a love letter to cinema

A friend mentioned in a film-watching group chat last night that he had applied to for Three Days in Cannes accreditation. There are two requirements to apply: "be aged between 18 and 28" and "be passionate about film." The deadline to apply was in less than 24 hours. The application required some ID documents and "a love letter to cinema." Here is the love letter I quickly whipped up.

***

I started my career in a Hollywood studio. By the lot where was once shot Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night, a digital media publication called The Ringer had leased offices to put out articles, podcasts, and videos about sports and pop culture. Right before the end of my third year of college, I took a sharp turn from my medical school ambitions to pursue journalism. The Ringer hired me as an editorial intern for the summer. I mostly fact-checked tome-like blogs the staff penned, but on occasion I got a chance to write. My first assignment entailed going to the Chinese Theatre to watch and assess the newly released computer screen horror film Unfriended: Dark Web two times, one after the other. The film’s gimmick was that it had two different endings that showed at random in theaters. Later on, I saw a dozen films starring Tom Hardy in 48 hours to help author a “scientific study” of how often the actor obfuscated his face, given his role in films such as Dunkirk, Mad Max: Fury Road, and Venom, the new box office entrant that germinated so bizarre a story idea.

In between helping inject frivolous color into the Tinseltown zeitgeist, I found time to discover another side of cinema that spoke to a deeper part of me. Most of my bare bones intern salary went to rent and cheap food, so I felt seldom able to afford movie tickets that weren’t paid for by my company. So, much like the characters of Unfriended, I gave my leisure time to a computer screen. On evenings and weekends, I’d take the subway to Koreatown, where I’d found an old cafe open until midnight that served cheap food and had plenty of space in its maze of rooms. Everything was made possible and welcome for me to stay for hours at a time, discovering new movies and getting lost in all kinds of new dreamy worlds of my imagination. There I discovered Terrence Malick and David Lynch, who would catapult me into Fellini and Tati.

“I just came here from Deep River, Ontario and now I'm in this... dream place!” Betty Elms says in Mulholland Drive. It’s exactly how I felt, a teenage newcomer from the Rust Belt, plopped onto a studio on Sunset Boulevard where I’d find myself brushing past reserved parking for people like Denzel Washington. Later that summer I met the girl who became my first love. In the West Hollywood room I rented we watched Chungking Express, which I’d also recently discovered, then shared our first kiss and made out. I listen to The Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” and Dinah Washington’s “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes” on repeat for days after that hazy summer afternoon.

***

That was the closest I came to the world of cinema. I followed my pursuit of journalism to San Francisco, where I now write about the artificial intelligence sector. Sometimes I talk to startups directly engaging with the film industry. I hear the technologists speak of certain degrees of buy-in from the likes of Darren Aronofsky and Harmony Korine. Technology and media are increasingly melding and I expect that I may have a role to contribute to the greater public discourse so vital to shaping the future of this world. I am bracing for a mess of problems to come from AI’s potential uprooting of specialized labor, but from that mess, optimistically, I am also hopeful daring rule-breakers will forge new frontiers in art.

Recently I watched the 1996 film Haru, which tells the fictional story of two people who fall in love through an online movie forum. The film was made before I was born, but I can tell through the power of the movie medium that an underlying sense of optimism for the promise of the nascent internet undergirds the story. My heart melted watching sheepish direct messages visualized in text superimposed over ambient footage of Tokyo in motion. I was warmed by the idea of a human connection that in an earlier age wouldn’t have occurred.

Earlier this week, I saw the 2024 film Grand Theft Hamlet, a semi-documentary about staging a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in an online multiplayer video game. Comparing it to Haru presents a stark image of how the internet has changed in three decades, commoditized around low-hanging fruit. As the film presents it, Grand Theft Auto Online is like the stateless society of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Filmed during the depths of the pandemic lockdown, the film shows countless examples of humans who log onto this video game universe to release their pent-up rage through senseless killings perpetrated with a level of indulgence so absurd it becomes hilarious: gun down a single person with a B-11 Strikeforce fighter jet, if you please. Facing a computer screen can send your spirit barreling into all kinds of new directions not conceived of yet in the 90s.

