Book review: Reflections on the silver screen

In the good seats: Essays on film is the third in a series of annual books following Running feet, sharp noses: Essays on animals and You spin me round: Essays on music. 

One might imagine being given a writing brief on film and becoming misty-eyed, nostalgic for old cinemas long torn down, childhood memories replaced by another empty glass building.

Ali Smith, in her essay 'Eden', begins: “The Empire got shut down when I was a very small child. I only ever saw its boarded-up doors. I never saw the inside of it. Then when I was 10 years old the Playhouse was gone too, up in flames one night.”

In the essay that follows, 'Amazing Grace', Francis Halsall says: “The Grosvenor Cinema on Ashton Lane in Glasgow doesn’t exist anymore, or at least not the version of it from 1995 when I started working there.”

Neither writer wallows, though. The prolific Smith ends up having a personal revelation while watching an unexpected short film, Les Bicyclettes de Belsize, before a screening of Casablanca. “I sit in the audience as if nothing’s happening though everything has.” 

Halsall, in his three-part essay, which doesn’t quite work, links Aretha Franklin to his late mother, who died just a month after the singer.

Old, crumbling buildings with incredibly sticky carpets are what we might picture thinking about the classic ideal of a cinema, but this being 2025, we’re perhaps more likely to half-watch a film on our smartphone. 

In 'All That Bad is Me', Ian Malaney finds himself watching the filmography of Gloria Grahame at home on his laptop during the pandemic.

Just watching a film on a laptop might make Maggie Armstrong jealous.

In one of the highlights of the book, 'High Speed', she has moved to a new house and is having such frustrating internet connection issues that she laments “the generous and shapely smart TV surrounded by stuffed bookcases and DVD shelves” of her previous home. 

“Watching a movie together in that house on a Friday night had been the iconic moment of family life, almost its whole purpose.”

Michael Magee, Cathy Sweeney, and Daisy Lafarge ponder about our connection with films and characters as we age. 

Magee, author of the multi-award-winning Close to Home, discusses, via a David Lynch detour, three performances of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' by Judy Garland: The original from the Wizard of Oz, one from 1955 when she was 33, and a performance in March 1969, less than three months before she passed. 

Though watching drunk at the end of a long night, Magee philosophises about “that bottomless well of intention that only the greatest artists are able to draw from, and give it to us straight and true”.

Sweeney watches Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika at different stages of her own life: In her late 30s and twice in her early 50s, wrestling with critics’ perceptions regarding the protagonist. 

She thinks: “On this watching of Summer with Monika, what I see is not a free-spirited, sexually liberated young woman, but a teenager who has experienced verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual harassment, and quite likely sexual abuse as well.” 

However, elsewhere the film is described as an “erotic portrayal of young love”. Lafarge, meanwhile, watches Donald Sutherland’s Don’t Look Now (1973) three times, relating its depiction of dwarfism and blindness to her own relationship of disability.

There are 14 essays in this slight collection, edited by Adrian Duncan, Niamh Dunphy, and Nathan O’Donnell, a welcome annual literary addition a la Winter Papers. 

Of course, when we think of the movie experience, it’s not just the film we think of. 

In 'Bad Habits, Ignorance, and the Pleasures of Terrible Cinema', Susannah Dickey savours “hours analysing a shitty, sub-par film into the dirt, querying every instance of ham-fisted exposition, highlighting every inconsistency in its own internal logic”. 

These post-celluloid discussions illuminate life with her partner: “I get to experience how his mind works, and I also get to experience films in a new way.” Such is the power of cinema.