10 films for a senior high student: ‘Cinema Paradiso’ and ‘La La Land’

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By John Anthony S. Estolloso

(Part 3 of 5)

There is something quaintly metacognitive in films about films. They immerse the filmgoer not only into the cinematic experience but also onto a romanticized look into its artistic process. The starving thespian and writer, and the flamboyant director are the dramatis personae of this strange libretto. Popular during the golden age of Hollywood, the genre has somehow taken a backseat in the wake of action flicks and CGI-infused blockbusters. But it never left the cinema: there were always one or two of these films produced in every decade – and if we are to talk about enduring narratives about film as art, two titles come to mind: ‘Cinema Paradiso’ and ‘La La Land’.

Released in 1988, Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso is a coming-of-age story laced around film appreciation. We encounter director Salvatore di Vita – Toto to his youthful peers – reminiscing his early encounters with movies, which understandably involved sneaking surreptitiously into the theater: getting the projectionist Alfredo to be the foil to his shenanigans was perhaps the crowning achievement of his boyhood days. The tragedy of the cinema fire – which blinds Alfredo – ignites the storyteller in him. Womb to tomb, Toto progresses from filmgoer to storyteller to filmmaker. The film closes with the blind projectionist’s funeral, many years after the accident. The mature director returns and attends in an act of defiant nostalgia: in the make-believe world of movies, to remember the past is to forget the present.

Through Toto’s awestruck eyes and Alfredo’s blindness, the ‘visuality’ of the artform is heartwarmingly emphasized: there is joy and sorrow unparalleled at the first and last experience of seeing cinematic spectacle and magic come to life. In the film, the eyes are not just windows to the soul; they are also receptacles of remembrance.

Cinema Paradiso is the portrait of film as collective mirror and memory; La La Land paints over it with a colorful romanticization of the drab underbelly of the film industry.

I was late for the movie when it screened in January of 2017 and I had to stand on the cinema aisle just to take in the entire panoramic spectacle of its opening sequence: the continuous shot weaving through dancers clothed in sundry colors. It was mesmerizing: here is the golden age of Hollywood resurrected for a modern audience – and Seb and Mia were divine as the classic movie couple frolicking through paper trees and cardboard buildings.

Given a cursory screening, we pass the verdict that the film is another cheesy tragic romance. Casting Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling together only bolsters the idea. However, nitpick the film and the tragedy becomes an apotheosis of art. Deep between the heartache and the tears is the one question plaguing every artist through the centuries: How much would you sacrifice on the altar of artistry? That lovely night they tap-danced, Seb the jazz musician and Mia the actress already had it coming, and for all the what-ifs at the epilogue, they know too well what art for art’s sake would demand from them.

La La Land aspires to aesthetic nostalgia: in attempting to frame a perception of the heydays of filmmaking, the film juxtaposes the artform’s development with an unsure millennial audience bred on a visual diet of trite scriptwriting and acting, and overused CGI. It took a bold risk in filming scenes with stop-motion animation, shadow play, and vibrantly painted sceneries and backdrops. It insisted on that aesthetic nostalgia by deliberately incorporating choreographies and practical effects used by the great directors of the past.

For both films, the scoring underlines the charm of the silverscreen – and quite rightly so, the film composer ought to be celebrated. Then again, who still sits through the film credits just to listen to the recap of the scoring? Ennio Morricone’s poignant leitmotifs of childhood memories in Cinema Paradiso ever warms the heart, just as his melodies have done in The Mission and Once Upon a Time in the West. Justin Hurwitz resuscitates jazz in La La Land, carrying on an eccentricity that exuded itself in the drummer’s licks in Whiplash and the bacchanalias in Babylon.

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Great films ought to provoke and inspire viewers – and for these two, what remains with their audiences is the sheer humanity that permeates through their narratives. They are affirmations of the human condition’s latent need to tell and retell stories – and if we cannot read them in books, then we might as well watch them on screens. In the darkness of the cinema and with the light of the projector, we bask in the sublime experiences that have moved men and women to sacrifice what and whom they cherish most in the pursuit of art and artistry. Always and forever, they are the fools who dream.

[The writer is a language and literature teacher in one of the private schools of the city. The film posters are from IMDb.]