‘Cinema Paradiso’: What Film Means to Me

Few films capture the theatrical experience as lovingly as Cinema Paradiso. The 1988 Italian film won the Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award and serves as one of the most beautiful love letters to cinema and the wonder it creates in the lives of those who connect to it. There have been countless reviews and essays about Cinema Paradiso that have worded how successful it is in what it sets out to do better than I ever could. But this will not be a standard review beyond me urging any reader who loves film, and/or feels a deep connection to the medium to seek Cinema Paradiso out and allow it to move you. I genuinely cannot imagine anyone who has a love for this art form not being deeply touched by the experience.

Rewatching the film last night, I was struck by how much more moving I found the experience to be when compared to my previous viewing. Amid the public health crisis the United States continues to face, I haven’t been to a movie theater since March. This is the longest I have gone without seeing a film in theaters as far back as I can remember. The viewing has caused me to ponder what precisely the theatrical experience represents to me, and on an even deeper level, what film means to me.

There are parallels in Cinema Paradiso to my own life that I really connected to, the main being that I was also a young boy obsessed with film who was raised by a single mother. The first eight years of my life were spent in a turbulent and abusive household, and that was where I first latched onto film as an escape from that reality. I watched everything in the house that I was allowed to; and the films I wasn’t allowed to, I would stare at the cases of. I cannot tell you how many days I spent far too much time looking at the VHS tape of Alien wondering what was inside of the egg, and how many times I begged my Mom to let me watch it as a young child (Mom finally allowed me to watch Alien when I was 11 years old and it was well worth the years of curiosity and impatient anticipation).

When I was eight years old, my Mom took me and my sisters out of that environment in search of a better life, but film remained something I obsessed over. After school each day, I would walk across the street to my Mom’s work, hoping the entire time that she would be off of her computer in a meeting so I could scour IMDb, making a mental list of all the films that sparked my curiosity and I would imagine what the plot of the films would entail. On days where my Mom was in her office working on her computer, I would go into the offices of her bosses Dennis and Errol, and I would talk to them about movies non-stop. I remember Dennis telling me about Groundhog Day and allowing me to borrow it. Every time I would walk into Errol’s office, he would greet me by asking, “Spencer, have you seen any good movies recently?”

I was also fortunate enough to spend my youth in a time when video rental stores were still around. I would eagerly anticipate anytime my Mom would have to go to the grocery store as it would mean I could go along and browse the video rental store they had inside. Mom would tell me to meet her at the check-out, but I would always get lost in the cases of the films (probably intentionally), and Mom would have to come get me, at which time I would beg her to allow me to rent a film, which I would then obsessively talk about for the entire drive home. I still remember the day the video store in the grocery store closed and I had to plead with my Mom to shift our allegiances to Video Plus (which had a much larger and far superior collection of films).

I also was a regular at the library where I would check out films (I quickly discovered that I could check out R-rated films, no questions asked). The librarians quickly came to know me as the kid who constantly was requesting films from other libraries. Where other kids around my age would play Runescape on the library computers, I would use my 30 minutes to read about upcoming theatrical releases that I would beg my Mom to take me to (oftentimes successfully).

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