Through the usual harsh criticism for which Spielberg has been getting on his nerves for a long time, I have heard so many good things about The Fabelmansthe latest autobiographical offering from the filmmaker, that I had to go see him at the cinema.
Steven Spielberg is one of those directors who get me out of my house, because I owe him my love of 7e art. I was 9 years old when I saw AND the extra-terrestrial, and I don’t know how many times my heart almost jumped out of my chest. Even today, despite adulthood and sharper tastes, my heart throbs when Elliott and ET soar in the moonlight to the music of John Williams…
Many have never forgiven Spielberg for having been practically the inventor of the blockbuster new genre with jawsin that glorious era of movie theaters where people stood in line for weeks to see a film.
Get to AND hadn’t been easy. My parents, my little brother and I had waited in line for an hour and a half in freezing weather, only to have the door shut in our faces at the last minute. The session was full, we had to wait until the next one, my parents were furious, my brother and I burst into tears, because our feet were frozen and we couldn’t stand another minute in this temperature.
It was perhaps to avenge myself for this disappointment that I went to see AND at least five times during the months it ran. Experiencing intense emotions and forgetting everything in a dark room had become my favorite activity. Vincent Guzzo must shed a little tear reading my memories…
The pandemic, combined with the dominance of platforms and home theaters, has hit cinema attendance hard, both here and in Europe. The shock is all the greater when we see The Fabelmansfrom the start.
When Sammy, Spielberg’s child alter ego, sees his first film at the cinema, The Greatest Show on Earth of Cecil B. DeMille – and his famous train accident sequence – I experienced a strange game of mirrors. On the screen, in the fiction, the room is full to bursting, while the one where I was was empty. We were less than ten spectators. Even more absurd, when I bought the tickets, I had the privilege of choosing my seat, when there was practically no one there. The icing on the cake, an employee warned me that there was a heating problem in the room and that if it bothered me, I could be reimbursed for the ticket.
I watched The Fabelmans all the way with my winter coat on my back zipped up to the neck, and I didn’t ask for a refund. To be honest, I came away happy. Nose frozen, but delighted.
As we have read everywhere, The Fabelmans is effectively Spielberg’s love letter to the 7e art and a tribute to his parents, in a family where he was torn between the scientific spirit of the father and the artistic temperament of the mother. The combination of the two is what makes cinema, and the filmmaker recalls, like a true geekthe devices and stuff he had to go through to develop his art.
PHOTO MERIE WEISMILLER WALLACE, ASSOCIATED PRESS
Gabriel LaBelle in a scene from The Fabelmans
We tend to forget it, but one of the greatest upheavals we have experienced in the last 30 years has been to move from a mechanical world to a digital world. The image quality of our iPhones far surpasses that of video cameras from the 1980s, that’s for sure.
If I had had this huge smart TV that I have in my living room as a teenager, I might never have gone to the cinema. And despite everything, even if we have seen films often in atrocious conditions, on tiny televisions and with cassette tapes of more than questionable quality, we have become cinephiles. But it is perhaps not for nothing that Spielberg for a very long time refused that AND be offered in video clubs.
Anyone who has taken film lessons in their life will remember with The Fabelmans the technical heaviness of yesteryear and the treasures of invention that had to be deployed. Like using a shopping cart to do tracking shots or punching holes in the film to make it look like gunshots.
It’s moving to watch the young Sammy bent over his editing table, cutting film with his mitten, in an artisanal spirit that forces him to see details unnoticed by the naked eye. I laughed until I cried when Sammy gets revenge for being bullied by a classmate, a tall, goofy blond guy who looks like a caricature of Aryan perfection according to the Nazis, by magnifying him in the school’s end-of-year movie. The great Tarla is so upset to see himself so beautiful in this mirror that he almost wants to strangle the director, because he knows deep down that he is not up to this image.
Emotion is the fuel of the filmmaker, for whom the greatest spectacle happens in the room, when the public reacts to his creation – Spielberg is moreover the king of the “reaction shot” in my opinion. In a mise en abyme, we see Sammy looking at those who watch his films, savoring this collective thrill impossible to experience alone in his living room. In this sense, The Fabelmans makes us live the nostalgia of a time when cinema was “The Greatest Show on Earth”.