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And there’s only a small select audience: just three of us – my movie-loving wife, my filmmaker son, and me, the type of boorish wanky cinephile who says stuff like, “Heard there’s a new anime from Ghibli but it’s not a Miyazaki, yahhh. Let’s watch it without dubbing or subtitles, in the original Japanese as the director intended, yahhh” (boorish wanky cinephiles always finish sentences with “yahhh”. Otherwise no one takes us seriously.).
For the past three months, the entire history of world cinema has been played in our living room. We’ve watched early silent films: Chaplin’s The Gold Rush, Keaton’s The General, and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin with the famous baby-pram-rolling-down-stairs sequence that was shamelessly stolen from De Palma’s The Untouchables. I don’t know how a 1925 film ripped off a 1984 film but those Soviets had all kinds of dirty little commie tricks, yahhh.
We moved onto neo-realist Italian cinema of the 1940s, watching Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (accompanied by my burnt, unrisen home-made pizza, symbolising the devastating hardships of post-WW2 Italy and the equally devastating hardship of a 2020 Yeast-Less Supermarket).
Explored the French New Wave of the 1950s, watching Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, with jelly snakes dangling from our bottom lips, like floppy non-nicotine gangster-Gauloises. Marvelled at Satyajit Ray’s Indian masterwork The Apu Trilogy, which we could only find on YouTube, so this stunning humanist saga was interrupted every 10 minutes by an ad showing someone getting a glob of earwax yanked out of their ear with tweezers, only adding more emotion to the heart-rending drama.
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We’ve watched documentaries like Ron Fricke’s Samsara, comedies like Jacques Tati’s Playtime, heavy metaphysical art-films like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (which we stopped halfway through, said “Fricke this!”, and went back to comedies with Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude).
We binged on modern Asian cinema with the directorial back-catalogues of Bong Joon-ho, Wong Kar-wai and Park Chan-wook, snacking between back-catalogues because modern Asian cinema makes you ridiculously hungry.
And just like any arthouse cinema, at the end of each screening we hang out in the OurHouse Cinema hallway-foyer and have fervid scholarly discussions about the big cinematic issues.
Is BitTorrent acceptable if you can’t find your movie on any paid service, and you’ve searched for a good five, maybe six minutes?
Why are Rotten Tomatoes critic-scores so different from the audience-scores, and does that mean the critics are wrong? Is pioneering indie-filmmaker John Cassavetes’ surname pronounced Cass-AV-etes or CASS-a-VETES? That discussion went for half an hour, until I yelled “It’s CASS-a-VETES, so shut up everyone, yahhh!”
No one can argue with a yahhh. A yahhh is absolute and final.
Danny Katz is a Melbourne humorist.