Two moments that defined my love for cinema:
1:
One day when I was about 15, I stumbled upon Allison Anders’ Gas, Food, Lodging – still living in a relatively remote small town in Germany. I was amazed by what cinema could do, and felt betrayed by the knowledge that there was a whole wealth of non-Holllywood films that I had no idea existed. From that moment on, I did my best to catch up on independent cinema, but it wasn’t until I moved to Barcelona that I had the chance to go to proper arthouse cinemas – it was the beginning of the Dogma era, and a great time to learn more about film.
2:
Fast forward and I worked as an usherette at an independent cinema in London while finishing my studies. We just started showing Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, and had signs of warning plastered around the building, because people kept having epileptic fits (the strobe light at the beginning of the film) and strong reactions to the portrayal of explicit violence. It happened 40 minutes into the film (about 5 minutes into the rape scene): two couples stormed out of the screen, shouting abuse at me and demanding their money back from the manager. They got more furious by the second, told the manager they wished his girlfriend was raped the same way as Monica Bellucci, and tried to pull him out to the street for a fist fight. That’s when I decided that I was in the right place: The Cinema. We (the employees) fantasized what it must have been like to usher during the release of A Clockwork Orange, and I just kept thinking how powerful film can be. Whether Irreversible is a good or necessary film is debatable, but it made me realize something unrelated to the films’ content: that the audience is just as important as the director. Without an audience, you might as well not bother to make a film at all. And that’s as far as you can (or should) define an audience (the rest is open for a debate in one of The Auteur’s Forums).