A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

The Cinema REX in Bern, my favourite cinema, and indeed the best cinema in Bern/Switzerland/Europe/the world, shows new releases, mostly independent films or world cinema – but that’s not why they’re my favourite: it’s their curated programme. More or less every month, they’ve got a programme focusing on a theme, genre, country or filmmaker – in parallel to which they will also be running other, longer-term series, e.g. on film history or LGBTQI+ cinema or kids’ movies. Thanks to the REX I’ve seen classics on the big screen that otherwise I might not have had the chance to see at an actual cinema, from Apocalypse Now to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, from North by Northwest to Fanny and Alexander. The other movie theatres in the city that have survived the Great Cinema Purges of recent years also offer curated programmes, such as a series on Cult Movies and Worst Movies, but none are focused as much on providing a curated programme.

Thanks to the REX, my cinema experiences have certainly broadened, especially (but not only) with respect to films from other continents and in languages other than English, German and perhaps French. More than that, though, I’ve really come to love the experience of curated programmes with a singular focus. There are the obvious but still highly enjoyable series such as a run of all of Stanley Kubrick’s films, or one on the films of Hirokazu Kore-eda, but also less famous directors both old (such as Dorothy Arzner) and new (they ran a series on Radu Jude earlier this year). There are wonderful oddities as a series a year ago on the popular cinema of Mexico from 1940 to 1970, which contained everything from melodrama and musical to the insane, camp La mujer murciélago, in which a woman dressed in a scanty, ’60s-style Batman outfit foils the plans of an insane supervillain.

During the summer months, the REX has been programming series on stars both modern and classic: since it opened, we’ve gone to see series on Marilyn Monroe, Frances McDormand and Cate Blanchett. Especially with actors who tend to have a certain reputation, it has been quite eye-opening to see the range of films they’ve been in: for instance, it is as easy as it is unfair to reduce Monroe to her parts in comedy, and even those are more varied than may be apparent at first – and it is exactly the opportunity to see all of them over a month or two that makes it much easier to recognise this.

This year, the cinema showed two actor series back-to-back, first the regular summer series, this time featuring the films of Mads Mikkelsen, then another on Lauren Bacall, on the occasion of what would have been her 100^th birthday. I’d only seen a handful of Bacall’s iconic films plus some of the ones when she was in her 60s and 70s, so the programme was a welcome opportunity to see what else she’d done – and to finally watch Murder on the Orient Express, which so far I had only seen in Kenneth Branagh’s less-than-amazing version. It was also great to finally see Jonathan Glazer’s unsettling Birth, and I was surprised to find myself enjoying John Wayne’s final film The Shootist tremendously. (The less said about The Walker and The Mirror Has Two Faces, though, the better.)

However, it was the Mads Mikkelsen series most of all that highlighted to me what such a curated programme can do. Obviously I could have curated my own Mikkelsen Mania – but having someone else go, “Hey, check this out. Interesting, huh?” is such a wonderful, enriching service when it comes to culture. Having the opportunity to choose yourself, as the world of streaming promises, is definitely a positive, but it is also both limited (there’s so much that is nowhere to be found on the streaming services) and limiting (you end up watching almost only the things you think of yourself).

I’ve seen Mikkelsen in many of the films they showed at the REX, so in theory I knew how varied an actor he can be – but it’s nonetheless too easy to fall back on the clichés: Mads the cold, superior villain. Mads the intense. Which can be true, but there’s more: Mads the man in midlife crisis (Another Round). Mads the kindergarten worker accused of a terrible crime (Jagten/The Hunt). Mads the pastor so idealistic that it becomes pathological (Adam’s Apples), or Mads the imbecile thug with daddy issues (the first two parts of the Pusher trilogy). It also reminded me that while not every film with Mads Mikkelsen is good (Arctic is fine but mostly forgettable, Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky rarely manages to move beyond the clichés of the biopic), Mikkelsen is good in all of these films. And sometimes he is great, in parts that I couldn’t imagine anyone else in, from his mute Viking warrior in Valhalla Rising to his pigheaded ex-officer trying to turn the Danish heath into fertile soil (King’s Land). And I very much enjoyed this opportunity to revisit Casino Royale, one of my favourite Bond movies, and shortly after the REX had upgraded their audio equipment and masking tech, resulting in more of the screen being used and therefore a bigger image. Yes, even at the best place for world cinema and indie movies, you can enjoy one of the best Bond flicks looking and sounding great.

Obviously not every single curated programme can be a winner for everyone – and that’s also fine. During the most intense phases, the REX team sees me and my wife four, five times a week, so if we have a few months where we’re there perhaps once or twice a week on average, I’m okay with that. Movie theatres such as the REX fill a gap in our cinema landscape. For a long time, Bern (which may be the capital of Switzerland, but it’s also not a very big city) was spoilt for cinemas, but it’s not sustainable in a place as small as this to show the same blockbuster on four screens at the same time, in English and in the German dub, in 2D and in 3D. Audience numbers were already dwindling when the pandemic struck, and now Bern has perhaps a third of the cinemas that we had ten years ago. It’s no longer enough for a movie theatre to show new releases and that’s enough to attract audiences large enough to make things financially viable. It is cinemas such as the REX that have an identity, a concept, that have identified a niche and set about filling that niche that have the best chance these days. And, as a result, I have seen 16 Mads Mikkelsen films this summer and 15 Lauren Bacall films since September.

Which only leaves Dogville, in which Lauren Bacall has a very small part, and which we missed this time around. And the Blu-ray of the film is sitting on a table in our living room. Eyeing me each time I walk in there. Waiting. Biding its time…