If you love a film deeply, you will never forget the first time you watched it and the emotions it gave you. And if you wanted to do it for real, to relive those sensations without knowing anything, returning to the viewing as a virgin viewer? In collaboration with Pathé, in the Netherlands there’s truly an ongoing experiment tied to reissuing in their cinemas four classic titles not too dated and highly beloved: Matrix, Se7en, La La Land and Interstellar. The key would be hypnosis, structured in several stages.
Forgetting the films with hypnosis to watch them again as if it were the first time: will it work?
With the collaboration of psychotherapist Victor Kraemer, the Dutch cinema chain Pathé, to promote the in-theater re-releases of Matrix, La La Land, Se7en and Interstellar, has launched a curious initiative called “REWIND“. On November 9 at the Pathé Buitenhof cinemas in The Hague, the experiment will unfold in two stages and will involve thirty volunteers linked to the feature-length films in the program. First there will be private online meetings with the psychotherapist Kraemer, apparently with a preliminary hypnosis, while the second hypnosis will take place directly in the theater, before the screening. Each participant will have indicated their preferred film in that quartet. Pathé hedges, noting that so far they have not been able to make people forget entire films under hypnosis, but who knows… Will the narrative twists most paradoxical in Matrix and Interstellar really be relived as if for the first time? Will one be able to watch La La Land again hoping that Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone will live together forever happily ever after? Or will one again ignore what’s in the box that Brad Pitt opens at the end of Se7en?
There would also be questions about whether we really want to “reset” our minds and do without these memories: it’s not only the stories that matter, but also the places where we experienced them and the people, the cinema or living room we were in, and who we were beside. The appreciation for our favorite films is fueled by these elements, just as much as by the cinematic qualities of works selected for Pathé REWIND.
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