How do you write about cinema when you cannot go to the cinema

I want to say I adjusted quickly. I want to say that when the cinemas closed in March I pivoted, as everyone kept saying we should, and found a new rhythm for the work, a way of watching and writing that did not depend on the particular smell of a cinema foyer or the particular darkness of a room designed for nothing except looking at a screen. I want to say all of that because it would mean I have been doing my job properly for the last four months. But the truth is I have been sitting in my apartment in Collingwood watching screeners on a laptop and feeling like a restaurant critic reviewing photographs of food.

The cinemas closed and at first it felt temporary. Two weeks, maybe four. We had all seen the footage from Italy and we understood the logic of it, the necessity. I am not writing to argue against the closures. I am writing because four months is long enough to start asking whether the thing I thought I did for a living is actually the thing I do for a living, or whether I have been doing something else this whole time and only noticed the difference when the original context disappeared.

What the room does

Here is what I believe about cinema, or what I believed before March, or what I still believe but can no longer verify through experience: the room matters. Not the screen, not the projection quality, not the seats, but the room. The presence of other people in the dark, breathing, shifting, laughing at different moments, going quiet at the same moment. A film is one thing when you watch it alone. It becomes something else when you watch it with strangers. The something else is what I write about. Or what I thought I wrote about.

The difference is not mystical. It is physical. In a cinema you cannot pause. You cannot check your phone without someone noticing, or at least without you noticing yourself noticing. You cannot get up and make tea during the slow part. The film has you for its full duration, and that captivity is part of the contract. You submit to the film’s pace. You let it bore you if it is going to bore you. You sit in the discomfort of a scene that goes on too long and you feel, in your body, what too long means, and that feeling is data. It is information about what the film is doing and what it expects from you.

On a laptop the contract is different. On a laptop you are in charge. The film is a guest in your space and you can dismiss it at any time. The power dynamic reverses entirely and the experience of watching changes accordingly, not because the images are smaller or the sound is worse, though both of those things are true, but because you are no longer in the film’s territory. You are in yours.

The screener problem

I have watched more films in the last four months than in any equivalent period of my career. Distributors have been generous with screener links. The festivals that moved online made their programmes available. There is no shortage of films to watch. If anything there is a surplus, which creates its own problem: when access is unlimited, attention becomes the scarce resource, and my attention on a laptop at ten in the morning with the dishwasher running is not the same quality of attention I bring to a seven o’clock session at the Astor.

I reviewed a film last month, a quiet European drama about grief and landscape, and the review was fine. I said accurate things about the performances and the pacing and the way the director used weather as emotional shorthand. I filed it and it ran and nobody complained. But I knew, reading it back, that something was missing. Not information. Feeling. I had not felt the film in the way I would have felt it in a cinema. I had understood it. I had appreciated it. I had not been inside it. And the review reflected that distance, a competent description of something observed rather than something experienced.

This is the problem I cannot solve from my apartment. I can be disciplined. I can close the other tabs and put my phone in another room and watch the film straight through without interruption. I can approximate the conditions of cinema. But approximation is not the thing itself, and the gap between the two is exactly where criticism lives. Or where I thought it lived.

The habit question

There is another possibility, and I have been circling it for weeks. The possibility is that everything I just described is a habit dressed as a principle. That the cinema is a wonderful place to watch films, and I love it, and I have built my professional identity around it, but that none of those things make it necessary for the work of criticism. That what I actually do is look at images and listen to sounds and think about what they mean, and I can do that anywhere.

This possibility is uncomfortable because it suggests that the thing I have been mourning, the closed cinemas, the empty foyers, the specific darkness, is not essential to my work but incidental to it. A preferred setting, not a required one. The difference between a writer who needs a particular desk and a writer who can write on any surface. One of those writers has a relationship with a desk. The other has a relationship with writing.

I am not sure which one I am. Four months ago I would have said I was the second kind, that the work was portable, that I could write about cinema from anywhere because the cinema was in my head. Now I am not sure. Now I suspect I might be the first kind, and the desk has been taken away, and I am finding out what I can and cannot do without it.

What remains

Here is what I have landed on, provisionally, knowing that everything about this period is provisional. I am not writing about cinema. I am writing about looking. About the act of paying close attention to moving images and trying to describe what that attention reveals. The cinema is the best place to do this. It is purpose-built for concentrated looking. But it is not the only place, and if I cannot go there, the looking does not stop. It just changes shape.

I watched Babyteeth on a laptop last week. Shannon Murphy’s film, Eliza Scanlen and Toby Wallace, the whole bright terrible thing. I watched it at my kitchen table with headphones on and the blinds drawn and I cried at the end, not because I was in a cinema but because the film found me where I was. It reached through the small screen and the imperfect sound and the kitchen table and it did what films do, which is make you feel something you did not expect to feel.

And then I wrote about it. Not about the cinema I did not watch it in. Not about the experience I did not have. About the film. About what it did with colour and music and the specific way Scanlen holds her face when she is trying not to show her mother what she is feeling. About looking.

I want the cinemas to open. I want to go back to the Astor and the Nova and the Sun and sit in the dark with strangers and feel films the way I used to feel them. I want that and I believe it matters and I do not think anything I have written in the last four months fully replaces it.

But I am still writing. The job is smaller than it was, or maybe it is the same size and I was confusing the container for the contents. Either way, I am still looking, and the looking is the work, and the work continues from a kitchen table in Collingwood while the cinemas stay dark and the dishwasher runs and the films keep arriving on my laptop like letters from a country I cannot visit.