At age five, to distract me from my Meccano building projects, which threatened to take over the living- and dining-room floors, my mother sent me to the movies with the boy down the street.
The boy's grandmother, looking very much like an exotic Gypsy, red lipstick and darkened hair pulled back to a low bun at the nape of her neck, walked us across the big street, Main Street, to the Deluxe Theatre, where The Wizard of Oz was playing. Then she shocked me by leaving us there while she went God knows where and we faced Dorothy, the Wicked Witch, the Wizard, the Tin Man, and all the other characters, alone, all alone.
The picture had already begun when we stepped in, and I thought we were watching a real story about other people's lives. I made no distinction between me and my life and what was happening on the screen.
My friend Marty got too scared and had to leave the theatre and waited for me in the lobby. I was also terrified, especially by the witch's power, but I couldn't leave until I found out what happened. By the time the true nature of the Wizard was exposed, it was too late, I was heartbroken at the fate of Dorothy and her friends. I found the ending deeply unsatisfying, but the movie set off a craving for visual stories, the feeding of which has sustained me in my darkest hours.
In my childhood, I was a willing victim to my brother's manipulative logic ("If you'll come with me to see The Frogmen instead of Annie Get Your Gun, there will be enough money to have popcorn too. And gum if you don't tell Mom or Dad").
Our parents never asked us what we saw, and I never told them. They never went to movies. My father said he couldn't sit still in a movie theatre. He had "restless leg syndrome." Are you kidding? He had "shpilkes," a condition known to Jews long before Restless Leg Syndrome got added to the ever-increasing list of modern ailments. You get "shpilkes" from worrying about something you have done wrong.
I explore this physical ailment in my new film Watching Movies. I interview an occupational therapist, who takes the problem one step further -- she tackles the threat of an embolism forming in your veins in a movie theatre. Hard to imagine while sitting and watching an Alfred Hitchcock movie -- maybe during a Matrix movie.
Thursday nights, the girls would giggle our way up to Academy Road to watch the sneak preview at the Uptown Theatre, resplendent with clouds and twinkling lights in the ceiling, and just a few years later going to the movies was the perfect date. It meant you didn't have to talk. Sometimes, if you liked the guy, you were so nervous you had to go see the movie again to find out what it was about.
In the sixties in Winnipeg, there were no foreign films shown in commercial theatres. But there was the Winnipeg Film Society. I went with my boyfriend who was an art student and, just as Margaret Visser describes in Watching Movies, (although she did it a decade earlier in London), you watched the movie, you went to a coffee house, you were baffled, you discussed the meaninglessness of life, you felt like an artist.
At that time, simply watching Hiroshima Mon Amour, Wild Strawberries and La Dolce Vita qualified you as a bona fide intellectual. My whole perception of how relationships between men and women work was formulated by the movies. Men could do whatever they liked. So could women, as long as they were at home. (They could cook, clean, write letters, wait for their father, boyfriend, husband to get home. Wait longer.) Men had power and women did not -- unless they were bad. That made me want to be bad! Later it made me want to make movies. I wonder if I thought I could be bad and have power that way?
One of the great pleasures of the 1960s was going to the drive-in. We loved to go in our pajamas, and take vast quantities of food. Boys especially liked going -- it was easier for them to try to neck with you there, because no one was watching.
As Howard Book, eminent Toronto psychiatrist, points out in Watching Movies, movie theatres were dark and you hoped no one was watching. So you did things you might not do in bright daylight. At the drive-in, you knew for sure no one was watching.
A boy I went to the drive-in with (who happens to have been a friend of Howard Book's in our childhood) decided, after I had accepted an evening out with him, to switch our date from a regular theatre to the drive-in. I was terrified. I ended up sitting on the edge of the seat of a Volkswagen throughout Days of Wine and Roses. It wasn't until 10 years later and Fellini's Roma that I let him touch me in a movie theatre. Sue Johanson (sex expert) explains all this in Watching Movies.
Like most people who have led complicated lives, I have had my share of dark days. Nothing on Earth has redeemed these times like slipping into a movie theatre on a cold afternoon, alone or with a friend, gathering the requisite nourishment, wrapping my coat around me and closing out the mean and nasty world out there.
It can't be done at home, however elaborate the television screen. In the theatre it's just me and whatever appears before me. I am the kid at The Wizard of Oz, and I am as afraid or delighted, wretched or elated as I was as a child.
I cannot watch violence, I have to cover my eyes. I am frustrated when poorly constructed narrative breaks my extremely forgiving suspension of disbelief. I feel thrilled to share the emotional experience of watching a movie with the strangers who also felt the need, the urge, to slip out on a bad day to the exquisite comfort of the movie theatre, where, at that very moment, just for you, a projectionist is lighting these images on to a screen so that you can get lost for a couple of hours in another time and place, another life.
Gail Singer is a Toronto filmmaker. Her latest film, Watching Movies, airs tomorrow at 7 p.m. on CTV.