By Preston Wilder
There’s a charm to open-air cinema, and it may be a dying charm. It’s not just the old clichés about the evening breeze and the canopy of stars (though they’re absolutely true), it’s also a fact about summer in Cyprus that may be less prevalent now, in the age of air-conditioning. Summer is (was?) a time when people – even those, like me, who consider it their favourite season – are at war with Nature. You spend the day dodging the heat, sitting behind closed shutters, seeking out shade if you happen to be walking – but then comes the night, the heat subsides and a truce is declared, at least till the next morning.
That’s where open-air screenings come in, in that blessed little window of peace between the fiery hostilities. That’s why they often produce a sense of well-being out of proportion to the actual movie being watched – and that’s also why they go best with certain types of movies, not necessarily feelgood but perhaps transportive, escapist in the best sense. Watching films on a summer night is (or was, before the advent of the air-conditioned bubble) an act tinged with miracle and magic, like coming upon an oasis in the desert.
Pardon the lengthy lead-in, but I just want to make very clear why – much as we love the annual Open-Air Summer Marathon organised by the Ministry of Culture and Theatro Ena – this year’s edition (the 19th, if I’m not mistaken) seems to be missing the point slightly. 22 films will be screened between now (the Marathon actually started last Wednesday) and September 10, all screenings taking place at the Konstantia Open-Air Cinema – and the films are quite diverse, ranging from Oscar contenders like La La Land and Lion to local productions like Beloved Days and The Magic Beans, yet something seems to be missing. The line-up is fine, but it’s not an open-air-cinema line-up.
The most obvious difference is that these are all new films. All but three were made in 2015-16, the remaining trio having been released in 2012. Contrast, say, the 15th Summer Marathon four years ago, when the titles on offer included two Hitchcocks, two Monty Pythons, an early Woody Allen (Take the Money and Run) and three with the divine Audrey Hepburn (including Funny Face, which paired her with Fred Astaire). That year, like most previous years, mixed new films with classics; this year’s much blander Marathon is essentially the summer adjunct of the Friends of the Cinema Society – plus a touch of the multiplex – offering a second chance to catch some recent movies you may have missed the first time.
The change has been made for good reason, of course. One reason is the legal requirement for official ratings, tying the hands of the organisers. Another is availability, some films being hard to secure or too expensive. Yet another (very important) reason is that oldies have apparently been unpopular in recent years, drawing sparse crowds – though, having said that, surely there’s a difference between films from the 40s or 50s (which may indeed have become a minority taste) and those from the 80s or 90s, which could attract nostalgic Gen-X viewers. Was there no way to show a cult movie like Brazil, or an Oscar winner like Dances With Wolves, or even kid-friendly stuff like Stand By Me or The Goonies?
That leads to my other objection about this year’s Marathon, viz. it’s too arty. The films are mostly in a language other than English, and even the best of them tend to deal with worthy subjects: Fire at Sea, for instance, is a documentary about refugees on the island of Lampedusa (even if it treats the subject in delightfully indirect fashion), while the Chilean-made NO is a serious-minded comedy about the plebiscite against Pinochet in 1988. Nothing wrong with arthouse films per se (I usually adore them), and world cinema is certainly transportive insofar as it carries you away to different cultures (take, for instance, I Still Hide to Smoke, a social drama about women in 90s Algeria) – but not in an open-air-cinema way. These are thoughtful and responsible films, and a summer night isn’t necessarily the time to be thoughtful and responsible; what you want instead is the freedom to dream, the sense of release at the end of a long day, the quiet contentment of that truce from the summer heat, taking in the breeze and feeling carefree and clean.
It’s no good, I can’t quite articulate the magic (that’s why it’s magic) – and maybe my objections are misguided, insofar as the only audience for films nowadays are precisely the art-movie stalwarts who frequent Cyprus Film Days and the Friends of the Cinema in winter, and migrate to the Open-Air Marathon in summer. (Who’s going to come if you show Stand By Me? Those people are all at the beach, or at home watching downloads.) I can only repeat that open-air screenings have the potential to be charming – even in the age of air-conditioning – and might be even more so with a more nostalgic or escapist lineup.
Meanwhile, go and watch some movies at the Marathon – which is still very much worth attending, despite my grumbling! Films show from Wednesday to Sunday at 9pm, each film getting two screenings. The full programme is available at the Friends of the Cinema website, http://www.ofk.org.cy/, or call 22-349085 for more details.
