The independent fills the screens with what must be cheaper films - current films but with a longer run, foreign films and even second run films. It also offers a screen for the films with lesser distribution so, although it's not exactly art house, it does show stuff that's away from the mainstream. The staff are very nice to us nowadays, greeting us like old friends rather than simple customers. I think we've even been greeted by name a couple of times and we usually have a giggle about the correct pronunciation of the title of a film when it is given in English. When we walked out of something because it was so bad for instance they let us go to a completely different film.

We went to see a Finnish film earlier this week. A very strange film that I enjoyed a lot. One of its themes is about refugees with Syrians and Iraqis working their way through the Finnish asylum system. One of the obvious problems that the asylum seekers have is that they don't speak Finnish but, in the Spanish version, everyone speaks Spanish and the dubbers are left with a difficult problem. The actors do their job and demonstrate their confusion, lack of understanding of what's happening to them etc. but the soundtrack flows with perfectly ordinary language and perfectly ordered grammar. There is a complete mismatch between picture and sound. It reminded me a bit of that scene in Love Actually where Colin Firth has learned Portuguese in order to propose to a woman he met but was never able to talk to. In the English version, as he declaims his love in a crowded restaurant the subtitles show that his Portuguese isn't isn't at all bad despite his making grammatical slip after slip. Small things, not large enough to mask the meaning - inhabit instead of live, over emphatic adjectives and inverted phrases - but wrong enough to make it obvious to us that he is a tyro in the language. When she answers in English she says that she learned the language "Just in cases." The faltering language makes the scene. In the Spanish version that is not allowed to happen. In films dubbed into Spanish that is not allowed to happen.

Fiesta del cine

I like going to the flicks. I know it's dead old fashioned. I know I should be streaming Netflix from the mobile phone to the telly screen or watching a film on my tablet or something but I quite approve of a four metre head shot and the thirty metre wide panning shot. The faces on my computer screen might get to be 15 centimetres high which isn't quite so impressive. It's good to get off the couch once in a while too.

I think there is a tradition of cinema going amongst Spaniards - it is often grandly referred to as the Seventh Art, but like most places cinema attendances here have been dwindling for years. 

The main reason that Spaniards always give for not going to the pictures is the price. It didn't help when the conservative government moved theatre tickets, and other arty products, on to a higher VAT tariff.

In Madrid, if you go to the wrong cinema at the wrong time, you might pay as much as 9.30€ for a ticket but, even in the capital, it's easy to find a show for 6€. With the Brexit decreased value of the pound making that seem more expensive we're talking less than £8.50 for a couple of hours of entertainment. Back here in Alicante we sometimes go to the outrageously expensive ABC in Elche where, I think, it's 8.10€ but, more usually, we go to a cinema in Petrer where we pay 5.50€. If we go on Wednesday, Spectator's Day, it's even cheaper.

I suppose if you have a bus load of kids it can add up but, then again, if you have a bus load of kids going anywhere, except the park, costs a fortune. The overpriced popcorn and fizzy drinks don't help either. But, per se, I don't see how anyone can class the cinema as being overpriced.

I'm obviously wrong though. Today was the last day of this year's first Fiesta del Cine campaign. During the promotion the cinema entry price drops to just 2.90€ for the three quiet days of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. I think this is the fourth such event since 2014. On Monday, the first day of the campaign, over 600,000 people turned out to watch a film. That's nearly five times as many people in the cinemas as against the equivalent Monday, the year before, when there was no promotion.