I suddenly went deaf in one ear the other day, so I went to the nurse. She looked in my ear and, startled, said, "There's something in there." I was intrigued. She warmed her syringe, scooshed and scooshed and, eventually, out came a lump of seaweed the size of a pea, from the Cromarty Firth in the north of Scotland, where I'd been swimming naked at three in the morning the previous weekend with 25 people from around the world I'd just met.
There was something Lynchean about this seaweed in my ear. When the nurse told me what she'd found, I imagined David Lynch's camera gliding into the roaring gloom of my ear canal. The thought took me elsewhere, but when I snapped back to the surgery I found myself blurting out the bit about 25 naked strangers. I know nurses see humankind in its infinite variety on a daily basis, but I suspect that mine found this story a bit weird. I admit it sounds so, but it wasn't.
Nairn is more Bill Forsythean than Lynchean. It's a small place, but people bustle and fizz with humour. Chicken rogan josh is easier to get than haggis. Women in their eighties are Johnny Depp fans. At the start of this year, the actress Tilda Swinton, who lives in Nairn, rented a smelly old sandstone former dance hall and bingo parlour that used to be called the Ballerina Ballroom and asked me to help put on a community film festival. In a moment of mental flooding, I said—absolutely.
Festival reports usually focus on the content of the festival, but I'd like to talk about what it felt like to be in the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, the form of our festival, because I don't think I have ever felt it before. As people arrived from all over the world—six times as many as we expected—they walked along a tunnel of twinkling stars, passed bendy mirrors and then glimpsed our childish little movie grotto, where the music was anything from "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" to Marilyn Manson. We saw kids' and adults' eyes light up as they came in. We had taken them by surprise. Our grotto glowed, it was warm, playful and friendly. We gave out free cakes. We were dancing to Bowie songs. There was a mosh pit of bean bags where kids could roll about. This was as far from the cold, empty multiplex silo as you could get.
We showed films from Iran, Senegal, Ukraine, Japan, Denmark, Poland, East Germany and all over the west. Some of them—Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, the Bill Douglas trilogy, Paradjanov's Memories of our Forgotten Ancestors—were tough as hell, austere, or wildly challenging. But people—80 per cent of them local—flocked. They queued down the street for films they'd never heard of. One of these was Yasujiro Ozu's 1932 silent film I Was Born, But…, a glorious comedy about pesky brothers that I've written about before (Prospect, November 2004). When I last showed it in London, 40 people came. In Nairn, 150 people did.
They did so because Simon Fisher-Turner was playing a brilliant new score for the film, because Tilda is one of the most interesting actors working in cinema, but also because of our grotto. People could feel the effort we put in, the fun, the double awe of childhood and cinema, the lack of avarice, the musicality and giddiness.
On our "half" day (we numbered our days half, one-and-a-half, two-and-a-half), we showed a musical from 1934, Dames, chosen by Joel Coen. It was a hoot, and one number, in which Joan Blondell sarkily pretends to love doing laundry on a Sunday, was particularly funny. As the credits rolled, Tilda and I both had the same thought: let's watch Joan's laundry number again. We invited the audience to do so, most did, and the second time around many remembered the lyrics. I bet this had never happened before, yet it seems such an obvious thing to do in the digital age, especially as the purpose of a musical is to entertain. As we rewatched Blondell dancing with a nightshirt, we felt a rantipole freedom. I suddenly wished we'd got permission to show a clip of the same Blondell, four decades later, in the "Beauty School Dropout" number in Grease.
Such little touches electrify movie-going—like the prelude we added before a movie started. The lights would dim, a spotlight drifted across the audience's heads. Silence. Then Johnny Cash singing his plaintive "Hurt," or Barry White with "You're the First, The Last, My Everything," or Morrissey wailing the line "And if a double-decker bus crashes into us," the latter before Singin' in the Rain, in case you think we tried to marry song to film. Then Tilda and I would climb rickety stepladders and raise a huge flag covering the screen, with the words "The State of Cinema" on it. People applauded, perhaps because of its touch of theatre, or because there's something moving for cinephiles in the pun, or even out of reverence.
The welcome banner has been taken down from the Ballerina now. Tilda has been to another film festival, some minor event in Venice, and the seaweed is out of my ear. I've spent the last 20 years trying to get people to see films like Ozu's I Was Born, But… by writing articles in Prospect and books, and by making television programmes. I now know that home baking, Dolly Parton and bean bags are a great way to do so. Whatever happens in the auditorium, the form of moviegoing matters as much as the content.
