š¬ #195 Cinema - Beyond Human Scale.
Two recommendations this week, but more importantly, an exploration of how different the experience of watching the same film, in a different way, can be.
Please enjoy
Bry
FILM ONE: Sinners š§āāļø
2025 Dir Ryan Coogler
2 hrs 17 mins
FILM TWO: Come and See ā ļø
1985 Dir Elem Klimov
2 hrs 22 mins
Earlier this month, I was lucky enough to see a screening of Sinners. Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler were both there, and they did a Q&A afterwards. It was great. [Thanks Pete].
The important point, though, is that I missed Sinners the first time round in the cinema, so I saw it on a streamer. Coming into it, fresh again, seeing it in a big screen with big sound, and even knowing the story, it almost played like a totally different film. Actually, I couldnāt believe how different it was in terms of feeling, because when I first saw it I enjoyed it. But then when I saw it again, I was really taken somewhere - the power of the music captures something that canāt be captured when watched at a normal, human scale - like on a TV, even the biggest of TVās.
As I mentioned just now and in the title, I think that effect comes down to human scale. There is a principle or method of design in architecture that uses āhuman scaleā elements to make buildings more friendly, or less overwhelming. For example, the Getty Museum in LA uses this to powerful effect. The exterior is divided into a grid-like series of tiles - and those tiles are about the size of the average arm span. This is all to say, that making things human scale, can be beneficial in some regards - in terms of making a huge building more approachable. But in the same way it can take power away from something - like seeing a film on a more human scale screen, with human scale sound. If we can stand over the film [playing on a tv], hold it in our hands [laptop / phone] weāre stripping it of the power it can wield, because itās all more approachable and knowable. Itās comforting in itās reduction in some ways. The musical power, the scope and sexy horror of Sinners is defanged on TVs. But in the cinema at beyond human scale - on a screen thatās 60 feet wide and 20 feet tall, its power is fully realised. It overwhelms, in a good way. Like how people must have felt seeing huge canvases of art for the first time, or paintings on chapel ceilings. Itās at a āGodā scale.
The same thing happened this week too. I saw Come and See for the first time on a big screen, having seen portions of it across the years on a TV / laptop. The experience, especially in the case of this film is night and day. Itās a film designed to be emotionally overwhelming. It puts us in the same shoes as the protagonist Flyora.
A 14 year old boy eager to join the war effort, but who is swept up in the incredible horrors that become an unrelenting torrent, tossing him wherever it pleases. Weāre shoulder to shoulder with him, the huge sound of bombs bombarding him, they bombard us, the screams he hears, we hear. Itās all loud and inescapable because not only is the power of the film amplified on the big screen - itās literally looming over us. Itās pinning us in our seat, in a hell-like cathedral of sound and vision. And all we can do is sit through it, looking up at it - in awe at the power of cinema beyond human scale.