Every time you close one movie theater, the collective memory of all who visited it is shaken. There were hundreds of couples who stayed on their first date to flirt with the light off, groups of friends who alternated the bottle with the premiere of the week. Families that instilled in their children a passion for cinema … so many memories lived in the same four walls. Last weekend it was known that the cinemas where I learned to love the cinema were going to close. The rooms Cinesa Zaratán, in Valladolid, announced that they were putting the final lock on the 18 theaters that since 2002 had shown thousands of films.
It may sound like an exaggeration that I “I learned to love the cinema“In those rooms, but they weren’t just any cinemas for me. I knew them as a movie buff who went every week to see a movie, but at the age of 21 I became part of those cinemas -which at that time belonged to UGC Cine Cité-. That university student who needed to earn a few euros ended up working surrounded by what he liked the most. Yes, it was one more job, but I saw myself surrounded by premiere posters, every two by three entering empty rooms, speaking 90% of what I liked the most … I even learned to project with celluloid film. Shortly before the film was swapped for the damn DCPs, I was a Toto apprentice for months in Paradise cinema. Ennio Morricone did not play music for me, but it was not necessary, I felt excited to look through that little screen as hundreds of people waited for the projector to turn on.
I perfectly remember the online ‘application’ that I filled out to get to work there. They asked for your information and a review of the last movie you had seen. I took it as a college exam and ‘casque’ a review with pretentious touches of a 20 year old movie buff about Perfume, of Tom Tykwer. Actually what you wrote in that box was of little use, but in my mind the casting would take place among those who knew the most about cinema and I had to stand out. When I had a personal interview with the person who hired me, he told me that he really liked what I had written. Who was going to tell me that years later I would dedicate myself, precisely, to that, to write films for others.
The Cinesa Zaratán ticket offices.
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What I really learned working in those cinemas was not to love movies. I did not discover hitherto unknown directors (for that I was already Seminci), but I understood the importance of going to the movies. Of the social act of going to a room. To get together with hundreds of strangers and share emotions in the same story. Go, decide which movie to see, talk to the box office, walk around and see the posters of the next releases, go early to see the trailers … that’s not at home. And I discovered it because I understood that it was not something that happened only to me, but that this illusion was shared. In a society sick with individualism, going to the movies connected us with the social and with the common.
I turned my job as a box office clerk into a little movie buff practice. He recommended, he gave his opinion … I even got some ‘fans’ who came on Thursdays when I worked to talk and see what movie they saw. When a colleague did not know what a movie was about, they sent people to recommend them. At that box office we have heard made-up titles -‘Vente a mi bando ‘instead of’ Benjamin Button ‘,’ Zoo ‘instead of’ 300′- and we have even been psychonalists of clients wanting to talk.
My friends had the joke, I had peaked, because “I worked in the world of cinema”, and deep down they were not wrong. I enjoyed those years like never before. I was glad when I saw familiar people. To those old men who got in the extra row so as not to disturb anyone when they took out their tiny sandwich. Even chasing the man who changed rooms every day became fun.
I understood that the illusion of going to the movies was shared. In a society sick with individualism, going to the movies connected us with the social and with the common.
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He said Amelie that he loved looking back at the movie theater to see people’s faces while they watched the movie. Working there, I changed that gesture to walk in with the movie about to start, place myself in the row at the top and see how they reacted to that miracle. It was magical to see all those people with their eyes wide. I have seen unforgettable moments in those rooms that I even remember the number of seats -450 in room 3, 333 in room 13-. I’ve heard applause at the end of The orphanage, I heard tears at the beginning of Up, and I have seen teenagers with their hormones fired applaud the sex scenes of Lies and fats. Until mass stampedes of The Tree of Life, the film that forced us to explain that it was not ‘a love story with Brad Pitt, but a work of authorship’.
In case all this seems little to you, in those cinemas i met my best friends. In those 18 rooms, different people met who became a family for 20 or 30 hours a week. Walks through the corridors, arranging rooms together … Lots of movies – free tickets for employees were like a second salary for me – and lots of parties. Leaving work on Fridays and Saturdays at 11 or 1 is gasoline for young people with four dollars in their purse. In those cinemas we have even played hide-and-seek – I imagine that now that they are closing it can be told – and a thousand anecdotes have been created that we remember every time we see each other.
Reading this I imagine that many will think that they are nostalgic tears, but deep down this text is also a cry of terror. Terror for a country without movie theaters. A country where children do not discover Pixar movies on the big screen and then run to play it like crazy to try to understand what just happened. We cannot allow the rooms to close. The cinemas where I worked have not been the first, nor the last. Just One More. Let’s think about everything we lose every time one closes and we get off the couch. Let’s turn Netflix off for once and let’s recover the magic of getting together, even with a mask and a safety distance.
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