The first time I ever saw a movie at the Cinémathèque française, I thought “only the French… only the French would house a cinema inside a palace”. The movie was Sam Fuller’s Shock Corridor. Its images were so powerful, it was like being hypnotized. I was 20 years old. It was the late 60s and I’d come to Paris for a year to study French. But it was here that I got my real education. I became a member of what in those days was kind of a free masonry. A free masonry of cinephiles…what we’d call “film buffs”. I was one of the insatiables, the ones you’d always find sitting closest to the screen. Why do we sit so close? Maybe it was because we wanted to receive the images first when they were still new, still fresh, before they cleared the hurdles of the rows behind us, before they’d been relayed back from row to row, spectator to spectator until worn-out, secondhand, the size of a postage stamp, it returned to the projectionist’s cabin. Maybe, too, the screen really was a screen. It screened us…from the world.
Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor (1963) in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003).
