Play it again

As a younger film lover, there are few thrills greater than seeing a title you’ve always loved through the medium of television and DVD (and, at the risk of dating myself, home video) given new life on a cinema screen, the way nature, or the filmmaker at least, originally intended.

A big-screen reappraisal can heighten already ardent cinephile devotion to a certain title – watching Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (admittedly in redux form) on a 20-foot screen in an empty theatre remains the single greatest cinemagoing experience of my life, while a pristine new cut of “Once Upon a Time in the West” at last year’s London Film Festival was one of my highlights of 2008.

Alternatively, the closer scrutiny of a cinema viewing can heighten one’s appreciation for a less-adored title. I had always admired “Barry Lyndon” more than I actively loved it, until a gorgeous restored print at London’s BFI Southbank earlier this year awakened me to the intricate painterliness of its compositions and near-hypnotic stateliness of its pacing. Some films need the immersive quality of the theatrical experience to drive their aesthetic point home.

So I was interested and heartened by this recent piece in the Times which discusses the surprising influx of re-issues on the UK release schedule in the near future, ranging from the aforementioned Sergio Leone delight, to Kubrick’s “Spartacus,” to a John Landis double-bill in the form of “Animal House” and “The Blues Brothers.”

Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese’s rehabilitation of the cherished Powell-Pressburger classic, “The Red Shoes,” is one of the hot tickets at the Edinburgh fest, which is also playing host to a rather different – and significantly more recent – high-profile reissue: a 15th-anniversary revisiting of Danny Boyle’s debut “Shallow Grave.”

As niche as some of them may appear, the article reports that there is actually a market audience for such releases:

(Universal Pictures UK head Simon Hewlett confirms that) other titles on the rerelease wish list include Jurassic Park, Jaws, E.T. and Back to the Future. He is confident, too, that there is an audience for rereleases, as the successful performance of other recent reissued classics, both arthouse and mainstream, has continually proved. Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1970 classic The Conformist, for instance, was a hit for the BFI last year, raking in a healthy £100,000, which in context is nearly twice the haul of Sienna Miller’s recent US indie film The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Other films such as Grease were rereleased last September and had the blockbusting result of more than 13,000 admissions in one day.

Of course, this trend could be seen as a lazy response of sorts to the issue that Kris was recently lamenting: the sheer dearth of original ideas in current mainstream cinema. Rereleasing past glories may not be pushing things forward, but as commenter Chuck pointed out on that piece (presciently advocating a “Back to the Future” reissue into the bargain), it’s a far more inspiring than the deluge of subpar sequels, remakes and rehashes that Hollywood has cottoned onto.

If the industry must resort to such artistic stopgap measures, perhaps it’s a case of better the devil you know.