Health & Safety and The Apocalypse

 A Few Notes on Hygiene and Social Distancing While Movie-Going


After 18 months of Lockdown and enforced germophobia, it is with not a small degree of caution that we are resuming our film evenings at the Victoria Park Baptist Church on the 16th of September.


Inevitably, we have considered how free and open to make these evenings. 

Should we go full-on Doomsday Scenario and insist on masks, vaccine cards, social distancing, the whole enchilada? 



Or should we throw caution to the wind and simply party like it's 1979?


Ultimately, we have decided to proceed with cautious abandon. We will not insist on masks at all times, however everyone should feel free to wear them if they choose. Seats will be socially distanced, but everyone will be welcome to sit with their trusted friends and family. 


We do strongly encourage vaccination, and if you are not fully vaccinated, please think long and hard about attending a public function such as this. Humanity did not pull itself, dripping and heaving out of the slime over millions of years, simply to fall victim to an easily preventable little virus. 


Let's be sensible and live to watch many more films in the future.

Fun Fact: two of the films above were directed by the same person, and two of the films (not the same two) have music by the same composer!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The calla lilies are in bloom again...

Image
At the beginning of last week's film, Ellen Wagstaff Arden has been lost at sea (missing; presumed dead) while engaged as the photographer for an anthropological expedition to Indo-China. While that back-story was obviously developed to establish the premise of the entire film (that she returns after a long absence to find her husband re-married) it is, I think, very notable that her character is shown to have a successful  career . Irrespective of the fact that she is supposed to be married with two young children, the (husband-and-wife) writers of My Favorite Wife saw no conflict in depicting a female character who had a life and a vocation that extended beyond her identity as merely wife and mother. Women in the 1930s were generally seen as people . They were allowed to have ambitions and aspirations that extended beyond "finding a man" and "becoming a mother". It was in the post-war years that mainstream society explicitly attempted to re-define womanhood a
Read more

A film about what now??

Image
One of the least shocking aspects of this week's film is the fact that it owes its existence to Charles Boyer and a cockroach. I should probably explain. In 1941, Billy Wilder wrote the screenplay for a film called Hold Back the Dawn . The story takes place in a small Mexican town just over the US border, where refugees congregate and wait (often for years) for their entry visas to be approved.  Billy Wilder had done his own stretch in just such a town, and the screenplay was written with a great deal of personal experience.  But the specific story he tells in the film follows the fortunes of a French/Romanian gigolo (ultimately played by Charles Boyer) who decides to shortcut his visa application by seducing and marrying a gullible American woman. One early scene in Wilder's script featured Boyer's character hitting emotional rock-bottom in his sweltering Mexican hotel room and conducting an existential conversation with a cockroach. Don't feel too badly if you know th
Read more
Image
  Movie Nights at the  Victoria Park Baptist Church And so life goes on. Some of you may remember that our film series in early 2020 was rudely interrupted by a Global Pandemic. The subsequent year and a half has been, well... You know things are pretty bad when you find yourself wondering if there is a plural for "Apocalypse". But at any rate, here we are ( Apocalypses? Apocali? That's going to bother you now, isn't it?) facing the prospect of attempting to pick up the pieces of Civilisation - assuming of course we don't go into another Lockdown first. ( Apocalyae?   Apocalim? ) Movie-going, like so many communal activities, has taken a severe hit during the Pandemic, and I'm willing to hazard a guess that most of the films you have watched over the last eighteen months have been from the comfort of home, with, at most, a family member or two. But watching a film like this: ....isn't really the same as watching a film like this : Sadly we don't quite
Read more

Down With... Architecture!??

Image
  Okay, folks, this one is just plain bonkers. We've had a month or so of fairly heavy films that tackle some difficult topics (Evolution; Witch-burning; Segregation; Rape.. nice, uncontentious subjects) so it's about time we pause for some refreshment. The rest of March is going to be fun, fun, fun. Say hello to Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand was born in Russia to a well-educated, upper-middle class Jewish family. The October Revolution of 1917 brought her comfortable childhood to a very sudden and violent end (she was twelve at the time) and her family lost absolutely everything. By the time she was able to travel to the United States in 1926, she had cultivated what was to become a life-long visceral hatred for Communism, or indeed for any remotely collectivist philosophy. She wasn't merely opposed to the Soviet Union (which you can sort of understand, given what happened to her family); she was violently opposed to any obligations that might be imposed upon the individual for the b
Read more

Carry On... #Inevitable Nuclear Armageddon

Image
Last week in our Halloween-themed film we saw Orson Welles and his Mercury Theatre troupe destroy the world in front of a terrified radio audience. As one might expect, there was a great deal of soul-searching by the media in the days and weeks that followed. Some journalists were fascinated by the panic, some obsessed over the implications, and some were openly contemptuous of anyone gullible enough to believe that Martians were invading New Jersey. Hugh S. Johnson, a free-lance journalist (and former associate of President Roosevelt) wrote a particularly scathing diatribe in which he wryly noted that "there is no reason to believe that in Mars, or anywhere else, there are weapons that could devastate a State or two in fifteen minutes." He made this observation in November, 1938. He was partially correct. Such weapons   took a lot less than 15 minutes, and they  didn't come from Mars. They came from Manhattan. Before becoming a journalist, Hugh S. Johnson had been one of
Read more