One of the best days of my life was, surprisingly, when I worked in a sticky big chain cinema for £5 an hour as a student.
One morning I opened up to discover that whoever had closed down the Ben & Jerry’s stand the night before had accidentally switched off the freezer. The ice-cream was perfectly fine but legally, as it had not been kept to a certain temperature overnight, we couldn’t sell it. Struck by a rare moment of genius, I realised, while I absolutely did have to dispose of 30 litres of Vermont’s finest, there was no reason I couldn’t wait until the end of my shift to take it all out to the big bins round the back. Shortly after clocking out – and followed by a spot of dumpster diving – I arrived home cold but a hero to my housemate. We dined like kings for weeks, eating Chunky Monkey for breakfast, dinner and tea.
I think the extreme joy of what became known as Ice-Cream Sunday felt richer due to the contrast with a monotonous job that was usually only punctuated by mildly miserable events, such as the time a woman threw a family-size bag of Maltesers at me when I told her the price.
What somehow made that job worse was that it was all in the noble service of providing profits for a cinema chain backed by US venture capital, to support multimillion-dollar movie franchises … backed by US venture capital.
In the last two decades, with sequels, prequels, adaptations, spin offs and remakes, it has begun to feel like there are no films at all being made outside of what Iunflatteringly call the “Marvel Corporate Universe”.
The field for quirky and unusual ideas has shrunk to almost nothing. And so, in the last 15 years, any residual disillusionment I’d felt from spending the prime of my life picking squashed popcorn out of the back of cinema seats has only grown.
However, recently there have been some tentative steps towards reconciliation. It has been helped by the excellent independent films being financed and made – think Parasite, The Whale, Aftersun and Rye Lane (below) – especially in the UK.
But above all, what has particularly rekindled my enthusiasm for film is the reopening of the glorious historic Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds, the world’s oldest surviving gaslit cinema.
Settling into velvety seats, a pint of local beer in hand, I’m reminded of previous generations of working-class millworkers enjoying an evening of escapism. At Christmas, when I watched It’s a Wonderful Life on the proscenium arch screen, I thought of families in 1946 paying a shilling and fivepence each to sit exactly where I was sitting and watch it when it was new, before colour films were mainstream.
Hyde Park Picture House is one of two small, volunteer-staffed cinemas in my local area, which also includes the even more adorable Cottage Road cinema, which opened in 1912, and still has a piano next to the screen.
These gems are becoming rare. It is incredibly hard to run an independent cinema, as we are seeing with the closure this month of the Electric, the oldest working cinema in the UK, a Birmingham fixture for 114 years.
Equally fragile and precious is independent film. An actor friend currently promoting a huge Netflix show recently lamented to me the loss of the indie film, something that had brought him a lot of fulfilment in his career.
When I watch an independent film at an independent cinema, it feels as if I’m investing in my community (or at the very least, helping to employ brilliant creative people like my actor friend) at a time when funding is declining and they need all the help they can get. Now the smell of popcorn no longer brings me out in a rash.
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