for RMC
1.
It was a total coincidence and yet it felt freighted with meaning: when I returned to the cinema at the end of August after months of suffering with the small screen, the first two films I saw began with crowd scenes.
The streets of London were eerily empty as I walked to the Genesis, but as soon as Les misérables (2019) began, the streets of Paris were full. France had won the 2018 World Cup and the city was alive with celebration. The image of so many young people of colour waving so many French flags was a succinct and spectacular way for director Ladj Ly to stage the problem of national belonging and its relation to race, coloniality, and inequality. Since the Revolution, the body politic of France has typically been personified by the figure of Marianne; Ly took a different path, embracing the heterogeneity and ecstasy of the crowd.
And then there was Tenet. Hundreds of audience members at an opera house in Kiev fall unconscious after a SWAT team introduces soporific gas into the air circulation system. They had already been docile, calmly awaiting the commencement of the performance; then, all at once, they conk out. I felt I could relate to them. Why was I at Tenet—a film I was sure to dislike—other than to sink into some kind of stupor? I had missed the cinema so much during all those days stuck inside, missed it even more than the pleasure of being part of the city’s anonymous mass of bodies. It seemed right that when I finally made my way back to the movies, the crowd was there, waiting for me on screen, having mostly disappeared from my life.
2.
This encounter wasn’t something I could have relied on. A few years ago, when I went to see the director’s cut of (1980/2012), I was overwhelmed by Michael Cimino’s extravagant, virtuosic use of extras, nowhere more than in the exhilarating sequence that takes place at the roller rink. There is the boy fiddler, there is Kris Kristofferson, and there is Isabelle Huppert, but is infamous. Still, whatever they spent on those scenes was worth it.
