He saw a film a day, sometimes two. He became a connoisseur of the non-time that preceded the  films themselves, especially in small cinemas where there were no advertisements or previews, where the audience was made up of four or five people, all of them alone. It is easy to see why, in films, fugitives and wanted men went to the cinema: not just to hide in the dark but because these intervals between performances were out of time. To all intents and purposes you might as well not have existed – and yet, simultaneously, you were acutely conscious of your existence.

[Geoff Dyer – Paris Trance, 1998]