The Good News

On Friday, September 9, the good news is the return of the Nuovo Olimpia after its summer hiatus.

Every summer, for the entire summer, I live in a state of trepidation. Will the Nuovo Olimpia re-open or be shunted to the expanding graveyard of Rome’s film history? Will I lose another piece of the Rome that means the most to me?

Fortunately, the cinema dearest to my heart is back in business and will resist another season and, with luck and the good will of its patrons, many more to come.

In the US, the summer months are high times for the film industry: new releases of multimillion dollar flicks featuring multimillion dollar movie stars competing for multimillion dollar gross receipts.

European cinema and cinema in most of the rest of the world craft and create on a more modest, more human scale.

If you scan your Rome daily for the listings, “chiusura estiva” (”closed for summer”) is playing on the majority of movie screens from mid-July until early September, and it doesn’t earn a dime.

From 9 PM on a summer night in Rome you can make your way to a few open air venues for a double feature under the stars and enjoy re-runs of the previous season’s biggest hits.

If you are an attractive young woman alone in the audience, you may be lucky enough to get a thigh massage (not a Thai massage) from some lonely man to your right or left.

That hasn’t been my luck in a long, long time, although in my youthful years as a Rome resident passing males dubbed me “bella cosciona” in celebration of my “beautiful big thighs.” Some would follow me down the street as I explored this city of cities and, in cinemas, place a hand on my Rubensian coscia for some exploration of their own.

Reluctantly, I never let a stranger’s hand linger long, and I regret the possibilities I denied myself.

In my first years in Rome the Nuovo Olimpia was the place I refined my Italian language skills.

My only formal training in my adopted country’s language was a two semester course at Harvard adult education. After three summers as a student tourist in Europe and Italy, most of it spent  in Rome (my kismet),  I was able to make good conversation shopping at the local market, downing a cappuccino at the neighborhood bar, and even socially.

But in the dark at the Nuovo Olimpia, an easy walk from my Trevi Fountain flat, I listened to the language and immersed myself in images and stories wrought by some of the world’s greatest directors, from Bunuel to Kurosawa, from John Ford and Sydney Pollack to Satyajit Ray to Tarkovski. Thanks to the miracle of dubbing, Fernando Rey, Robert Redford and Soumitra Chatterjee all spoke the same excellent Italian. I soaked up the language and furthered my self-education in film.

In those days the Nuovo Olimpia was a one-screen house, dingy and rundown. The restroom was unspeakable. Better to hold it in. At night the cinema became a mecca for gay men, so most of the time I was an afternoon visitor.

When I returned to Rome in 1995 after formal education in filmmaking in NYC the Nuovo Olimpia was a spiffy two-screen establishment showing first-run original language films.

In the old days in Rome one had to wait at least a year after their original release to see the best films from the US, and only one cinema in the entire city, the glorious Pasquino in Trastevere, showed them in English.

In the Seventies and Eighties art house clubs sprang up in various neighborhoods all over the city. Shrines to film in its noblest form, the clubs were often created out of tiny, improvised spaces with an air of poverty that unequivocally foretold their doom. They were not in business for business, they existed to exalt the art.

Except for the resurrected Film Studio in Trastevere, the others rarely drew crowds but had a devoted following screening rare films exactly as they were shot, with Italian subtitles. Czech films, Hungarian, Polish, Indian and Yiddish films, the French New Wave, the English Free Cinema, the New German Cinema, the Greek Anghelopoulos (my daughter’s favorite), the Italian masters from Rossellini, Visconti and De Sica to Bellocchio and Bertolucci, and the long generation of greats in between. Most of those art houses are now stardust memories, but there, in those dank, uncomfortable holes, consoled only by the beauty on the screen, I tried to instill in my young daughter a love of the art of film.

By the time I returned to Rome from NYC, some of the most illustrious commercial cinemas in the heart of Rome had begun to shut down, one by one, not for the summer but forever: the Augustus on Corso Vittorio, the Capranica and Capranichetta between the Corso and Pantheon, the Etoile in the posh Piazza in Lucina, the Quirinetta near Trevi Fountain, the Quirino and Rialto on Via Nazionale, the Rivoli just off Via Veneto.

It hurts to recite the names and remember the places, so I won’t burden my memory except to mourn the most recent demise, the Metropolitan, near Piazza del Popolo, just after the Christmas peak of 2010, two months earlier than announced.

The Metropolitan had been smartly renovated as a four-screen theatre and featured first-run original language films, American and European.

The house drew good audiences and became a meeting place for Rome’s film-loving foreign community, just as the Pasquino (RIP, also dear to my heart) had been years earlier.

The Metropolitan was not in dire straits when the property’s new owners, titans of real estate, closed it. These titans are not types to dream about a simple tale simply told with exceptional actors unknown to the masses who can move you to tears or laughter without manipulation, or the beauty of the moving image on a big screen, whether in black and white or full color. They are practical people with monochrome vision. Everything they see, they see in green. Inspired only by the color of money, they envision a multi-story mini-mall in the once hallowed cinema space to draw in crowds of non-cultural consumers.

A slogan for our times: “Coming to a theatre that was once near you… I love shopping.”

That’s the bad news.

To enjoy movies in Rome nowadays it takes only a satellite dish and a DVD player for small screen viewing in the comfort of one’s home; press pause for a break, resume whenever. It requires far less concentration and is a different experience, to be sure.

Alone, in the silence of your home, with no one to rest a hand on your thigh. But, if you’re lucky, you might have the cat come sit on your lap.