Thirty-six auteurs add their two cents. By JACOB POWELL.

AS YOU WOULD expect from a film made up of discrete three minute shorts by more than 30 different directors, To Each His Own Cinema makes you, in its turn, laugh, muse, shake your head, cringe, nod knowingly, reminisce, tear up, and laugh again. What I did not expect, is how moving the overall experience would be. There is something deeply stirring in this series of very different reflections on the cinematic experience which is difficult for me to explain. I’m not sure why I didn’t think that it would be so affecting considering the weight of talent, intellect, and craft brought to bear on the project; perhaps it was because I felt it would be overtly manufactured. The idea of the Cannes governing body (??) asking a bunch of their favourite auteurs to make short films about movie going just didn’t strike me as likely to produce anything cohesive or as inspired as these directors would generate from their own creative impulses. Luckily for me, I was proved very wrong. Although it isn’t all top notch work, the overall viewing experience is so rich that I think any movie watcher would likely get a high level of satisfaction from watching this film.

Following a broad overall theme does tie the shorts together nicely and there are a number of common threads noticeable across the body of work. Most directors took a literal approach and set their shorts inside a theatre for the bulk of the time, though some set them nearby like Ken Loach’s Happy Ending (waiting in a queue for tickets) and Walter Salles’ 5,557 Miles From Cannes (on a street outside a cinema building). A number showed makeshift or ramshackle cinemas from times past or outside of a recognisable western setting such as the sheet screen and old projector being set up in the rural Chinese village in Zhang Yimou’s Movie Night. There are also a number of recurring motifs such as the blind viewer (eg: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Anna and Chen Kaige’s Zhanxiou Village), referencing classic directors/works past (eg: many references to Fellini, Bresson, Truffaut, Godard and the like), and the director appearing onscreen in his own short (eg: Takeshi Kitano in One Fine Day and David Cronenberg in At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World).

Although I think anyone could enjoy and take much from To Each His Own Cinema, it really is a film lover’s (or film geek or film wanker – whichever you prefer) movie experience. Part of the enjoyment for me was in was in recognising the work of directors I love – some like David Lynch, Ken Loach, and Wong Kar Wai seemed very obvious whilst others weren’t so easy to pick – and also recognising the other films and directors that were being referenced like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s use, in his short The Electric Princess House, of the bumper car scene from Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967). Conversely, just as much enjoyment is to be had in the responses of the rest of the audience; different people laughing at different scenes, or gasping in surprise while the rest of the cinema is quiet, or heaving a wistful sigh when others are staring blankly. In fact, this continued after the end of the film as pockets of people talked about their favourite bits or parts they didn’t get. It seemed that everyone had a different moment that touched them the most and particular shorts they didn’t care for. The breadth of unique responses was illustrated to me in the conversation of a young couple I was walking behind on the way out of the cinema who were exclaiming that they couldn’t understand why some people were laughing at the oddest moments.

The response of each director to the task was as disparate as that of their audience this night. Some took route of humour (black, wry, or straightforward) as in Lars Von Trier’s Occupations which saw him at a screening of his film Manderlay being incessantly talked to by some random man in the seat beside him who, at the end of a his spiel, asked Lars (whom he did not recognise) “What do you do?” to which Lars responded “I...kill” and proceeded to take to him with a pick axe. After which he sat down to resume viewing the film whilst the rest of the faux audience were watching him in shocked silence. I’m sure many of us can relate to times of frustration when others are not interested in what’s happening onscreen and end up distracting the other nearby viewers.

Some directors chose a more autobiographical approach; looking at the early childhood experiences which drew them into a passion for the cinema like Claude Lelouch’s The Cinema Around the Corner in which he recounts key movie moments in the life and romance of his parents’ which they then included their children in. A more surrealist angle was taken by those you might expect, including David Lynch’s prefiguring onscreen of a friend murdering another friend in the cinema that they are watching the film in his short Absurda. Others took an obvious socio-political path, as did Wim Wenders & co. in War in Peace which saw a screening of Black Hawk Down take place on a TV in a hut in the Congo which is seeing peace for the first time in about 100 years.

The sole female director asked to take part was New Zealand’s own Jane Campion who produced The Lady Bug, a quirky meditation on the treatment of women via a pantomime ladybug who is drawn to the light of the projector but is eventually squashed by the cinema’s cleaner. Shorts about the emotional power of the cinematic experience were submitted by several filmmakers. The aforementioned Anna from Alejandro González Iñárritu shows a young blind woman’s response (with her friend explaining the visuals to her) to Godard’s Contempt (1963), while the Dardenne brothers’ piece, Darkness, has a young thief attempting to steal a woman’s purse in a darkened theatre. Upon catching him she takes his hand and slowly moves it up to her cheek to feel the tears that have covered her face as she watches Bresson’s harrowing Au Hasard Balthazar (1966). Other films are full of fun and exuberance such as Walter Salles’ 5,557 Miles From Cannes which has two musicians musing comically about cinema outside a rundown theatre playing Truffaut’s 400 Blows (1959). One moment they suddenly break into an amusing song about their perceptions of the Cannes film festival so far away.

It’s not all top shelf viewing though, and again, which shorts get labelled ‘the bad ones’ will differ between viewers. To my mind Gus Van Sant’s First Kiss was under par. This effort involves a young man working as a projectionist in an empty cinema who plays a film with a beautiful girl swimming in an unnaturally blue sea and then steps off the stage and into the film to kiss her. Youssef Chahine’s 47 Years Later is basically self-aggrandisement with the director displaying his movement from being an unrecognised to young filmmaker to (archival footage of him) being heralded at Cannes in the Palais du Festival as a great filmmaker. These few missteps do not so much detract as serve to bring further contrasts to complete a very rounded couple of hours viewing.

If you enjoy going to the movies then I would suggest you get to To Each His Own Cinema and see which of these shorts make you laugh out loud, which move you, which frustrate you, and which make you wistful about the birth of your own love affair with the cinema. I’m sure you’ll come away from the experience feeling invigorated about movie going.