Paula Routly: The Enduring Appeal of Going to the Movies

I understand the appeal of streaming a movie at home. I can pause the action whenever I want. The snacks are free, and so are the throw blankets. There’s no driving in the dark — just a shuffle to bed.

And yet I still prefer to sit in a room full of strangers to watch a film.

The endurance of movie theaters, and the persistence of annual events such as the Vermont International Film Festival, suggest I am not alone. In this week’s issue, we preview the forthcoming 10-day celebration of global cinema, which has been around in various forms for four decades. More newsworthy, though, is the fact that VTIFF’s steady flicker has grown brighter since last November, when Burlington’s only commercial movie theater closed. In “Now Showing,” Mary Ann Lickteig explains how executive director Steve MacQueen, who once chose acts for the Flynn, has artfully expanded local movie-viewing options to help fill the void.

Nothing beats having a pro do the picking. The irony of living in a digital world of limitless options is that it is limited — polarizing, even. Your streaming algorithm serves up just what you like, but as they say: “You don’t know what you don’t know.” A great movie can open your mind — especially one you’ve never heard of and had no plans to see.

Just as important is the communal aspect of moviegoing. Absorbing new information this way is a perfect mirror of the human experience. We’re both alone in the dark and together.

That was true, too, when I lived in Uganda from 1988 to 1990. Hungry for a view of the wider world, people there would assemble before a television set — some in simple chairs, others sitting on the ground — while a generator powered the VHS. There was no electricity in our town, Arua, so neighbors happily gathered for these outdoor screenings whenever and wherever they happened.

Judging from some of the questions that came up, not all the viewers understood that what they were watching was fiction, a staged narrative for their amusement; action flicks worked best. For many, it was their first glimpse of this art form.

I’ll never forget one movie night on the road between Arua and the country’s capital of Kampala. There was a problem en route, so my husband at the time and I had to overnight in a tiny town near Lake Albert. Our accommodations were in a single-story compound that looked like a prison: three-quarter walls between rooms; thin, stained bare mattresses; no indoor plumbing. After the equatorial sunset, it got dark fast.

It would have been a very long 12 hours if someone hadn’t organized a pop-up screening right outside our window. Grateful for the entertainment, we joined the audience and stood out for being the only two white people in the crowd. Back then, the farther you got from cities, the more likely it was that Ugandans would stare, point or laugh hysterically at “mzungus” like us.

We were already feeling conspicuous when we realized the movie was not some kung fu classic but Amin: The Rise and Fall — the cinematic rendition of a bloody chapter in the history of our host country. The former dictator Idi Amin, aka “the Butcher of Uganda,” had been ousted only a decade before.

The 1981 movie reenacts real events from his eight-year reign of terror with “a lot of gruesome violence,” as film critic Roger Ebert noted in a review at the time, but is neither a documentary nor a drama. He wrote: “It’s sort of a biographer’s notebook, a strung-together series of anecdotes in which the former Ugandan dictator emerges as a man with many personalities, all of them out of control. The movie itself is also out of control.”

The depiction of several incidents from the early 1970s — Amin exiled Uganda’s South Asian residents and had a British journalist arrested for an unflattering portrayal — caused a stir in the audience. Lots of people turned around to look at us. It was unclear whether they were familiar with this recent history or thought the events on the screen were happening, in real time, as we sat there, nervously, experiencing the awesome power of a moving picture.