Cinema Purgatorio

When I go to a movie now, I seem to be aware of so many more things: the man a few rows over talking to his wife, someone finishing his popcorn and throwing the bag into the aisle; I’m aware of editing and bad dialogue and second-rate actors. Sometimes I watch a scene with a lot of extras and wonder, Are they real actors, are they enjoying being extras or are they unhappy not to be in the spotlight? There’s a young girl, for example, in the communications center at the beginning of Dr. No. She has one or two lines but you never see her on the screen again. I wondered out loud to Jesse what happened to all those people in those crowd shots, those party shots: How did their lives turn out? Did they give up acting and go into other professions?

All these things interfere with the experience of a movie; in the old days you could have fired off a pistol beside my head and it wouldn’t have interrupted my concentration, my participation in the movie that was unfolding on the screen in front of me. I return to old movies not just to watch them again but in the hope that I’ll feel the way I did when I first saw them. (Not just about movies, but about everything.)

— David Gilmour, The Film Club (pg. 136)