See you at the cinema
My relationship with cinema has long cooled. Today I am in the theater – where, unlike cinema, a great variety of ideas and styles has been preserved, where there is a place for the author’s view and expression, where there is a thinking, interested spectator. But I love cinema and cannot calmly watch how the entire domestic film distribution industry is collapsing. Therefore, I declare officially: I have five films, including my recent experiment “Anna Karenina” – a film that was not at the box office at all; and I, director and producer Yuri Grymov, are ready to rent them for FREE. I do this with absolute sincerity: maybe it will help the distributors to keep their business, and the viewer to look at the cinema from a new point of view.
Movie theaters today are fighting for life. Films of half a century ago, the same Office Romance, are released for hire. This is not even the second – the third youth of the picture. Here – “Brother” and “Brother-2”. All these are films that, probably, everyone has seen more than once.
Out of habit, the distributors again decided to bet on proven hits. While quite a lot of good, but not too box office films pass by the viewer. By a strange coincidence, it is there, among not the most budgetary and almost unnoticed by the viewer paintings, that most often there are those worthy works of contemporary authors that do not make it possible for the current cinema to make an official conclusion about death.
Yes, the Russian audience has been weaned off serious, smart, subtle cinema. Yes, thanks to the clumsy attempts of domestic filmmakers to imitate Hollywood, our cinema has turned into some kind of Frankenstein, more precisely, into a Frankenstein mannequin, a wax figure, a meaningless, lifeless and uninteresting attraction. And yes, to our great regret, our viewer agreed with pleasure that the choice in favor of this attraction was made for him by the producers and film distributors.
The situation has changed. Nobody was ready for this. Except for the cinema itself! It turns out that all these years of millions in box office receipts, a string of superhero movie comics and the incessant domestic sports-military-patriotic auto-training on the screen, despite the tons of eaten popcorn – all these years the cinema continued to live! In the world it was more noticeable, in Russia his pulse was almost threadlike, but it was palpable. There were and are interesting pictures. It’s just that no one saw them. Good cinema is enough. There are excellent Korean, Japanese, European films. There is a treasure trove of Soviet cinema. You can show the same Ioseliani, let the films of Balayan, Alov with Naumov, German Sr., Tarkovsky, Khutsiev return to cinemas – who ever saw these masterpieces on the big screen? Yes, they are sometimes shown on TV, but I have a strong feeling that the works of such masters – they, like any piece work, are intended exclusively for specific conditions, these canvases need the only possible frame – to be shown on the big screen. TV, home theater – not the same: the aesthetics are collapsing, the atmosphere disappears.
Give these wonderful paintings a second life! This is not only a question of money. Although, I think you can make money here. This is a cultural issue. Which – agree – can be increased indefinitely. Let the viewer see something other than computer superhero blockbusters. Yes, I know perfectly well what the distributors’ answer would have been just yesterday. And how difficult – yes, what is difficult there: impossible! – it was to break into the big screen “unformatted” cinema. But today is very, VERY different from yesterday. So maybe you should take advantage of this opportunity? What if this turns out to be the very straw that will pull out our film distribution?
Our big screen can get a new face – special, interesting, which can be viewed for a long time and with pleasure.
See you at the cinema?
Newspaper headline:
“See you at the movies!”