Film Power or the Power of Film?

Film, cinema and the moving image are entering a new phase in Scotland with the creation of the Centre for the Moving Image which will incorporate the Edinburgh International Film Festival and the city’s Filmhouse cinema. Mark Cousins and Tilda Swinton have come on board as creative advisors in what feels like another major shift for the landscape of the arts in Scotland.

Meanwhile the hopes of Edinburgh’s grand old lady of cinemas – the Odeon on Clerk Street – have been raised as a group of recent graduates aspire to breath new life into its boarded up auditorium. This feels like a coming of age for Film Studies – a subject I was once told wasn’t a ‘proper’ one. I love that graduates are emerging with energy, passion and the confidence to take a piece of cinema history into their own hands and give it a workable future.

All of this is refreshing news at a time when Hollywood is accused of being too scared to take risks and 3D is already being touted as yesterday’s news. In the week that Warner Bros cancelled the release of the next Harry Potter film in 3D, you have to question whether plans to convert the Star Wars films into 3D are going to rake in the anticipated profits from a cynical audience who are counting the pennies and seen it all before (both 3D and Star Wars).

Other head thumpingly dull news is that James Cameron has toped the Guardian’s Film Power 100 list. Please, please can we have a list of people who are ‘feeling the force’ of film, circumnavigating the industry’s traditional ‘gatekeepers’ and taking its future into their own hands. Let’s have a list that celebrates the likes of the graduates planning a coup of Edinburgh’s old Odeon, the filmmakers who are crowd sourcing footage and finance, the artists who are breathing new life into archive film, mob cinema and the 8 1/2 Foundation.

Film has come of age and its maturity has nothing to do with an expensive in-your-face format, powerful men, or industry veterans squeezing every last penny of profit out of a thirty year old franchise. It has everything to do with people who are passionate about cinema and filmmakers sticking two fingers up at the likes of lists celebrating those who have ‘Film Power’. Because such is the power of film!

I’m thinking digitally

So, I am feeling differently about digital after the Cinema Exhibitors Association roadshow last week. Not least of which in how independents might afford the switch and keep some options open around alternative content and Virtual Print Fee deals. Even if it does mean that working with VPF prevents the full potential of digital being unlocked.

The other reason I’m feeling so positive about digital is that I feel confident cinema will survive despite the changes brought to our lives by the wider world of digital development and web 2.0. Let’s face it, cinema has reinvented itself many times already, did anyone ever expect it wouldn’t in the digital age? And this time the possibilities open to those exhibitors who recognise the full potential of digital are far greater than those offered by any of cinema’s other incarnations.

I came across this online interview with John Knell from the Intelligence Agency chatting to Bill Thompson the other day – in which Knell makes the (tongue in cheek) suggestion that all cinemas should be operating with a sense of impending extinction.

My grandmother was a cinema usherette in Coventry during the war. From an early age I was feed stories about GIs, gas lit auditoriums, nicotine stained cinema screens, mothers who let their children pee on the floor as they didn’t want to take them to the toilet and miss the film and the times they ignored the air raid sirens to stay in the cinema as the bombs that destroyed the city fell all around them. The cinema she knew was different to the one I grew up with – the worn out, divided up auditoriums of the late 70s and early 80s. Pressed up against bingo halls and British Legion social clubs with minimal sound proofing, smokers on one side, intermissions and usherettes with ice cream trays around their necks.

And these faded cinemas, where those of us who are old enough remember the first time Star Wars revitalised their tired screens, are different again from the modern multiplexes that screened the digitally shot Attack of the Clones with glorious Dolby surround sound.

All of these lives are a world away from cinema’s first silent incarnation where people flocked to see the news as well as films. So Knell is right when he claims that cinemas should be operating with an impending sense of extinction, but then they always have. Cinema has become extinct many times and digital is just another reincarnation – if anything one that harks back to cinema's roots and allows ‘alternative content’ to be screened alongside films.

All that’s ever stayed the same in cinema, and ever will, is a dark auditorium, a big screen, a magic lantern and a deep seated desire to momentarily escape from the real world.