Have you noticed lately how many old movies are being screened at the cinemas? It’s not like the annual Cinema Reborn festival, which blends new prints of classics with rare and unusual titles, it’s a parade of certified favourites - Psycho, Night of the Hunter, The Sound of Music, In the Mood for Love, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly… all oldies but goodies. James Cameron’s incredibly successful, utterly fatuous Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) is getting a “Special Re-Release 3D Screening”.
While the nostalgia kick is looking like more than a passing phase, the new releases come and go with alarming speed. I found as much recently when I considered writing about the Sara Bernhardt bio pic, only to discover it had lasted less than a week at the pictures. Audiences may queue up for superhero and action flicks or big budget kids’ films, but almost everything else is a gamble. It’s as if people have lost faith in new features. Australian films are particularly hard hit, as local audiences lost faith a long time ago.
Nostalgia is one way of revising our cinema-going habits, another is to use the movies as a way of seeing high quality, overseas opera and theatre productions. I’d be happy to do this any night of the week, although not without an irrational sense that it’s not ‘real’ cinema. One thinks of the great French auteur, Robert Bresson, who claimed that most movies failed to take advantage of the capabilities of the medium, being nothing more than “filmed theatre”.