2024 Film Diary: Black Narcissus

I wondered: is something inside me resisting this?

Black Narcissus/Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger/1947. DCP, Le Champo

This was the first movie I ever tried to watch in a Paris cinema. It was January 2011, and I came to the city for the first time  on a free trip to be on the jury for an independent film prize. They put me up in a weirdly large suite at the Hotel de Louvre where, thanks to jet lag, I basically didn’t sleep at night and couldn’t stay awake during the day. One night I stayed up most of the night watching the Golden Globes on an illegal stream (my only memory of the broadcast was that it was the first time I had ever heard of Downton Abbey.) One day, I went to a cinema that I think no longer exists to see Black Narcissus and slept through the entire thing. It wasn’t Black Narcissus’s fault; I also slept through the other film I tried to see on that trip, Queen Christina. As of this writing I haven’t had a second chance to see Queen Christina in Paris, but last Tuesday I got my second chance with Black Narcissus. 

When I sat down for round two, at first I wondered if it was going to happen again. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and I had to stop myself from dozing off a couple of times during the first half of the film. I wondered: is something inside me resisting this?