Julio Algañaraz
06/15/2020 - 18:03
- Clarín.com
- World
Let's go to the cinema. Let's go! The day of the opening of the 4,000 Italian rooms closed for almost four months due to the coronavirus arrived, a great event on the path of hope towards normality. But few reopened on Monday the 15th: Clarín followed the adventure in the only chain, the UCI, which dared to present films in eight of its fourteen theaters in the suburb of Porta Romana. The other multiroom, Mádison, who was also due to leave, decided to wait until Thursday.
The punishment of the pandemic has been cruel to Italy, which registers more than 34 thousand deaths . The pestilence is less fierce and they say that summer helps. Fewer people die and they also spread less. Italians are downcast, disoriented. Recovering the cinema, that incomparable dream factory, is an important moment . This country continues to go to the cinema: last year more than one hundred million tickets were sold.
Cinema returned in Rome. Photo: Víctor Sokolowicz
The UCI chain, which has 40 structures throughout Italy, dedicated the viral times of screens obscured by quarantine, to put themselves at the forefront, make security a motto, a propaganda weapon.
The security measures have caused a sea of litigation, because the managers of the rooms consider them exaggerated. No room, no matter how big, can hold more than 200 spectators. It was even forbidden to remove her chin during the screening of the film. Impossible to eat popcorn or ice cream. Families had to be separated.
The managers threatened not to reopen and in Rome only the UCI rooms turned on the projection machines on Monday. Elsewhere in Italy there were more reopened cinemas, although the overall percentage was low. Public security guards finally slackened. Take off your mask when you sit down, but to get there or to go you have to have it on.
Photo: Víctor Sokolowicz
Those who arrived at the beginning hesitated but were happy. "I always went to the movies, they don't nail me at home with television," said Mrs. Madeleine wearing a patriotic mask that reproduces the Italian flag. "Have fun together in maximum safety", the colorful posters display. " A staff armed with gloves, visors, smiles and controls the distances. Movie times are coordinated to prevent tight lines. Tickets can be purchased from home and removed with machines. Families can be together, especially in supermodern seats.
There are sanitation and disinfection stalls everywhere. You can throw everything you want to be impeccable and die of something else if the time comes. Separate routes were created for those entering and exiting.
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Watch the specialFirst with shyness, then with growing confidence as it was noted with the increase in decibels of noise, seeing and trying the anti-pandemic novelties was part of the walks between the eight rooms that projected the films that were frozen during the long quarantine.
You could choose 2020 novelties such as the French "Les Miserables" and the view of San Mendes titled " 1917" and set in the First World War. You could choose " The Grudge", a horror film inspired by a terrible ancestor of Japanese cinema.
The atmosphere between security and the cinema was lifting everyone's spirits. Leaving home is still a novelty because the quarantine was very rigorous and has even changed customs. Millions of Italians fear leaving their homes and facing the danger of contagion, which although it shows that it has weakened is still present, threatening.
Those who wanted to have fun with shocks chose "Dinner with Crime" , which is from last year but many were lost due to the long absolute diet of cinema that began in late February while the first deaths from the coronavirus multiplied.
The pressure of the managers of the cinemas seeks new concessions from the authorities because the summer has brought with it the "boom" of the sands with open screens , increasingly populated.
It is expected that in September the situation will be normalized, when the Venice Festival arrives, the most legendary in Italy, which dates back to the 1930s, when the absolute star was the Duce of Italy, the dictator Benito Mussolini, who did not miss one to show off among movie people. Mussolini was the promoter of the great Italian dream factory of Cinecittà in Rome, which exists to this day and remembers in its large spaces the magic of memories of its great characters, such as Federico Fellini, protagonist of an entire era.
The hope that the Italian public will return to the cinema is strong among the 27,000 workers who spent four months collecting normal or insufficient subsidies from the extended Italian social system. In those four months, 30 million spectator presences were lost .
This night of Monday the 15th had its particular history because many were tied to television in a day dedicated to the tribute to the great actor Alberto Sordi, who died of lung cancer at the age of 82 in 2003, who was celebrated with dozens of films, documentaries and all kinds of tributes to the centenary of his birth. Sordi and Anna Magnani are the popular idols of cinema in Rome, so much so that they call him “Alberto nazionale” and everyone knows who he is talking about. The two of them and their friend Federico Fellini form a revered trio of Roman cinema, although Fellini was born in Rimini and arrived in the capital as a teenager, as soon as he was freed from the Nazifacist occupation.
Although the premiere of the reopening night did not have a massive presence in all eight of the fourteen UCI rooms in Porta Romana, the recovery of the public is expected to be massive when autumn arrives in September . The Romans believe that it is no coincidence that of Alberto "nazional", who in spirit will protect the fortress of the cinema in the most cinematographic city in the world, along with New York.
The theater also started this Monday, with much more complex problems than the recovery of moviegoers. The protagonists of the theater are living beings, the actors are there. The punishment of virulence can devastate them like the public. That is why security measures are particularly incisive.
Actors cannot touch each other. Clarín witnessed the video shown to some correspondents of the essay of a work reconverted to the times of the coronavirus. The actors looked like acrobats. They were forced to use their bodies to the extreme. Maintaining safe distances is almost impossible in some scenes . It will cost the theater genius a lot to overcome so many restrictions that demolish creativity and fidelity to the texts. It is as if the circumstances forced to give life to a new style that will lead to change the classic, normal content, to give life to a fascinating but also mutilating new reality.
The adventure of the theater in the face of such a gigantic challenge will be able to breathe and sigh, like ordinary beings, only when vaccines allow ending the nightmare of an unexpired pandemic.