Paradise is a movie theater.
Life is not like the movies. life is so much harder . Alfredo said to Salvatore, Totò, in Cinema Paradiso. But a life without movies, without cinema, would be much harder. Without movies we have not been a day, not a minute in this time of confinement and de-escalation. The cinema has not failed us. On the contrary, cinema has saved us (and the number of new subscribers on platforms confirm this for us). There are those who have returned to see his favorite stories, those who have recovered titles that escaped in recent years and those who, finally, have had time to catch up on the classics of all time. The cinema has saved us.
Cinema always saves us, entertains us, evokes us, inspires us, amuses us, teaches us. We like to remember our life through the movies we watched, when we watched them, who we watched them with, where we watched them. What was the first movie you saw in the cinema? Surely you remember the person who took you, the cinema you entered, the smell of popcorn, the darkness of the room suddenly illuminated by that magical screen. mine was The little Mermaid, My older cousin took me to a cinema that no longer exists, the Novedades. I remember the excitement of what awaited me.
Alfredo and Totò, united by cinema.
You also remember the first movies with your best friend, the two of you alone. It was while you were sleeping. In another cinema that has already disappeared, the Peñalver. Also sessions at the Paz and a snack afterwards. And in La Vaguada with the first date, or whatever that was. A Jurassic Park. What a good time we had.
Cinema is memory. Behind every film, behind those memories, there is a place. Because where we saw those movies is still important. Now that we have been more than three months without being able to set foot in a movie theater, it is more important than ever. We have discovered how much we have missed her. Not even those most in love with streaming will be able to deny the value of seeing a movie in a room (closed or outdoors), on a big screen. Buy the ticket, sit in the assigned and chosen seat (some of us have very clear preferences, almost obsessive), wait for the lights to go out and see the first images, the Universal logo, the Fox logo... The light reflecting on our face and sound surrounding us.
Going into a cinema is truly forgetting everything that awaits you outside. It is abandoning oneself to the screen and not thinking about the mobile, about the day's work, about the dinner to come. It's being able to stay and live in a movie for an hour and a half or two hours and sometimes wishing it were even more minutes, staying even longer in the Italy of Call Me by Your Name, in Tarantino's Los Angeles, the Galicia of What burns...
That magic machine.
Living all those worlds and traveling to known places and unknown landscapes surrounded by people. The intimacy of a full movie theater is a unique experience. It is an experience of communion, of union. Share. It's part of that magic of the room. Movie theaters have always been meeting places in towns, in neighbourhoods. As Tornatore told in Cinema Paradiso. Meeting places of laughter and tears. Of sighs and cries. Sharing all that with strangers somehow linked us to them. All leave the room exalted, with a big smile, with tears still in their eyes.
Without nostalgia, eagerly and safely (because all theaters reopen with the highest possible security measures), we need that meeting so much, that reunion and union right now.
Cinema is communion, encounter, union.
Going back to the cinema is to dream again, it is to travel again. Let's go back to the cinema, let's dream, let's travel.