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.