TAG / 10 PIECES

[COVID]

Lockdown taught me to watch films on a laptop, and the cinemas reopened, and the laptop stayed where it was.

The Coburg Drive-In sold out every session in October, and by December the queues were back to normal, which is to say: short.

Insurers excluded COVID from coverage, productions could not restart without it, and the government took four months to fill the gap.

The productions paused, the releases dried up, and the silence where new Australian cinema should have been got louder every week.

The job is to write about what films do in a room full of strangers, and the room has been empty since March.

The venue closed, the laptop opened, and the room the mic was in became a bedroom.

Event, Hoyts, and Village lost a combined $340 million in Q1 2020, and the independent cinemas behind them lost something harder to measure.

When the films stopped, the composers did not; they just scored different things, and the habits they built in lockdown stayed.

On 23 March 2020, every cinema screen in the country went dark, and the production pipeline behind them froze with it.

Three scores dropped in the two weeks before every screen went dark, and nobody heard them the way they were designed to be heard.

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