Movies – Journey Home

Sunday was the annual award ceremony for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I’ll just straight up say it: I don’t recognize any of the honored films, actors, and technicians and can’t find the impetus to learn who or what they are.

It’s hard to say what happened. When I returned from Europe and attended graduate school, I saw multiple movies every week. When we gathered for the recent holidays the family viewed a made for television movie. Before that, who knows when I saw the last one. It had been years.

I’m not the only one. The online service Quora posted, “Less than 10 percent of Americans go to the movies regularly today, but that has been true for the last 20 years or so. Now overseas markets, especially China, bring in the big box office.” Streaming services, installed home theaters, and changing preferences contribute to the decline. Movies have been in decline more than 20 years for me.

In 1986, I wrote a high school friend about this:

I have been thinking about the motion picture of late. It has been about a year since we saw one in a theater. Probably will be as long before we see another one. Film was a crucial part of my masters degree. I saw so many. I thought about and digested them constantly. Here in Cedar Rapids, film has taken a back seat in my intellectual journey. Rather, I have changed my perspective.

What is essentially an entertainment became, for a brief instant, an inspiration. Film is visual, musical, and most of all, a social statement. By watching so many, I studied one of the societies in which I live. But now, this study finished, I turn to application of this knowledge. (Letter to Dennis Brunning, April 19, 1986).

I had viewed maybe ten films in Europe over three years. One of them was Patton which we showed repeatedly to soldiers in the field. I became an expert at showing a film movie using a generator and a lamp projector.

For me, movies were part of an intellectual process. It began when I saw Apocalypse Now in Springfield, Illinois while on my trip home from Europe in 1979. Francis Ford Coppola’s film opened up a new world of creativity. When I finished mining the movie vein in the early 1980s, film-watching at theaters was mostly over for me. It became a “date night” special we did only a time or two per year.

Back in the day, before there were talkies, movies were available everywhere. Many urban neighborhoods had a place to pay a dime and see a movie. They were cheap entertainment. Over time, these storefront neighborhood theaters disappeared to be replaced by movie theaters on the scale of the RKO Orpheum chain. My home town had four of these, the Capitol, State, RKO Orpheum, and Coronet. Next came multiplex theaters where concession sales were consolidated for many motion pictures playing in close proximity. In our community of about 250,000 there was at one time a single multiplex. Traveling a half hour by car to see a movie eroded interest in new release films.

Home movie watching had its heyday with the advent of VHS cassette tapes of movies, and later DVDs. I continue to have a collection of VHS tapes stored in two banker’s boxes. The technology to play them has become too expensive to justify getting a player. It was great while it lasted. When we lived in Indiana in the late 1980s and early ’90s I would stop at the video rental store after work, get a movie or two, and order pizza delivery for supper. It made a good, inexpensive Friday night in our small family.

Today, I just don’t know. Groups I know get on Discord to live stream a movie for people viewing from all over the globe. Some people are addicted to Netflix and its equivalents. Viewing a movie on television in the family room morphed into each family member watching something different on individual screens. The movie itself seems to be beside the point.

The short analysis of why movie watching is in decline is people don’t have “spare time” the way we did. We view every moment as an opportunity to be occupied with activities. We believe we have more activities than time. There is too much investment of time to see a movie at a multiplex. The same social behavior impacting movies also affects reading, which, as I have written, is also in decline. The idea of spare time and needing something to do with it, just doesn’t seem to be present in society the same way it was 40 years ago.

Some day I will take my DVD copies of The Matrix, Out of Africa, Blade Runner, and Lord of the Rings to the living room and watch them. Revisiting my favorites does not help the broader problems of the motion picture industry. I’m not sure going to the multiplex a couple of times a year would either.

Full moon through maple tree, March 6, 2015.

The atmosphere was particularly clear Saturday night. Moon bright, stars twinkling. A fine time to be outdoors despite the cold. On Sunday, for entertainment, I read The Movie Ad Book by Malcolm Vance, a book with 120 full page, color reproductions of classic motion picture posters.

My canon of movies makes a short list. Chronologically, World War II movies I saw in downtown Davenport were formative. Saturday morning I picked up the city bus near the hospital where I was born and rode downtown to pay my newspaper bill. After hanging out for a couple of hours, when theaters opened, I saw matinees of The Great Escape, The Longest Day, and other films about the war. I grew up in a culture where World War II veterans were everywhere.

Grandmother took the whole family to see The Sound of Music during 1965. She particularly identified with the Maria Rainer character. Of course, this was also a film about World War II. It was the only time I remember going to a movie theater with her.

I saw early James Bond films in Davenport, beginning with Goldfinger, released in 1964. Dr. No and From Russia With Love made return engagements, so I was able to see them. Even then we expected all of Ian Fleming’s Bond books to be made into films. The last Saturday matinee of a Bond film I saw was Thunderball, released in 1965. It was a special time for a young newspaper boy.

I have little remembrance of films I saw from beginning High School in 1966 until returning from military service in 1979. I remember seeing The Graduate in a Quad Cities theater, likely in 1968. While serving in Germany, our battalion showed Patton repeatedly while we were in the field. It was always a challenge to keep projector light bulbs going because generator surges caused a couple to burn out during each screening. In garrison I remember seeing Superman with Christopher Reeves during its initial release, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind at a theater in Wiesbaden, dubbed in German and subtitled in English. During a trip to Holland, I saw Annie Hall in an Amsterdam theater in English with Dutch subtitles while the buddies I traveled with went to the red light district.

When I returned to the United States, I saw Apocalypse Now which made an impression on me. So did The Deer Hunter. When I entered university for my graduate degree in American Studies, I became completely absorbed in seeing every possible film. It was a way of understanding film as an expressive art form to enhance my writing. I sought every film by Rainer Maria Fassbinder who was at his peak creativity. I saw most of his feature film movies during that period. During our first year of marriage I saw the entire Berlin Alexanderplatz series. It was surprising when he died in summer 1982 of a drug overdose.

The first time I did anything with my future spouse, we went to see Blade Runner in 1982. We also saw Tootsie and Out of Africa in theaters. Most of the long-form movies we saw were on VHS and CDs checked out from a library or commercial video rental store. For a while we made movie-watching a regular family event at home. Of the films seen during that period, I would watch the first film in The Matrix series again. Another keeper is Michael Moore’s Roger & Me about the auto industry in Flint Michigan. I spent a lot of time in Flint when I worked for a transportation firm.

Of the 120 movie posters in Vance’s book, I saw about 30. I was serious about film study in graduate school, but the 40 years since then eroded my interest. These days, I can hardly picture myself sitting still 120 minutes at a time to watch a movie. I’ll be sending my copy of The Movie Ad Book to Goodwill to be recycled with another reader. It was a fun Sunday thinking about films and how they affected my life.