As a technology reporter, I think a lot about the wide-reaching ways that technology is remolding our social fabric, altering the way we experience things and the people with whom we experience them. How inspiring, then, to see last year’s Palme d’Or winner Sean Baker go on to take the Oscar stage and make a battle cry for watch films in movie theaters. “In a time in which the world can feel very divided this is more important than ever,” he said.

Ironically, it’s amid San Francisco’s hub of computer screens that I’ve found the movie theaters. I saw Grand Theft Hamlet at one of few independent theaters in San Francisco that survived the pandemic. The packed audience constantly hooted and hollered, and maybe some of them, like me, were inspired by the film for the way it recontextualized a technology product for more joyous, creative reasons. Within its own confines, the destruction of Grand Theft Auto Online had transmogrified into creation.

***

If, as Frédéric Gros puts it, pleasure “causes a possibility of feeling to blossom” at the first encounter, while joy, unlike pleasure, “increases with repetition, and is enriched,” then my greatest pleasure came in falling in love with films that Hollywood summer. My first taste developed through transmissions from my laptop in the solitude of a dark cafe. That summer in Los Angeles opened paths that continue to this day: my time California dreamin' in California, my profession, my love for movies, my seeking out the physical spaces and mental space to go into dreams on my own. Today, I’m still in the same California, but a different, less sunny, city; the same profession, but a different, more serious, focus. I have the same desire to pop into another world, sometimes through movies, but there are no cafes I have found here where I can decamp for hours at a time — or perhaps no loose ends of time before my mind is bogged down by this or that obligation. And so now I find solace and shelter in the schedules set by the movie theaters, and let myself escape for an appointed amount of time in the dark room illuminated only by the pictures on the big screen.

Years after I first watched it at the Koreatown cafe, I got to see Mulholland Drive on 35mm at my favorite local theater, preceded by a live performance from singer Rebekah Del Rio. She did a version of “Hallelujah” where she modified the “that David played, and it pleased the Lord” line to be about David Lynch, and then she ended with this song that apparently took her 33 years to write which was about learning how to say “thank you” and “I love you” in different languages because when she was a kid she told her dad she'd have to learn those two phrases to travel the world. Two seats to the left of me this couple was on their first date, and the girl was fawning with the most sweet of aw's when Del Rio said that. And she was laughing and chortling throughout the whole film, but it was actually just so wholesome that no matter what tragedy befell the characters in the movie, she made me feel a vicarious joy for the power of love and I hope that the couple is still making it today. Life has become a lot more complicated, but sitting in my seat at the theater, I feel for some prolonged moments a light amidst the darkness and a warmth in my mind and soul: the heats of fires lit in simpler times that I had let lapse from my mind, but which persisted in burning nonetheless, now to be made stronger by new flames being sparked around me.

Pleasure has given way to joy, which has come from finding other people passionate about film. I exchange comments on Letterboxd with a retired gentleman in Melbourne who one day years ago randomly followed my account, likely after reading one of the many long-winded reviews I type up to keep my writing muscle sharp. I made a friend in the bathroom line of a local theater after we saw the five-hour version of Fanny and Alexander. So many of my closest friendships have budded over the course of evenings planned around movie tickets we bought together. To connect with these lovers of film is as enriching to me as seeing the film itself.

***

I don’t mean to spoil it for you if you haven’t seen Haru or Grand Theft Hamlet, but it should come as no surprise when I say that, after a runtime where transmissions are contained entirely within the digital sphere, the most euphoric moments came in the tiny epilogues that gave glimpses of those humans uniting in person. There is, after all, a limit to what can be experienced through a technological intermediary. Screens may bridge the gap, but the greatest enrichment, the biggest joy, comes in forfeiting isolation for the magic of communion. In the audience reactions during these showings and the conversations continued in bars, bistros, or bedrooms afterwards, I come to better understand the film and, in turn, the world.

I am applying for 3 Days in Cannes accreditations alongside some dear people whose friendships, forged through a shared love for cinema, have enriched me. To watch films in the very best possible conditions, physically and technically at Cannes, as well as emotionally with them and the Cannes crowd, would be the honor of my budding cinema-going, cinema-writing life.