A Useful life Film Difficulty Ranking: 3
If you love going to the cinema to watch films, find out how they are run by watching A Useful Life. This short film focuses on a struggling art house cinema in Uruguay. It’s an ode to cinema of the past and how it is being forced to adapt to a new digital world.
From: Uruguay, South America
Watch: Trailer, Buy on Amazon
Next: Cinema Paradiso, Hugo, Gloria
Why Watch A Useful Life?
- See how an independent art house cinema is run
- Witness some live dubbing
- It’s an ode to cinema
- For one great scene in which a fake substitute teacher tells his students that everything is bullshit.
The Breakdown
A Useful Life starts with a fed ex package and two people. The package contains a bunch of DVDS which are divided between two men. From this opening we can infer that they both are either avid film fanatics, or more likely, are two guys who run a cinema and are reviewing films that might potentially be screened.
Turns out they are both. They help run an art house cinema that has been running for 50 years. As the following shots confirm, the letter they both silently look at in the opening is a notice that they are close to bankruptcy and not making enough money. Their art cinema specialises in old films and it’s mostly empty – only a handful of cinemagoers are seen entering the screening in a cinema aisle which looks like a long corridor in a warehouse. Things don’t look bright for the future of art house cinema.
The future of the curator is intertwined with the future of cinem
But it’s not just the future of art house cinema that is under threat, as the curator is forced to adapt to a life without the cinema he has worked in for the last 25 years.
In the first half of the film, when the future of the cinema looks bleak, the director uses a lot of close up shots of the curator to indicate ow he feels. A lot of the time he is blankly starring at nothing. He appears distant and half lost as if contemplating his uncertain future.
In another shot the curator walks up and down the cinema corridor on his own lost in thought. He wanders in front of photos of a horse galloping. These photos are significant because they are photos by Eadward Muybridge, a pioneer of photographic studies of motion and one of the first people to experiment with motion picture projection, aka cinema, in the second half of the 1800s. It links the curator’s future to the future of the history of cinema. They both need each other to survive.
However, whilst their future looks bleak it is not completely hopeless. The curator charismatically adapts, imitating a professor, getting a sharper haircut, and winning a date with a woman he likes. His success offers some hope for the future of art house cinema. If he can adapt to a new life without the cinema, cinema can adapt to a new digital life.
What to Watch Next
If you want to watch more cinematic love letters to the history of cinema check out:
Or if you want to see another great South American film about a single middle aged person trying to make the most of life, check out Gloria from award winning Chilean director Sebastian Lelio.
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