The concept of the 'patron saint' has been much-discussed back home in Britain this week, as April 23rd was St George's day - the day on which (some) English people celebrate the life and achievements of a Cappadocia-born soldier in the Roman army who never, it is reckoned, went anywhere near what's now the United Kingdom. The current debate is about whether the UK should have a saint to represent the whole country, in addition to George, Andrew (Scotland), David (Wales) and Patrick (who does double-duty for both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland).

St Aidan would be the bookies' favourite for the "job", and as I'm from north-east England - where Aidan is already well-known and venerated - I should in theory be enthusiastic about his chances. Trouble is, the whole concept of the "patron saint" rubs me up the wrong way, combining two concepts - religion and nationalism - which I find myself increasingly opposed to the older I get.

Then again, I do think that an event like Crossing Europe should have a kind of a "patron saint": a guiding – and totally secular - spirit to whom we can all turn when times get rough (i.e. when we arrive late for an unexpectedly sold-out screening; misplace our favourite scarf in Moviemento 1; accidentally cause a revered Lithuanian auteur to fall down a flight of stairs - that kind of thing).

And who better than Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the 20th century's greatest philospher, who (famously) spent several years at school in the city. Was there a cinema in Linz in 1905? Let's imagine that there was, and that it was here that young Ludwig developed the passion for the movies that was to sustain him throughout his troubled life:
“Wittgenstein was always exhausted by his lectures. He was also revolted by them. He felt disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended. As the members of the class began to move their chairs out of the room he might look imploringly at a friend and say in a low tone, ‘Could you go to a flick?’ On the way to the cinema Wittgenstein would buy a bun or cold pork pie and munch it while he watched the film”from Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, by Norman Malcolm (Oxford University Press, 1958)

Wittgenstein's cinephilia is well known - as are his particular habits while inside the auditorium itself:
in the 1930s, whenever he felt exhausted and drained from his classes at Cambridge, Ludwig Wittgenstein would go to the cinema with a friend or some student. Ray Monk tells us that he would always sit in the front row, where he could probably immerse himself more completely in the stream of images and sound, and he preferred either westerns or musicals starring
the Portuguese-Brazilian Carmen Miranda.

Even now, several crossing Europeans keep the Wittgenstein spirit well and truly alive, always sitting front-and-centre, even if this means they're only a couple of feet away from the screen (CityKino 1!), even if it's a subtitled film which requires them to swivel their heads as if they're watching a particularly ferocious tennis match at Wimbledon. Myself, I favour the philosophy espoused by The Drifters, who in 1964 sang
Saturday night at the movies
Who cares what picture you see
When you're hugging wih your baby in the last row in the balcony

and then in 1974:
Kissin' in the back row of the movies on a Saturday night with you
Holding hands together you and I, holding hands together, ooh yeh
Smoochin' in the back row of the movies on a Saturday night with you
We could stay forever you and I, we could stay forever you and I
Smoochin' and a-kissin' in the back row of the movies

A consistency which even Ludwig W would surely applaud - from the front row, of course.

NY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7_MYrVzU-Y