First Response - Page 1

More often than not we know more about the film we are going to see than we need to. It leads to us being conservative in our choices and stops us from appreciating film's greatest pleasure: spontaneously responding to what is happening on the screen.

You never forget your first time; you never forget your first time with a new person. Pauline Kael memorably called her first anthology I Lost It At The Movies and the first time I heard that I thought she meant that she had literally ‘given it up’ in the back of a cinema¹. Looking back at the titles of her anthologies (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Deeper into Movies and Taking It All In, among others) got me thinking about sex and specifically the first time you had sex. There is no need to disturb you here with the details of my first time except to say that the only comparable physical and mental excitement I had experienced up to that point was watching three men try to kill a shark. I began to wonder why it was so rare to experience that excitement when I went to the cinema now.

Kael recognised how cinema and sex are similar. They are both about pre rational response first and foremost (the rationalising always comes later). We also seem incapable of talking about either activity without some distancing layer of theory or agenda. When she castigated her fellow critics for being ‘ashamed of what they enjoyed’ she was mining something very interesting about the honesty of sexual response and the deception of how we discuss sex in the public sphere. And I think that this is where the problem with a lot of contemporary film literature lies. We are not really free to be honest about our cinematic responses. We are like the pre-McKinsey housewife – scared to say what we like, fearful of not knowing why we like it and repressed by what is publicly acceptable. In short, many of the ways we have come to discuss films often actually distances us from what is really pleasurable about the activity².

As with sex, first responses in Cinema are essential to shaping your ongoing attitude to the activity. When I was young I used to see films knowing nothing about them. No reviews, no marketing, no plot synopsis and we rarely even managed to read the back of the video box. Me and my friend Ben used to pick them by their covers in the video shop, then because they were invariably 18s Ben’s mum would take them down and rent them for us.

¹ Alexander Walker once described his first moment in a cinema as a child saying ‘I watched it totally entranced. Galileo discovering the Earth move must have felt the same elation as I did discovering pictures that moved.’ As quoted in Projections 8, John Boorman and Walter Donohue (ed), Faber and Faber, 1998, p 51 (I can’t help thinking of that post coital favourite ‘the earth moved'…)

² Press releases, thumbnail reviews, Paul Ross etc

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