English
In his strange book The Image Announcement, writer from Samoa Albert Hanover has an emotional recollection, full of depth of melancholy, of the summers of his childhood and adolescence. Due to the somewhat nomadic quality of his life during these years, his parents with odd, mysterious professions, Hanover liked nothing more than to stay in the city for the summer. He loved the way the streets were taken over by the pulse, respiration and rhythm of the sleepy, urban summer months – especially in cities like Madrid (which in august literally becomes a ghost town), where he lived for a few years; cities of unbearable heat.
As he felt so at home in sky high temperatures – considering himself to be a naturally lazy person, he felt that the soporific effect that the heat had on most people made them more like him – the summer months brought him an indescribable, almost erotic pleasure, full of sensation, which was only confirmed to him many years later (though, how many years is many?) by the statistic that the most extraordinary things tend to happen in excessive heat. Hanover felt he wanted to live for exceptions; for the breaks and the flaws.
In those summers, one of his favourite pastimes was to go to the cinema in the afternoon, scrupulously avoiding the new releases, which were out of bounds during this period of dog days. He frequented, aged 11 or 12, the back to back screenings, and the cinema clubs which were so popular at the time, in search of double shows of B-movies, sci-fi, horror, classic comedy, Marx bros and Woody Allen. But he especially liked the re-runs. He listened to a midnight radio show which called for people to speak about films which had effected them. Often the people who called in couldn´t remember the name of the film, or the director, and sometimes not even the actors, but the presenter, who was a kind of human encyclopaedia, would soon be able to identify the film, no matter how old it was, sometimes giving details or where and when it would be screened that summer.
If for some reason or other the discussion of the film in question had intrigued him, the young Hanover, who didn´t even have a video machine at home, felt like a kind of miracle had taken place.
Now, the Verdi cinemas (http://www.cines-verdi.com/barcelona/inicio/) is reprising this old tradition of re-runs, and is offering an alluring line up of old films (from Chaplin to Bergman, via Lubitsch and Leone) throughout summer.
Paul Oilzum
A special chance to see – perhaps for the first time, like Hanover, a series of iconic films in the history of cinema. Don´t miss out when you rent apartments in Barcelona
Translated by: Poppy
