“Spectators!” », “The Fabelmans”… how directors pay homage to the magic of cinema on the big screen

Paul Dédalus was 6 years old in the 1960s. For the first time, the boy entered a cinema, on the arm of his grandmother. That day, what interests him above all is the projection booth, much more than the big screen in front of which he has to sit facing Fantomas.

Tender and moving, this sequence evokes a personal memory of director Arnaud Desplechin, whose double is Paul on screen in Spectators!: “I was immediately amazed by the cinema machine, by the light of the lamp whose beams flew towards the screen,” he told us before the film’s release.

Several filmmakers before him have tried to tell the magic of their first cinematographic emotions. Thus, in 2022, Steven Spielberg brought together more than 900,000 spectators around The Fabelmansan autobiographical story. Unforgettable, the opening scene brought to the screen the Fabelmans parents accompanying their son Sammy to the screening of Under the biggest marquee in the world by Cecil B. DeMille. Spielberg’s double, Sammy experiences the train derailment scene as an experience that is both terrifying and fascinating.

By evoking this first cinematic shock, Spielberg takes each spectator back to their first cinema memories. And the charm of nostalgia unites. Already, in 1989, Giuseppe Tornatore had summoned these moments in Cinema Paradiso. Worldwide triumph for this work which tells the story of the little Sicilian Toto, spending his days at the Paradiso cinema after the war, and becoming friends with the projectionist Alfredo (Philippe Noiret).

A reason to live

With this learning film, the director recalled how post-war cinema was a popular art, open to the imagination. Toto’s wonder in the projection booth magnified the cinema as a soothing and unifying space. “Cinema saved my life!” As a child, during the Second World War, my mother hid me in dark rooms (…). The 7th art recreates the world, only better. I knew what I wanted to live for,” Claude Lelouch told us in 2023.

Cinemas are places of initiation, on the fringes of real life, which Agnès Varda celebrates in Jacquot of Nantes (1991), where she traces the birth of the vocation of filmmaker Jacques Demy. By shedding light on the destiny of this son of a mechanic dreaming of the 7th art, it is his own aspirations that his partner weaves*.

Because expressing your admiration for directors other than yourself is a way of revealing yourself, implicitly, on your own journey as a creator. That of Martin Scorsese is revealed in Hugo Cabret (eleven Oscars in 2011). The director features Georges Méliès (1861-1938), French pioneer of cinema. A magical story which gives access, for the duration of a session, to the fabulous childhood of the 7th art.

*Agnès Varda will direct The beaches of Agnès (2008) and Varda by Agnès (2019), documentaries around his own vocation.