Spielberg, Tarantino, Mendes, Chazelle... the disease of nostalgia infects the cinema

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Vicente Monroy, author of the essay Against cinephilia, tells that the great invention of the Lumières was not so much the cinema as the spectators;

that is to say, a new definition of the image and the transformation of the gaze and of the world that inaugurated an invention, according to its creators, with a somewhat limited future.

If the Renaissance brought with it individualized, silent reading and, for all that, it invented the reader in the strict sense,

More than two decades have passed since the cinema turned a century and, suddenly, the most popular and

-winning part of the billboard turns the cinema itself into a matter of reflection, nostalgia or simple

.

It's not the first time.

Since even before Buster Keaton's

, cinema has lived obsessed with itself, always delivered to discuss any of its crises.

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The Fabelmans,

by

, is not only, as the director himself says, the genuinely autobiographical film of the greatest living director, but also a declaration of principles (and even of love) about the moral character that, in the director's opinion defines and gives meaning to cinema.

At his side,

will shortly premiere

which is nothing more than a celebration of 80s cinema for what it was, the most obvious and recognizable meeting place in a society that then enthusiastically embraced individualism. neoliberal as an article of faith.

And of his own ruin.

for his part, delivers the excessive

as a summary of all the obsessions and doubts of an art that takes refuge in the vindication of memory as the last lifeline against the flood of screens.

And then there is

whose recently published book

is not only a review of his cinephile memory, it is also an exercise in melancholy with something from

to what it was like to go to the movie theater and is no longer.

The latter tells what the double session he experienced in 1972 in one of the cinemas on Broadway Boulevard in Los Angeles meant to him.

There he went with his mother's boyfriend Reggie to see Black Powder.

The party lived in the stalls became an Epiphany for him.

"Since then, I've spent my life going to movies and making them, in an effort to recreate the experience of seeing a

[he was the lead] movie just released, on a Saturday night, in a cinema with a black audience”, he writes.

And in that statement in the form of a lament he refines the entire book and, in some way, the general feeling of his colleagues.

I did not believe the truth that my eyes taught me.

I just believed what the movie told me.

And that became my truth

Spielberg

Mendes makes one of his characters in the film starring Olivia Colman declare that "cinema is an illusion of life."

And the same director concludes the reasoning in a key between poetic and just pompous: «The relevant thing is that cinema is nothing more than a consequence of an error.

If the still images pass at a certain speed, our optic nerve gives up and the brain creates the sensation of movement.

.

Be that as it may, it is that lyric of error that now, according to him, has been lost.

“Going to a movie theater required a commitment.

You would walk through a door and meet people to witness a beam of light that flickered and moved in the air... That's the feeling I miss.

I am not saying that it is better or worse than watching a movie on a mobile, but the cinema involved more people », he says.

Perhaps the key is, as one might imagine on the other hand, in Spielberg.

In

the director repeats the scheme of the obsessive parent, focused on his work and oblivious to anything that has to do with the family.

It happened in the

in

and, hastening, even in

.

What happens is that before it was a myth, in his new work it is his own flesh.

Spielberg tells himself and does so through an idealized fable in which childhood and cinema itself are confused.

It would seem that Spielberg now offers himself in sacrifice as the catalyst for what has been recent popular cinema: the director who understands his profession as a way of rewriting his own reality to perhaps escape from it appears, and the creator appears tortured man

When Spielberg-Sammy (this is the name of the character) discover in the family film that they have just filmed the secret that condemns their beloved mother, childhood ends suddenly.

«In fact», the filmmaker has declared, «I did not believe the truth that my eyes taught me.

I just believed what the movie told me.

And that became my truth."

And there, the key to the shipwreck: reality surpassed by cinema.

I have spent my life going to movies and making them in an effort to recreate the experience of seeing a

movie on a Saturday night in a theater with a black audience.

tarantino

At the end of

, Chazelle strives to unite in an accelerated montage everything that cinema has been capable of inventing in its fight against reality.

And there it gallops from

-the twelve consecutive images taken in 1878 by Eadweard Muybridge- until the elimination of the barrier that separates the synthetic image from the real one in

passing through Méliès, Grifftih, Buñuel, Godard, Bergman or, Again Spielberg.

Cinema, everyone tells us, changed our gaze and the world; it turned us into spectators.

And that world and that gaze now vanish.

to turn the stupor for the lost into a balm, so as not to die suddenly.

To gain time.

Nostalgia for one's own nostalgia.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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