The cinema of the City of Refuge is largely as one would expect. When the lanterns dim and the curtains open in the grand movie houses, an orchestra swells as title cards give way to sweeping Todd-AO panoramas that subsume their audiences into a neighboring reality for a few hours (with a brief intermission). The films are, of course, timeless in the truest sense: no element of their mise en scène ever betrays a particular era, nor succumbs to out-and-out anachronism. Perhaps it is more that they are from another time or outside of time entirely, though no specific word or song or prop or style gives that away.
On any particular lazy matinee — can there be a matinee in the sunset city? maybe it is always the early performance — one could stroll down the cineplex hallways to take in the colorful painted posters and imagine what they might be about:
a heroine in heavy kohl traverses an endless desert to return a treasure that fell into her possession after it was stolen by her father, an innocent thief who was tricked into starting a war between two neighboring countries,
two lovers try to escape an enchanted castle before the great walnut mantel clock in the hall chimes for the thirteenth time and both are cursed to remain there forever, invisible, intangible, but still very much alive,
a historical epic of the last man to fall from the moon, and how he returned,
a librarian falls in love with a mysterious word, sending her on a journey through a thousand books before she discovers a long-hidden truth about herself,
a comedy about a village where everyone awakes one day to find that no one speaks the same language, and the chaos that transpires as they prepare for the annual harvest festival,
the dizzying adventure of a boy who fell asleep in a rooftop garden and was roused to wakefulness on a floating island that serves as the private menagerie of a peculiar old man who is running out of time to fulfill his life’s ambition,
a teenager is horrified to learn that she is literally outgrowing her suburban town, expanding out of proportion and threatening to crush her family and friends; however, as she escapes the life that she once knew to find anywhere that might suit her, she finds that it was not she who was growing, but her town that was shrinking,
and tumbling out of the doorways comes the sighs and shouts and sobs and snickers of enraptured audiences who found their way to the city of the eternal golden hour — perhaps years ago, perhaps yesterday — and wandered into the beckoning tungsten archways of the movie palaces, transported yet again to a charade world that would fill their hearts beyond capacity with some vast emotion, only to eject them blinking into the resplendent glow of a metropolis they never intended to find and can’t seem to willingly leave.
tasting notes:
this started almost six months ago when i put billie’s ‘on the sunny side of the street’ in a place where i would remember it later. i will often put a constraint on myself while building these things just to keep myself a little bit in line. i have a lot of little piles where songs go and i have to remember why i’m putting them there. so from that seed, my guiding principle was “songs from before i was born.” from that principle or constraint, generally some mood emerges and i have to trust that and lean in a little to build the rest of it out, adding things that work and deleting things that don’t. the idea of some timeless diegetic emerged pretty soon after I heard the big strings of chiemi eri’s ‘tennessee waltz’, a song that i feel succeeds at telling a story larger than itself.
thinking about how this all gave the impression of a film before my time filled my head with colors that don’t quite exist and i decided to stay a little longer in the sunset city, the City of Refuge. perhaps i myself don’t quite know how to leave.