SUMMER CINEMA

Cinema critique essay series:

«Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty…

 make artists and morons lose all self-control…” (VN)

      ... Barefoot… down to the river, trying to tread on the bottom of dried-up streams: there are no sharp pebbles there, capable of biting your foot. The river glistens in the sun, and noisy airplanes  from the nearby aerodrome occasionally skirt among the clouds. The locals have long ago got used to them and determine the weather by them: if they are frequent in the morning, it means that it will be sunny. About three o'clock the sun already sets behind high pines above the precipitous coast and the beach plunges into shadow.

      If you put your trousers on over your wet swimming trunks, you will see a triangular-shaped wet spot on them in a minute. For lunch from the beach it is necessary to go through old sanatorium. The alley is dark and leads to the former stables, a long building, also not lacking some sophistication. It's now a cinema club house. During the day it's cool and dark inside. Rows of sodden chairs with flapping seats, in the absence of a fashion for vandalism, have not yet been cut with razors or painted with ballpoint pens for lack of them. As a free supplement to the film - a ten-minute cinema journal.

    ...From afar, I fondly remember "The Queen of Chantecler", "The Italian Marriage", "Only the Wind Knows the Answer" and "The Nights of Cabiria"…. Thanks to the perspective, the characters of the films even become like relatives who have reached the horizon - and stood in a row. Today (this today was half a century ago…) - Love in Kashmir. India. They are preparing to get married, but he goes on a business trip to Kashmir and there, taking his car away from a child who ran out on the road, crashes. His leg is amputated. He decides to break up with his fiancée. She doesn't notice the mutilation and is perplexed to the point of heartbreaking tears. Finally, she sees the prosthesis. Realising everything, she goes to the sawmill…Her full Indian thigh gets closer and closer to the gleaming teeth... But then he appears:

- What did you want to do?

- I wanted us to be on equal footing.

     Evening. It was raining during the film was being screened, and now there is a smell of dust in the air…