Cinema

I don't know what prompted me to buy tickets for two consecutive showings of different films this evening.   Probably loneliness, missing Dd.  I was taken back to the time when I was a member of the Edinburgh University Film Society and saw up to eight films a week, often consecutive screenings of different films nearly all when I should have been studying my law books.   I realise now how studying law made me deeply unhappy causing me to seek escape to other worlds  in the darkened theatre of George Square.   Ironically, it was one viewing there that tipped me over into profound disillusionment, if not depression.   It was Bertolucci’s 1900, which tells of the rise of fascism in Italy in a sweeping cinematic way with stunning rural tableaux.    I'll never forget the cut to the scene of the newly-acquired threshing machine in the farm yard.   But it was the cruelty of the Donald Sutherland character putting a cat to death by strapping it to a wooden post and, after a long manic run up, head-butting it to death.  The blood smeared on his forehead somehow took the wind out of my young idealistic sails.   Much like the politics of today.