5+1 transcendent movie theater experiences I've had over the past 12 months

James Stewart as Wyatt Earp, with Arthur Kennedy as Doc Holliday, about to deal with a rude inter­rup­tion of their dir­ect exper­i­ence of poker in Cheyenne Autumn, John Ford, 1963. 

After I pos­ted my piece on the movie theat­er etiquette debate, such as it is, my friend The Self Styled Siren e‑mailed me, inform­ing me that in search­ing for a Steven Spielberg quote about movie houses as churches, she did not come up with the goods, but did find a not-dissimilar sen­ti­ment artic­u­lated by Bernardo Bertolucci, made on the occa­sion of Bertolucci accept­ing a DGA award from, as it happened, Spielberg. In that speech, Bertolucci praised cinema as “the most inter­na­tion­al and the most class­less of expres­sions,” wor­ried that “cinema is liv­ing in shyness—I might even say fear—of tele­vis­on,” and con­cluded this train of thought with “Maybe I’m an ideal­ist, but I still think of the movie theat­er as a cathed­ral where we all go togeth­er to dream the dream together.” 

I feel like in my dire-seeming con­clu­sions about shifts in how movies func­tion in the lives of the mass of theater-goers, my real­ism might have obscured not just my own ideal­ism but anoth­er facet of real­ity, the one that Bertolucci speaks of. To extend the meta­phor, per­haps we could even say that where ever two or more are gathered in cinema’s name, that’s a church, or cathed­ral. Amazing celebrations/appreciations of cinema still hap­pen in an en masse con­text, that is to say, in theat­ers. I’ve had at least a half a dozen of them in the past twelve months, which does­n’t sound like many, but I want to be clear about the “amaz­ing” part. Because “amaz­ing” is almost by defin­i­tion rare. All of these screen­ing were unmarred by smartphone-checkers, tex­ters, talk­ers, or any such thing. Except…well, read on. 

1) Eloge D’Amour (In Praise of Love), The Museum Of The Moving Image, Queens, N.Y., September 15, 2012. A part of the pro­gram Film After Film, cur­ated by the great crit­ic J. Hoberman in con­junc­tion with the pub­lic­a­tion of his book of the same name. Hoberman intro­duced the screen­ing to a packed house, provid­ing his cus­tom­ar­ily cogent, witty, and acute per­cep­tions and dis­cuss­ing in par­tic­u­lar the use, in this remark­ably dense and pro­voc­at­ive 2001 Jean-Luc Godard film, of film stock and digit­al video for its two com­ple­ment­ary nar­rat­ive sec­tions. The pro­jec­tion was flaw­less, and the con­cen­tra­tion of the crowd was exem­plary. “Think this through with me,” Jerry Garcia sings on the Grateful Dead tune “Uncle John’s Band;” the feel­ing in the theat­er that even­ing was of a large scale effort at think­ing the movie through with Godard. And the movie has lots to think about, and see­ing it in this con­text, with this crowd, was lit­er­ally rev­el­at­ory for me, com­pel­ling me to under­stand how much about my think­ing on the film had been wrong, wrong, will­fully wrong. I wrote about the cor­rect­ive feel­ing I came out with here. 

2) The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, The Lafayette Theater, Suffern, N.Y., October 6, 2012. For a long time the Lafayette, a gor­geously restored single-screen movie palace erec­ted in 1924 and kit­ted out with a full Wurlitzer organ, was run by my old friend Nelson Page, as a first-run theat­er, with a sea­son­al rep­er­tory pro­gram called Big Screen Classics booked and pro­jec­ted by anoth­er pal, Peter Appruzzese. The theat­er is kit­ted for both digit­al and 35mm pro­jec­tion, but Peter liked to run 35 as much as he could; he’s no lud­dite on prin­ciple, and under­stands and appre­ci­ates the new tech­no­logy thor­oughly, but like a lot of us he still really likes cel­lu­loid and over the past few years has had a harder and harder time get­ting his hands on it to show. Now while Nelson and Pete would very kindly wave in me and my Jersey cinephile pal Joseph Failla, also a long­time asso­ci­ate of the team, when I’d make the trek from Brooklyn to Suffern for one of the Saturday morn­ing screen­ings in the spring and fall-held series, I was appre­ci­at­ive that the pro­gram­ming for this cinephil­ic indul­gence had to attract some kind of crowd. The eco­nom­ics of run­ning a movie theat­er are so par­lous that we should praise the lord that any busi­nessper­son still deigns to do so, and Nelson can wax elo­quent on the top­ic at length on request. At the Lafayette, you open the pad­lock on the doors and you’ve spent half a grand already. Because of the theat­er­’s beloved land­mark status in the town, and the inter­ven­tion of Suffern res­id­ent Robert Benmosche in the res­tor­a­tion of the theat­er at the begin­ning of this cen­tury, and a town sub­sidy, the Big Screen Classics series became a fix­ture at the place, but book­ing Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell’s 1944 The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp was a kind of cal­cu­lated risk any­way. The movie’s “redis­covered clas­sic” status is not as strong as that of The Red Shoes, the sub­ject mat­ter and its treat­ment is very British, and the pic­ture is very nearly three hours long. But I don’t think Peter could have res­isted: the new, painstak­ing res­tor­a­tion was avail­able in a 35 print from Park Circus, so as he did with The Red Shoes a couple of years earli­er, he booked it. 

