Memories of a Film

Aim: This film focuses on the cinematic experience through a reflection on the importance of cinema in the city. A certain idea of cinema was lost, the cinema as a Temple. Cultural habits has been changing in society, the spirit of cinefile was lost, where people in general would go seeing the latest Truffaut, Godard, Chaplin or Leone and Ford. The film militancy has disappeared. It is no longer important to watch films in “the dark room”, with your family, friends and/or strangers. Nowadays we watch films in solitude, alone, at home. This means that the cinema experience has changed completely, and the relationship between people and cinema has also changed. Precisely, this experience is lost, or at least is being lost.
Oporto city was crucial for the development of cinematographic arts in Portugal, always in the front line. But, over time, the city that already had fifty film theaters over one hundred years started to lose this force, this importance, by reducing the investment in the Seventh Art. This is a common problem within cities around the world, facing the closure of their film theaters. Our starting point is the microcosm of a single film theater, the Charlot Cinema (in Shopping Brasília, Oporto), and them we extrapolate the analysis to other cinemas. However, it is not relevant at all to be familiar with this film theater in particular, since a film theater is representative of all the others.
“Cinema is a dream”. This dream is, therefore, an experience. This experience only exists if there are viewers, they are the ones who build the cinema itself. It is the cinematographic experience. This experience is magical, an illusion. The viewer designs in his minds artificial images. The viewer when enters the film theater becomes a part of this experience, transforming it in a dream. We all live the cinema in very different forms, but in that moment, we are all dreamers. In a way, the cinema is a form of escape for many people, is projects our dreams. The viewer projects himself on the characters, relates with them, becomes himself fiction in a way. This is something that he is not.
Ii is interesting to ask this question: “Does the cinema still exist?”. The cinema was a technology of the nineteenth century that crossed all the twentieth century. Today, in the twenty-first century, will this technology hold? The greatest channel to transmit emotions every invented, the cinema itself, will be an invention without a future? With the end of the film itself (versus digital film) the experience is another. Does the cinema still exist today? This is a interesting question, where the answer is still difficult to obtain. One thing is certain: the cinema existed and still exits. Even though it is disappearing or changing, the cinematographic experience still exists in several parts of the world. We still have people who what to me child again and forget the solitude. We still have people who dream in the dark room and continue to be seduced by this ritual that goes back over a thousand years, twenty four pictures per second.