Cinephilia on a Train Out of Locarno

At the train station in Locarno, on my way back home after almost two weeks at the Festival, I had a conversation with a guy from Texas who looked like a character straight out of a Jim Jarmusch film. He had a black cowboy hat, black vest, and long black hair, with a big shiny suitcase. After Locarno, he was going to continue travelling around Europe visiting different film festivals. Are you a filmmaker, critic or programmer? I asked (after several days of meeting many of these). No, he said. Just here to see movies. But do you write about them at least, for yourself? He thought about it, No, I don’t. You really came just to watch movies and now you’ll keep going to festivals just to watch films? Yes, he said, laughing. But you must keep a list, at least, of what you’ve seen? I insisted. He shook his head. Not even Letterboxd? No actually, I don’t. I don’t want it to be work, he said. Anything that sounds like work, even making a list, I won’t do with films. I just watch them. Wow, I thought/said. Now this kind of festival-goer I had not come across at Locarno (or anywhere perhaps) until now. We then had about a 40-minute or so conversation only on one film we had seen at the festival: Don’t Expect Too Much From the End of the World, by Romanian film director Radu Jude. The conversation was unlike any other I had had in those weeks. It was strikingly intelligent, thoughtful, analytical, but also sensitive, open, and surprising. We both made each other think about the film in new ways and we would build off of one another’s reflections, adding layers to our analysis, yet avoiding any kind of generalizing conclusion. At the end of the ride (he continued on to Milan), he showed me a rock that he was taking back as a souvenir. I took a photo of the rock, but not of him and I don’t remember his name anymore. He doesn’t have social media either so we will not keep in touch. I came back almost two weeks ago and have been slowly processing everything I saw, heard, felt and experienced while at Locarno. Seems to me that the higher up a person is in the film festival/industry world, the less films they see and the less they actually talk and think about films. In the newspaper on one of my last days there, I read an interview with the now former President of LFF Marco Solari and he said that finally he will be able to go back to watching the films at the Piazza Grande. After 23 years. When I read this I wished to never become a festival director. The conversation with the cinephile on the train reminded me what I love about films, aside from watching them and making them: talking about them, discussing them. But not in the way that many people do at festivals, making sweeping declarations “this is the best film”, or quickly looking to find a consensus “yes, this is part is great, but the rest is not”, or fitting everything into a short, attention-grabbing sentence that can be shared across different platforms. No, I mean real discussion, debating scenes and decisions made by the filmmakers, including structure, narration, and form. But also: speaking about those moments that call out to you in a film, those little moments that maybe you thought you forgot but that actually are the images that stay with you the most days after seeing it. In any case, I came back home replenished by this conversation. After almost two weeks of work-related activities, running from one thing to the next with very little time in between for reflection, it was such a gift to end the festival on this final note of pure cinephilia. I thank this anonymous Jarmusch character for this conversation and for reminding me of what’s important. Here’s the photo:​