I confess that it had been a long time since I had stepped foot in a cinema. The confinement (and the associated syndrome that has affected viewers) has done damage, which I hope is not irreversible, to movie theaters. And I chose well for my return, The Fabelmans, a beautiful film by Steven Spielberg, where he dives into his childhood and adolescence to discover how he fell in love with cinema. And how that passion saved him from family collapse.
Spielberg, to whom we owe so much for how much he has made us enjoy his films, pays a new tribute to cinema, with an explicit reference to The greatest show in the world by Cecil B. DeMille, which is part of the collective memory. The filmmaker explains how, when he was seven or eight years old, he tried to reproduce the railway accident in the film with a toy train, which he filmed with his father’s Super8 camera.
The film is not only a fictionalized autobiography (Scola said that the cinema was a painted mirror), where he tells us about his fascination for cinema, the crisis in his family and how the seventh art was the lifeline that helped him to get out. The Fabelmans It is above all a song to pursue a dream at any moment of existence, regardless of age.
Spielberg in ‘The Fabelmans’ encourages us to pursue an illusion regardless of age
In a world in which illusions are official and the new generations doubt more than ever between risk or subsidy, Spielberg tells us that we have a lot of time ahead of us to make dreams come true that we haven’t even imagined dreaming yet.
The final sequence – which reproduces a decisive moment in the filmmaker’s career – recreates the few minutes he spent with John Ford. The old director, before two paintings in his office, asks him where the horizon is in each one. His reflection on him is a film lesson, but it is also a good metaphor for life.
If Ford reconciled Spielberg with the seventh art, to me the director of The Fabelmans It allowed me to rediscover movie theaters. I even bought some popcorn to set myself up. How right Orson Welles was when he said that a camera is the closest thing to the eye in the poet’s heart. Aute also sang it: everything in life is cinema and dreams are cinema.
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