Lyric Theatre Executive Producer and movie buff Jimmy Fay writes for Culture about Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, who passed away earlier this week, aged 77.
I was 16 and in love with film. I was a kid from Tallaght, wet behind the ears and standing at attention in line waiting to see a film that was still banned in Ireland. It was dark, cold and wet outside The Academy on Pearse Street. The city then was still edgy around there. In a way it still is but not so much. Then it was edgier. I was front in line because I’d heard on the pirate radio station I listened to that tickets would be scarce. The film was strictly over 18. I didn’t have ID but I figured if I’d been served in a pub in the Wild West of Connemara at the age of 15, I’d persuade whoever it was that needed to let me in that I was the right age.
Eventually a long line formed behind me, all shivering but in couples or groups, all chatting away like friends, all I realised a good bit older than me when I glanced back at them. At last The Academy opened its gates and I bought my ticket at the stall inside and a membership for the film club showing this film. I pretended I was born in 1965 on the form!! I walked up the dimly lit stairs and entered the auditorium and there was a couple, male and female, welcoming me in and offering me free punch. But the guy hesitated as he offered, and said "Are you old enough?" I said yes, but declined the punch. The woman left as if she was on a mission. Other people were coming in and I went quickly to a seat in the middle of the auditorium. The place filled up, steadily. I saw the woman going up and down the central isle showing people to their seats and also looking up and down the rows as if looking for someone. Her eyes never settled on me. Tom Waits’ The Piano Has Been Drinking was playing. I never heard it before then and I loved its oddness. It seemed to suit this strange new experience I knew I was about to have. This first touch at the obscure world of adult drama. I knew the actor, I loved the actor, I knew his On the Waterfront "I could of been a contender" speech intimately, I knew his beauty in One Eyed Jacks, I knew his one-two-three wack in Guys and Dolls, I knew his Godfather.
I knew this was something else though. I had read this was darker. It went somewhere else. It had that musky cologne fragrance of Europe and intimacy and lust and... sex. An aura of profound expectation was in the air. Nobody had seen this film yet. It would be a collective first for this packed house. The lights in the cinema went down. People lit up their cigarettes. Couples snuggled warmly into each other. Smoke mingled with the beam of the projector. All the time I thought someone was going to grab me from behind and throw me out for being too young to watch this adult drama. The film started and it was the music that hit you over the credits of Francis Bacon paintings. Green lines squiggled up and down the print. Scratches and pops appeared intermittently. People were tut-tutting. Clicking their tongues. The film was notorious, it was banned. It seemed only appropriate that it came across as a found artifact. I wasn’t going to let anything distract me. I was going to breathe this film in. It was, in my young mind, going to contain the great complex truth of human relations and the unbearable, unknowable nature of love. And in a weird way... it did. For a 16-year-old.
As years have gone by, I can’t really watch Last Tango In Paris anymore. But I’ll always be grateful to Bernardo Bertolucci (R.I.P.) for one of my most profound cinema-going experiences and for The Conformist, which is in my top 3 films of all time, I saw it in that first season at The Academy, and it left a much more profound effect on me to this very day.
Films still have an effect on me, but sadly not cinema going. We should treasure cinemas like the IFI in Temple Bar, the Lighthouse in Smithfield or the Queens Film Theatre in Belfast. But the days of passing a fleapit and going into a dark auditorium to see a Betty Blue or Mauvais Sang by chance are well gone. With the passing of Bertolucci and Nicolas Roeg, the last of the last European batch of true auteurs have left the stage. Jean Luc Godard sits isolated in his villa in Switzerland - when he’s gone that will be that, the reel flickers out of its spool. The beam evaporates. FIN.
