People want and deserve to feel connected to and see themselves reflected in art, whether paintings or films, writes Colin Farquhar.
I’m standing in front of the Mona Lisa, in the Louvre in Paris, trying to jostle for position at the front of the queue and avoid the outstretched arms, to get an unhindered view of the most famous painting of the world. It’s not the easiest.
The arms reach away from the painting, as people turn their backs on it. Her quiet smirk is reduced to a shimmer over a shoulder in a selfie.
She’s quite beautiful, and ethereal. The colours are more vibrant in real life, and the smile is a hint more obvious. The landscape behind her is strange and green and distant. You wonder if the power is in the beauty, or because the Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa.
News reaches me that, back at home, a film director from Peterhead, Jon S Baird, wants Aberdeen City Council to show his film, Tetris, at the currently empty Belmont Filmhouse.
Tetris was partially shot in the Granite City, at the University of Aberdeen Zoology Building on Tillydrone Avenue, and at the recently A-listed high rises of Seamount Court, on the Gallowgate. Aberdeen’s most brutalist buildings, standing in for Soviet-era Russia.
I had heard whisperings before I left for Paris. It’s a romantic idea, to see the former Belmont Filmhouse brought back into use for a short run of a film that would have found its audience there.
Tetris had been filmed before the pandemic and, following our post-lockdown reopenings, I had imagined the release would be a major event for the Belmont –perhaps a glitzy regional premiere, and large crowds hoping to see places familiar to them on screen. A film for us.
Let’s do this!!! #tetris 🏴 https://t.co/YmHlNx6NlL
— Jon S. Baird 🏴🇺🇦 (@jonsbaird) March 5, 2023
Alas, it was never to be, either in the way I had visualised it, or as it was proposed by Jon. By the time I had arrived back from France, the council had quashed the plan.
It’s a shame, as there’s a cinema sitting there ready to go, and it would be the perfect place for the premiere. But I also understand the difficulties in opening a building, and a business, for a short time frame, given the administration and the costs required.
We want to see ourselves on the big screen
In the Louvre, I stand back from the Mona Lisa and watch the crowds. Everyone enters, navigates the queues and then poses and snaps. I try not to use my phone too much in galleries, as I prefer to see with my eyes, and it can be difficult to get perspective in photos of such spaces. But it can be hard to resist with the more famous works, and I take a few quick photos above everyone else’s heads.
Tourists and school trips filter to the far end of the room, past Titians, Tintorettos and Veroneses and have their moment with Mona Lisa. They want to see her, and they want to see themselves.
The shame of not being able to watch Tetris in the cinema is that we won’t be able to see ourselves, and our home, in an exhibition space – the film is released on Apple TV+ on March 31. There’s a particular draw to seeing places, and sometimes people, we know on a big screen.
Terence Davies’s Sunset Song was a huge hit for Belmont Filmhouse in 2015, and the last film to which we had a premiere as glamorous as the one for Tetris might have been. Sunset Song was hugely popular with the Aberdeen audience: people flocked to see the history and traditions so well known to them. Those landscapes, those cultures.
The same was also true of For Those in Peril, a 2013 film by Paul Wright. Filmed in Gourdon, Aberdeenshire, it’s a tale of mental trauma following men lost at sea.
The local premiere was at Woodend Barn in Banchory. The hall was packed with people from Gourdon. During the screening, a man next to me leaned over to his neighbour and whispered: “That’s my mum’s dog there.” The film then had a very successful short run at what was then Belmont Picturehouse.
Aberdeen is missing its small cinema
I leave the Mona Lisa behind me in Paris, still trying to decide if it’s a better painting than those adorning the walls around it, and come back to Aberdeen.
Since then, I’ve been past Seamount Court, and I am familiar with how the Zoology Building looks, in all its stark glory, from my time at university. The brutalist beauty of these structures, and others like them, has long been a source of debate.
Our people should be allowed the opportunity to see themselves, their city, and the work of their favoured folk when the chance allows
The news of a Peterhead screening of the film is welcome and makes sense, given the director’s roots – but Tetris still deserves to have its chance on a big screen in Aberdeen, somehow. Our people should be allowed the opportunity to see themselves, their city, and the work of their favoured folk when the chance allows.
Again, it’s a shame that currently there’s no cinema in the city that can provide that opportunity. Aberdeen may not be the Mona Lisa, but it deserves to be seen.
Colin Farquhar is former head of cinema operations for Belmont Filmhouse in Aberdeen
Conversation