Five Memories on Film
1. A much too hot July day in Paris, on which I try to escape the greenhouse-like conditions in my 11m² cell under the roof. I’m walking the streets aimlessly, the asphalt burning under my sandals that wind up my calves in laces and make me feel like a gladiatress without victory and without an arena; I sit in a small park under a fountain and write until the screams of playing children start tugging at my tired brain. I keep walking without purpose until I pass a cinema. On a whim, I go in, buy an ice-cold coke and a ticket for L’Amant double (François Ozon). Walking into the deserted cinema feels like stepping into a refrigerator. Then it gets dark and quiet, a cryogenic comfort.
2. When I step out of the cinema, the world lies very still, as if asleep. Snow has fallen. Just a moment ago, I was on the French Atlantic coast in the 18th century, where in Portait de la jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma) two women paint, look at, and fall in love with each other with cautious passion and infinite slowness. Loneliness envelops me like a warm coat or an ozone hole, sometimes there’s this snow that gets very hot with silence. Vivaldi’s violins of the four seasons in my ear, I walk through a white Vienna to my house, where I have a simple dinner of bread, cheese, and olives and start writing feverishly.
3. Instead of waiting for a response — or admittedly not instead, but in spite of it—, I drag myself to the cinema. Two hours without phone, without the disturbances I so senselessly long for. In Paterson (Jim Jarmusch), they sleep and fight together, and write poems about matchboxes so mundane you wonder where life ends and poetry begins. I can’t even remember which cineplex I went to or when, but judging by the chronology of missed contacts it was a faceless January day. By the time the credits start rolling, I have an apology on my phone that wasn’t worth waiting for.
4.He’s standing by the entrance when I exit the auditorium. The Generation Wealth (Lauren Greenfield) of cinema: You go alone but you’re always part of a handful, and it’s also how you get released—like a fist that opens and lets its prisoners fall free. I’m blinking and disoriented as always, but this time there’s someone waiting for me, unexpectedly, in my new city. We will look at each other in the mirror across from each other and both see something different. I still don’t know anything about the luxury of everyday life.
5. That day, it’s raining like it can only rain in August and I feel as alone as one only does in summer. The reel of Happy Together (Wong Kar-Wai) is only a little younger than me (1997), it flickers and freezes several times while we wait in the semi-darkness for the film to continue. Sometimes I doubt that it will go on.
6. It always does.