The screen­ing attrac­ted a good, not great, crowd, a mix of sub­urb­an cinephiles and folks from a nearby seni­or cit­izen’s cen­ter. There were a lot of people who had nev­er even heard of the movie before, and for whom the main draw, or curi­os­ity, was Deborah Kerr’s pres­ence in the cast. At the time the movie was made, it was both a semi-nostalgic look at a British ideal and an anti-nostalgic entreaty for Britain to shake itself out of a com­pla­cency of val­ues that was threat­en­ing to allow it to be defeated in the Second World War. Almost 60 years after it was made the movie has in itself a con­sid­er­able nos­tal­gia value, and this multi-dimensionality, while intriguing to con­tem­plate in the after­math, hardly registered at all after the movie’s rauc­ous “War begins at mid­night!” opening. 

Now, noth­ing against Film Forum, where the latest restored ver­sions of clas­sic films gen­er­ally make their first New York stops, but not one of that ven­ue’s three screens has a patch on the one at the Lafayette, which is 32 feet wide and 16 feet high.  This, com­bined with the beauty of the movie itself, had the effect of draw­ing its audi­ence in with a par­tic­u­lar acu­ity. The movie’s dir­ect­ness, its innov­a­tion, its refined dis­tilling of emo­tion and intel­lect, cre­ated, yes, a spell, and the three hours passed like fif­teen minutes. The exhil­ar­a­tion of it car­ried into the lobby after­wards; octa­gen­ari­ans with their walk­ers and impossible-to-miss gleams in their eyes, speak­ing to each oth­er anim­atedly; they had just seen some­thing. 

3) and 4) 2001: A Space Odyssey, December 24, 2012; and Cheyenne Autumn, December 30, 2012; Walter Reade Theater, Manhattan, N.Y. The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “See It In 70MM” series of last winter was one of the indis­put­able high­lights of New York moviego­ing, and the screen­ings of these two pic­tures provided me with very dif­fer­ent and very beau­ti­ful and irre­place­able exper­i­ences. I went to the screen­ing of 2001 solo, not quite know­ing what to expect; what shape the print would be in, that sort of thing. The screen­ing was in fact sold out and I only got in through the good graces of a FSLC pal who had an extra tick­et, God bless him. The packed house was largely male, middle-aged, and poorly dressed, and of course I myself was/am not exempt from any of those qual­it­ies. And by the glowing-eyes-of-the-leopard shot in the “Dawn of Man” sequence we were all slack-jawed-with-wonder twelve-year-olds again. Yes, the print was mag­ni­fi­cent, the sound superb, the whole thing as trans­port­ive and chilling and engross­ing as it ever could have been. During the inter­mis­sion we were all just stand­ing up and stretch­ing and mur­mur­ing, “Wow, whoa, whu…” 

Cheyenne Autumn had a wonki­er print, from a Scandanavian film archive, sub­titled in Swedish at that. But again the house was packed, with a slightly young­er, slightly more diverse crowd; I had per­suaded My Lovely Wife to come along too. We went in “know­ing” the film from tele­vi­sion and DVD, and under­stand­ing it as a “prob­lem pic­ture” for Ford, a racial apo­lo­gia com­prom­ised by Hollywood cast­ing (Ricardo Montalban and Sal Mineo as Native Americans, etc.) and ton­al inco­her­ence (the comic-relief Dodge City sequence with James Stewart as a Wyatt Earp devoted to his leis­ure time has earned a par­tic­u­lar notori­ety). But the visu­al majesty of the thing, and its sheer com­mit­ment, ameli­or­ated so much poten­tial awk­ward­ness that the whole movie, includ­ing the Earp scenes, played like a dream, and the folks around me, includ­ing quite a few pro­fes­sion­al col­leagues, ended up not only enter­tained but kind of schooled. Ford is not to be under­es­tim­ated, even in less than optim­um circumstances…and his com­mand of the large frame was unques­tion­able. Damn. 

