“I know myself, but that’s all,” said the admirable Scott Fitzgerald in On this side of paradise. Mallarmé wrote: “Meat is sad. Pity. And I have read all the books.” When I was young, I boasted, although at that time the flesh was happy, of having read infinite books. Of having heard the most sublime music. To know much of the history of cinema. And so happy, with that narcissism that tries to hide your insecurities.
And now, in old age, when I no longer have the cinema that I have loved in outdated formats, I resort with possibility and infinite effort to the platforms of the damned internet. And I catch what I can, infinite repetitions of the films that I have loved, but I also find myself with a look of boredom at the prominence of nothingness. It is terrible to see on the panel of the hyper-modern Filmin that only one desirable film appears, even a masterpiece, in the midst of a torrent of cinema that is as invisible as it is inaudible. It is the tacky, the grotesque pretensions, something disastrous. And I wonder: who did this? Who paid for it? If cinema were this shabby, pretentious, disastrous excrescence, part of which is shown at prestigious festivals, I would have hated it since I was little.
But pleasant things also happen to me. I had no fucking idea (misinforming you also requires calculation and insidiousness) about two films that I see on Movistar.
One is titled Testament and the other The promised land. The first is very beautiful, sad and happy, sardonic. She speaks of an old man, with nothing left to offer or believe in, in the midst of the stinking movement of cancellation, like so many impostures imposed by the ideological market. The second is a western set in 19th century Denmark. The first provokes sympathy and emotion in me. And it ends well. I forgive you, everything is credible. The end of the second is as logical as it is bleak. For me, in my complicated loneliness, the continuous viewing of these two films, which are not masterpieces but contain what I love most about cinema, are an injection of ozone.
You can follow EL PAÍS Television on x or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Miracle #beautiful #cinema #survives