Like Herzog’s opera-loving Fitzcarraldo dragging a 320-ton steamship through the jungles of Peru, Oscar-winning film buff/actress Tilda Swinton and a few followers are now driving – and occasionally dragging – a mobile movie theater across the Highlands of Scotland as part of a quest to bring the “experience of cinema” to Scotland’s smaller villages and towns. In Tilda’s own words:
“We’re going to be doing something very romantic and passionate here. Because we love this place, its mackerel skies in November and its marmalade bracken, we are going to pull a 37 tonne cinema on wheels across it, from its crashing Atlantic waves to the dolphins of the Moray Firth. We’ll get hot and sweaty, or drenched with rain, and bitten by midges, and we might get blisters on our fingers and toes, but we’ll show flickering, splendid dream movies as we go, in a cockeyed caravan, like clowns or dafties, or kids.”
Not just any movies, you understand, but classics like Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, Minnelli’s Brigadoon, and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, movies that people rarely see in any format other than DVD or television broadcast – assuming they see them at all.
So hats off to Tilda, co-conspirator Mark Cousins, and their dedicated crew. We wish them our best.
[Via The Huffington Post.]
