Text: Victor Morozov
I grew up in Tulcea, a small town in eastern Romania – and the so-called gate to the Danube Delta. By the time I could go to school, all the cinemas had closed down. During the Ceausescu régime, there had been five of them and they thrived on popular movies from the USSR, India, and America. They would experience a second wave of success after the end of communism in 1989, when censorship was no more and Romanian directors could finally depict whatever was on their minds (spoiler alert: anti-communism, violence, and a lot of sex). When I was born at the end of the nineties, television and the internet were finally taking care of that, like in other parts of the world. Communist repression brought good, albeit artificial, health to the cinemas, the only distraction around back then. Afterwards, it was no longer needed. Nowadays, the old “Patria” cinema sits renovated as the town’s theatre, “Jean Bart” (named after a local navigator and writer of the early twentieth century). I recently introduced a few free screenings there – including Sentimental Value and It Was just an Accident – for the first ever edition of the European Film Festival held in Tulcea. The screen was improvised and slightly crumpled, but it was still the only chance for the locals to see these films.
One cinema, “Tineretului” (Youth), is now a nightclub, while another one, “Favorit”, gave way to a small gambling place . It must have been in one of these, one cold winter evening back in 1961, that my grandmother, a big fan of Elvis Presley, felt she was going to give birth – and hurriedly left the screening. My grandma, who is 91, survived a typhoid fever epidemic in the early forties and the Covid-19 outbreak. A war refugee from Bessarabia in today’s Moldova, she has lived long enough to witness quasi daily smartphone alarms warning against falling objects from the sky, and weekly news reports of Russian drones breaching Romanian airspace and being shot by F16 airplanes. Tulcea sits roughly 20 kilometres from Ukraine – the Danube separates them. From Paris, where I am writing this, all of it seems like a bad dream; there, it has become routine.
Grandma did not watch any films in the newly opened “Cityplex” – a two-screen cinema built at the top of a shopping mall at the end of the 2000s during a pre-crisis momentum that soon faltered. Nor did my uncle, or my parents: compulsive cinephiles when they were young, they had resolved in the meantime to television or piracy, like every other Romanian. My first viewings occurred this way, as well as my first cinephile crush on Rachel McAdams. I was about eleven or twelve when the cinema opened in the midst of the new 3D hype. My schoolmates and I would go there, be handed a heavy pair of glasses that almost never worked and get frustrated over a partial viewing of The Hobbit and some other 3D titles that I forget. I would watch anything that was showing, with no discernment: from Now You See Me to Captain Phillips, Jack Reacher or The Expendables. I was already somewhat into cycling back then, so glimpsing a trailer of Premium Rush, a Joseph Gordon-Levitt film about a daredevil delivery guy, threw me into frenzy.
For a few years, this would be my favourite thing to do – go to a film, maybe more, each weekend, leave the theatre (with no barthesian hedonistic pensée) and discuss what I had just seen with my friends. Some of my formative memories go back to this period: the disappointment at not being able to see Gaspar Noé’s Love, since I was not yet 18 and not handy enough to fake my ID; a first awkward date at Fifty Shades of Grey; inviting my soon-to-be best friend to see The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, before I had even heard of David Bowie; or my last screening there with the same friend in 2015 of Aferim! by Radu Jude, while drinking alcohol from a bottle that we hid in a bag.
By that time, watching films there wasn’t fun anymore. The cinema reduced its schedule: it would now play films only from Wednesday to Sunday. Going there started to feel increasingly like a depressing ritual, a punishment of sorts: heading up to the top floor on a badly lit staircase, passing in front of all the boutiques that had closed down for lack of customers. The top floor itself, the food court, was by 2015 absolutely ghostly, the cheap stall of a fried chicken business being the last one standing. It had become difficult to even see films: one needed to have at least four spectators for it to play. Sometimes we would buy two tickets instead of one; then, more and more, we would just give up. In 2020 I was already living in Dublin after a two-year stay in Grenoble, a small town in France where the seats in the cinemas have names of directors attached to them. After the pandemic, the cinema in Tulcea never opened again.
I didn’t really feel nostalgic – I had other things going on. It is only some years later that I started thinking about all those brainless films that I had watched there before knowing anything about anything, inadvertently turning them into an education. (By the way: how did Aferim! play there? Were there also other arthouse films that were being screened, for which I had absolutely no interest?) There are currently 70.000 people in Tulcea and no cinema. Two years ago, some friends of mine started organising screenings in the basement of a local museum, showing repertoire films for free on a PowerPoint screen, with sound coming from their own PC. These informal screenings would be accompanied by discussions. Twice they invited me over: I chose The Man who Shot Liberty Valance and Close-Up. Other titles they screened include They Live, America America, Daisies, and M. Sometimes it is a packed audience, other times it’s just a few people, some high school friends, some old ladies. Every time I feel it is worth it. The interconnectivity that social media promotes is an illusion. One has to make an effort. The biggest joy one could get is inventing a common language between those who are thirsty for cinema and have not yet turned it into culture: the language of John Ford, of Abbas Kiarostami, of Premium Rush.