A ghostly tennis match translated as unanswered letters by Jeroen Peeters & Jack Hauser.
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Brussels, Sept. 16, 2010
Dear Jack,
It’s been five weeks since we discussed Christopher Nolan’s Inception in Vienna, yet only today I had the chance to go to the movies again. The Agenda came out and it announced two films with a three-star rating at the Kinepolis cineplex around my corner, so I could not but go. And now I find myself writing to you, to make a start with my promise to “just write along”.
As you know, it’s been over four years now that I live in this place with a cineplex at walking distance and that I’ve made it not only a habit but a practice to go to the movies once a week. Nothing much has changed in those years. At some point the tickets got rather expensive, which dented my rhythm and made me more critical in the choices I made, but now I have an easy solution for this: I simply buy ten tickets at a time, so I can go for an affordable 6,90€ instead of 9,00€. Not being inhibited in choosing which films to watch is important for me: I simply want to go to what is up and deal with it. I pick any film that gets a rating of three or four stars in Agenda, but also go to two stars if the film interests me for some reason. Kinepolis is by no means an independent cinema; it shows only popular stuff. If a film by David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan or Gus Van Sant happens to be shown, most likely it will be on only for one week or so. Since I don’t watch TV nor listen to pop music, cinema is my main link with pop culture and its imagination. I always go alone; film is only a social art form in that it deals with the cultural imaginary and that it’s nice to talk about afterwards. When you’re here in December I’d like you to come along with me once though; it’ll provide me with an occasion to test my theory on the relation between cinema and popcorn! Kinepolis is a huge building with 30 movie theatres in it; all concrete on the outside, all carpet on the inside. The theatres come in two sizes; my favorite spot in the smaller ones is row seven, in the larger ones row twelve – I always wonder why other people go all the way up in the back. That’s about it for the protocol. Oh yes, it really is around the corner.
Tonight I saw Stephen Frears’ new comedy Tamara Drewe, with Gemma Arterton. Curiously, another film with Gemma Arterton came out this week as well: The disappearance of Alice Creed, which might be something to see next. The idea of seeing the same actress in two different films shortly after one another is interesting to me, not unlike the way repertory works in German ensemble theatres, where one can see the same actor in four different plays in the course of one week. In film, a lot of famous actors suffer from being typecast; with others, like Johnny Depp, it is impossible not to think of all the other roles he ever played when he puts on Jack Sparrow’s pirate costume – and then imagine either Neil Young or Keith Richards playing along! This multiplicity in cinema is interesting, the accumulation of registers hybrid and potentially monstrous. I don’t recall having seen a film with Gemma Arterton before – looking this up, it occurs that she plays the role of Strawberry Fields in Quantum of Solace! Anyway, that memory didn’t accompany me in the movie theatre. Tamara Drewe had plastic surgery done to her nose, which yields her the nickname “Plastic”. The “nose job” is not a marker of the hybrid imagination though, but a tool for Frears and the other characters to address something like Tamara’s “real” self – she finds it back at the end of the film when her nose is broken! Now, all that genuineity and deepness is just cheap expressionistic crap, and Frears knows it – or as the character Nicholas Hardiment voices it: “Oh, that’s your 10 pence psychology.”
One more thing about hybrids. Since a few days Brussels is flooded with advertisement panels of Chanel, with actress Keira Knightly presenting the Coco Mademoiselle perfume. Only on the way to the cinema I crossed two of those! On the internet one can find by now a whole literature on Keira’s airbrushed boobs. Here is a picture of the “before” and “after”:
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It is no coincidence that Knightly is not a model but a film actress. Perhaps the airbrushed image on the right reveals something about the hybrid cinematic imagination – monstrous or not? Embrace your parasite!
Best,
Jeroen |
To Be Continued
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