The Spontaneous Cinema

I got very good at browsing as a kid. Anytime I’d go with my parents to get groceries at Fred Meyer’s or buy odd household products at Target, they’d let me roam free in the home electronics or toy sections and know where to find me when the shopping was done. I spent hours perusing every LEGO set and reading the backs of boxes for video games I knew my parents would never buy. This probably turned me into something of a dreamer, but also prepped me to be a critic that not a lot of people like. This has led me to, at times, being embarrassingly similar to Metropolitan’s Tom Townsend: “What Jane Austen novels have you read?” “None. I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking.” However, this inclination did help guide me when my obsession eventually turned to film.

2014 was when I had my first summer as a cinephile—I’d just graduated high school, and whisked away my graduation money on Criterion DVDs and Blu-rays. Criterion’s website became my taste-making bible, where I’d religiously read the liner essays for films I’d never heard of and gave me a jumping off point in looking at the classics. While there’s always been a problematic consumerism in allowing Criterion and Janus Films control the “canon” in a lot of people’s eyes, it was an invaluable resource to me as a teenager trying in searching for films beyond what I’d grown up on. While consistently a browser, now that I had a little cash I distinctly remember three purchases that would define that transitional point for me:

1. 1) A DVD of Badlands (1973) which, next to Blue Velvet (1986), was my favorite movie.
2. 2) An out-of-print Blu-ray of Chungking Express (1994), which blasted down the dams, and sent a river rushing to flood the valleys of my mind—a pure revelation of cinema.
3. 3) The (then) new Jacques Demy boxset. I’d never heard of Demy before Criterion started advertising their set of brand new restorations, nor was I aware of the alternative French New Wave happening away from the Cahiers on the Left Bank of the Seine that Demy was nominally associated with, but I was starting to learn. It was advertising timing with my burgeoning interests.

This last week was a miasma of bad news, personal crises, and a wave of depression piling up on each other. In my most lost hours, I gave up control and let Criterion 24/7 guide me. When I first snapped it on, I was rushed back into the past, 10 years ago, when I first walked into that Demy set, putting in Disc 1, and seeing Lola (1961) for the first time. I came into the movie that night near the beginning, still in the cafe in Nantes with the old ladies that bookend the film’s series of encounters and fleeting and fraught meetings. But the feeling that overwhelmed me the most when watching Lola for the first time had nothing to do with the film as it was, but what would came after it: This is like a Wong Kar-wai movie!

The way characters’ lives flow in and out of each other, where bumps on the shoulder can lead to new beginnings or arriving at a cafe late can close a whole possibility in life, feels as much a staple of Demy as it does Wong. That spark was maybe the first time I’d connected a dot like that, found a thread in film history, not one that was shown to me, but one that revealed itself on its own.

While that spark of obsession is one of my most important film moments, a single sequence from Lola has stuck with me just as much. As the woven fabric of Demy’s Nantes starts to loosen and we’re realizing how many of the characters will never see each other again, the teenage girl Cécile (Annie Duperoux) and the American sailor Frankie (Alan Scott) share an afternoon at the fair. It’s a fun sequence, one might even call it Truffaut-like in its playfulness. But something happens, and time nearly stops: off-screen, concealed by a cut, Cécile has her first kiss on a spinning carnival ride, and all of a sudden she’s grown up. The noise of the world stops and an arpeggio consumes the soundscape. Everything’s in glowing slow motion, Cécile whips her hair as Frankie lifts her off the ride, they run through the crowd. Though it feels like the moment will last forever, it’s gone in an instant.

There’s many times that the French filmmakers on the cusp of the 1960s reach for Jean Vigo, but I think this moment in Lola is the only time that any filmmaker gets close to, if not exceeds, the exuberance of the end of Zéro de conduite (1933). It demonstrates not just a level of immediate mastery of the form so common in his contemporaries, but a fire burning in his heart that he can only express by putting it on a screen that too can barely contain it, like the compressed edges of Lola’s Franscope frame, where the vertically stretched limits of the lenses imply so much more than the camera could ever capture.

Lola is my favorite first film of any of those revolutionary French filmmakers that would define 1960s cinema and beyond—it’s more than just lightning in a bottle, but a lynchpin for a kind of spontaneous cinema that reaches from Vigo to Wong, a midpoint in the development of a sometimes serendipitous cinema of chance, one that inevitably altered the way I look at cinema.