In Movie theater Paradiso, Toto goes to watch a film with 50 lire his mother provides him to buy dairy. He's not supposed to go to the cinema house and yet he can't avoid Cinema Paradiso. In such a landscape, we see Toto observing the film in awe along with others from the city. The theater is stuffed and alive. Gisueppe Tornatore, the director, compensates great focus on detail-facial expressions, gestures and reactions of the group are well captured. The theater stall and balcony indicate the class divide. The kids take the front row, working category Italians fill the stall, the wealthy man, who spits rests in the balcony, and the projectionist, Alfredo is trapped in the dingy projection room.
Like Toto, I watched films after i was in college. I bunked university and travelled with my friends to watch an Indian Bollywood film in Mumbai, India. We all chipped inside our pocket money and proceeded to go for the films. Like Italian Cinema, Indian films were an occasion for households and neighborhoods to come together. This was before the multiplexes. The theatre house that we frequented was small like Theatre Paradiso. It had one display, stalls and balcony. People whistled during kissing displays, some kids danced throughout a song-dance series and harvested men sometimes cried during an emotional scene.
In that picture in Movie theater Paradiso, Toto is enjoying La terra Trema (The Earth Trembles) directed Luchino Visconti. The audience reception of the film is lukewarm & most people don't get the dialect and context of this Neorealism film. But through the kissing picture which is edited out, we see the crowds engrossed, disappointed and then laughing at the rigorous censorship. "Twenty years, and I haven't seen a kiss, " a man from the audience shouts. Through the screening of the Chaplin film, we start to see the crowd employed. Kids and men and women, rich and poor, men and women laugh together. Theatre thus becomes a great equalizer. But more importantly, this inserted film in a film creates a feeling of two times nostalgia. The audience in the film is nostalgic as they take in the images in the theater, and we as an audience are nostalgic about our own experiences of observing films, etc like Toto.
In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Reasoning lately Capitalism, Jameson writes, "Nostalgia movies restructure the whole issue of pastiche and job it onto a collective and communal level, where the desperate try to appropriate a missing past is currently refracted through the iron rules of fashion change and the emergent ideology of the era. . . . " (19). In Theatre Paradiso, the screened films (Toto and more watch in the theater) generate a pastiche--Hollywood classics, Italian and Skill videos, popular comedies etc. However, Jameson points out that the postmodern nostalgia is "never a subject of some old-fashioned "representation" of historical content, but instead approaches the "past" through stylistic connotation, conveying "pastness" by the shiny qualities of the image, and "1930s-ness" or "1950s-ness" by the characteristics of fashion" (19). Thus keeping Jameson's discussion in mind, Theatre Paradiso doesn't signify the historical content by verisimilitude, but evokes the feeling of nostalgia by visual appropriation. However, this seems to be a reductive method of fully understand and appreciate the nuances and consistency of Tornatora's film. Pleasure Marcus, on the other side argues that in Cinema Paradiso, Tornatore defies the reductiveness of postmodern citation by embedding early film video footage in his 1989 work so that "waning of historicity" or "cosmetic colonization" cannot happen. "Each and every time Tornatora splices images of old movies into Cinema Paradiso. . . he phone calls attention to the actual film is not-that is, he announces the irreconcilable distance between the current work and it's cinematic forebears" (201). There's a disconnect or distance between the Cinema Paradiso's audience enjoying the inlayed film La terra Trema and a simultaneous sense of connection. Moreover, we also feel a sense of nostalgia and disconnection viewing Cinema Paradiso, and watching the audience watch a film.
In my taking a look at of the film, I also pointed out that Cinema Paradiso and this scene specifically created a sense of nostalgia for my community, culture and country. The connectedness that Toto among others feel in a tiny town going to a theater is also the connectedness we as audiences feel towards our previous memories of youth and community. My very own experience of watching videos in India then symbolizes a nostalgia for the lost homeland and sense of community I once belonged to. The social rootedness or lack of it, becomes a way in which the Theatre Paradiso evoked nostalgia for me-or as Jameson places it eloquently, the film/scene/image use becomes "a eager attempt to appropriate a missing past. "
