Porchlight Cinema: A Big Success!

We love our porch.


In the daytime, the sun, the fecundity…


In the evening, the breezes, the fireflies… (not so many, but I totally saw one last night.)


One evening last summer, as we sat out there watching Pillars of the Earth on a laptop, we were struck by the idea of projecting a movie onto a screen for friends.

A year later, the plan finally came together- Jaws and Quint battled on our porch, with a full cinema attending!



Snacks were popcorn in these sharkbite novelty bags, with Old Bay seasoning; drinks (brought by friends) were Narragansett Lager and whiskey, both endorsed by Quint in the movie.










It's not uncommon for people to want to manufacture a movie theater experience at home- by making popcorn, turning the lights down, or shelling out for a big screen or lots of speakers- but we figured we could take it another step with the theatrics and really pretend that we were at a screening in a park or a drive-in. (Showing vintage commercials before the movie helped a lot with this.)

We worried about a lot of ways that this concept might not work- rain, people not being comfortable enough, etc, but as far as I can tell it was a home run. Everyone squished in and really got in the spirit.

The movie also jibed nicely with the season and our travels (we were on Cape Cod for a couple of days).

And it was also great to return to Jaws after waiting so long to see it again, and consider the ways one's perceptions of a movie can change over time. For instance, there's a scene with a grieving mother that I once considered excruciatingly protracted; now, it seems to me about the right length. I once considered it cold and distancing that a child is killed essentially to move forward the gears of the plot, but now I feel appreciative that such a gutsy move was made at all.

There's at least one thing I never liked, and still don't: it's the shot meant to signal Roy Schieder's horror that a beach swimmer is being attacked by the shark. Spielberg uses the field-stretching effect of simultaneously trucking in and zooming out, a technique supposedly invented by Hitchcock for his masterpiece Vertigo. It must have seemed like a great idea at the time, but I still find myself wondering: did they really think they nailed that shot, or were they as put off by its execution as I am, and just couldn't bear to leave it out?

My favorite aspect of Spielberg's technique- what I consider his hallmark innovation- is on full display in Jaws. Let's call it the Dog At The Front Door Effect. Consider: when a group of people in a house are getting ready to go somewhere, and there is a dog in the house, the dog, a highly attuned observer, will see people walking from room to room, gathering things for the journey, exchanging brief sentences in passing ("Have you seen my scarf?" "What time did you say the show starts?" etc.), and the dog will understand more or less what is happening. The dog will wait at the front door, growing more interested and excited. He doesn't need to understand the details that are all over his head anyway; all he needs is the big picture, and he's quite happy to be involved at that level.

This is how Spielberg has made me feel time and again, by presenting various scientists and specialists barking at each other in jargon and busily accomplishing vital tasks that I understand partially or not at all. (Close Encounters of the Third Kind has more of this sort of activity than you can shake a stick at.) An important part of this technique is to provide us with a character who is along for the ride and is just as naive and clueless as we are. In Jaws, Roy Schieder's character is the ear for Quint and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss)'s squabbling (and bonding) about fish; in Close Encounters, Dreyfuss is the one who shouts "What the hell is going on here?" to a mysterious and all-knowing Francois Truffaut. Ironically, the more Spielberg goes over our heads in this way, the more populist his movie gets. We don't need to, and aren't meant to, understand everything, and we know that; we can just enjoy being foolish mutts prancing around because something cool is happening.


The Cape was gloriously foggy (there's the Chatham light house). Just as anyone who blurs movies and life together would, I expected that I'd link the experience of going there to Jaws, but instead I wound up with a much stronger connection to Red Desert, the latest from Jamie's Netflix queue.



I was really in the mood for Antonioni, but at first Red Desert was a bit disappointing. It opens with dazzling style, like a collage of the best moments from a dream diary: two men are made to seem the size of ants; a sheet from a newspaper is briefly anthropomorphized; a cargo ship seems to charge straight through a forest. But I never felt invested in the story until the characters found themselves in a wee pier house, full of cheerful drunk people, a charmingly partitioned bed nook and a black wood-burning stove. Outside the window the pier is engulfed in total fog, out of which great ships silently materialize. There's even more at this point with which Antonioni can create subtle visual confusion and wonder, but this sequence has something else going on that I could finally sink my teeth into: a rich interplay of small human moments and emotions that are not so opaque or mysterious as what the long first act had comprised. For once, it's easy to understand the characters and what they're all feeling and thinking, and that is a relief. Sometimes you just need an entry point like that. I didn't want that sequence to end- I would have been delighted to stay in that shack for the rest of the film. The sequence ends in a way that plunges us back into mystery, but, lo and behold, I didn't mind that at all, because now I was invested in a way I hadn't been before.

One more recent cinema adventure to relate: we had a lazy afternoon watching two indie classics, Sex, Lies and Videotape and Gas Food Lodging. My fascination with this era of cinema is as rabid as ever. Sure, there are thousands of turkeys that came out of the film school gold rush, but the good indie films are amazing because so many of them threaten to become turkeys, are just as campy as their bad siblings, and yet succeed anyway; they verbalize something rare or unexpected, and they end up actually moving you. Some movies are obviously great, but a movie that succeeds in spite of various obnoxious qualities can be just as interesting to study, if not more. Check out Gas Food Lodging. When you get to the part where they're making love in a cave, with bits of rock inexplicably sprinkling on their heads and janglin' singer-songwriter guitar stylings on the soundtrack, you'll know what I mean. And when you get to the part at the end when that guy from Dinosaur Jr. tells Fairuza Balk the untold story, you'll know what I mean again.

We're definitely doing another porch movie this summer and we're deliberating on the next one. Current possibilities are:

Pinocchio
Sweet Smell of Success
On the Waterfront
The Thief of Bagdad
Rio Bravo
LA Confidential
Night of the Hunter
The Dark Crystal
My Neighbor Totoro
Nights of Cabiria
King Kong
A Hard Day's Night
Switchblade Sisters
Terror Planet

What do you think?