5) The Vikings, The Lafayette, May 11, 2013. The 1958 Kirk Douglas-starrer, also fea­tur­ing Ernest Borgnine and Tony Curtis, all of them play­ing, yep, Vikings, has a “4;30 Movie” rep as a cheese­ball clas­sic. But expertly dir­ec­ted by Richard Fleischer in glor­i­ous widescreen, and action-packed, with said action enacted with gusto by the cast, it really is rip-roaring fun, a Captain Blood for Eisenhower-era proles and bey­ond. Although we were start­ing at 11:30 in the morn­ing, this really was unim­peach­able Saturday after­noon at the movies fare, and the siz­able crowd, most of them this time com­ing in with pretty fond memor­ies of the movie, ate it up. 

The bad news is that the Big Screen Classics series at the Lafayette had its last sea­son this spring. Nelson passed the torch to new own­ers, who are going to con­tin­ue to run the place as a first-run theat­er, and work with the town of Suffern on a new Saturday screen­ing pro­gram, but likely an all-digital one. Peter is in the pro­cess of trans­form­ing the Big Screen Classics web­site into a movie blog…which I can­’t wait for. I am really gonna miss the shows though. 

I’ve not included spe­cial screen­ings because I wanted to con­cen­trate on cinema exper­i­ences that any per­son with a couple of bucks in his or her pock­et, and some geo­graph­ic prox­im­ity to the ven­ue, could have just walked right in to. My “plus one” for this post, though, is the spe­cial 70MM screen­ing of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master that I saw at the Museum of the Moving Image on August 18 of last year. I got an e‑mail earli­er that week from an address I had a vague recol­lec­tion of. The text was from Paul Thomas Anderson, ask­ing me to attend. I had­n’t really spoken to Paul since the New York première of Boogie Nights, which I had inter­viewed him about for a Première fea­ture sev­er­al months pri­or to its open­ing. To say I was sur­prised was an under­state­ment. Now over the past few years I’ve got­ten to know the comedi­an and act­or Bill Hader. He’s a huge cinephile, and we’ve had a bunch of won­der­ful chats about movies and music over cof­fee and vari­ous meals; we were intro­duced by the dir­ect­or Greg Mottola, who I’m also friendly with. Bill knows Paul well (Paul’s wife Maya Rudolph is a former Saturday Night Live cast mate of Bill’s), and he had seen a cut of The Master earli­er in the year, and he made me jeal­ous talk­ing about it. “I’ll be inter­ested in what you think of it,” he said. “It’s bril­liant. It’s also…difficult.” Okay, I thought. So after I got this e‑mail I con­tac­ted Bill and asked him if he’d had any­thing to do with this invite com­ing my way. He said no. What was weird too was that, besides hav­ing been anti­cip­at­ing the movie, I’d been writ­ing a mem­oir in which a pro­fes­sion­ally cru­cial and per­son­ally dis­astrous for­ay to the 1998 Adult Video News Awards is chron­icled, an event at which almost every­one had Boogie Nights in the back of his or her mind. So I’d been think­ing about Paul. That Saturday even­ing My Lovely Wife and Bill and I took a cab to Astoria, killed some time talk­ing movies at a Starbucks, and in the lobby of MoMI, before the screen­ing, Paul showed up with his edit­or­i­al per­son, whose name I’ve regretably for­got­ten, and with whom he’d been hand-carting select reels of 70MM film to screen at select ven­ues across the coun­try. Also with him was Jim Downey, the legendary com­ic writer and broth­er of Robert Downey, Sr., a great friend of Paul’s. Anyway, Paul and I bro-ed it out for a bit (not so much that I felt I had to recuse myself from review­ing the movie that next month), and when we went into the theat­er, which was of course packed (there were many oth­er crit­ics in attend­ance, includ­ing J. Hoberman and Richard Brody) there was a feel­ing of such intense anti­cip­a­tion that it was almost as if every­body was hold­ing their breath as the lights went down. And God damn if we did­n’t wait to exhale for the next two hours and twenty three minutes. Well, except for one teensy thing. During the scene in which Freddie and Lancaster are jailed, there was some­thing about the fram­ing of one of the wide shots that just killed me, and made me think of the visu­als in Kubrick’s The Shining. And I was think­ing that this was a pic­ture that had that thing, that thing that we want from film and which makes us believe in it all over again, as strongly as we ever did, whenev­er we are able to find it. And I knew that Bill, who was sit­ting next to me, was on that wavelength too; and I briefly glanced at him and he glanced at me and he whispered, “I can­’t believe I get to hang out with this guy,” and I whispered “I know,” so, yeah; we talked dur­ing the movie.