Last Friday, I took my eldest once again toe BAM's Harvey theater, this time to see 2001: A Space Odyssey on the Big Screen, as part of the Big Screen Epics series, that will also feature a restored print of Lawrence of Arabia. I'd told her a little about the film, enough that she was kind of interested, and warned her: A) it's kinda long; B) there are long stretches with no dialogue; C) I have no idea what it all means. (Okay, the last part is not entirely true; I am a film professor, after all.)
I suspect she was one of a handful of people there seeing it for the first time, and I'm pretty sure she was one of the youngest (as she was when we went to see the silent version of Hitchcock's Blackmail the week before). A few people around us were talking with their companions about how stunned they were that there was an intermission when they saw it back in 1968 (or in any number of revivals). (On those few occasions when I showed the entire film in my film history class, we usually didn't take the intermission. Usually, because I was covering a lot of ground, I'd only show the Dawn of Man sequence.) And yes, we got an intermission this time. (Which was good, because we wanted popcorn.)
I am happy to report that the kid -- thirteen -- was thrilled and amazed by the film. yes, a little tired near the end, but that's as much a function of her sleep patterns -- she gets up ridiculously early -- as it was about the film's pace. I'd described to her the key moments in the Dawn of Man sequence beforehand, including the classic graphic match of the bone becoming the spaceship, and whispered that the little girl who plays Dr. Heywood Floyd's daughter was the director Stanley Kubrick's daughter. But she "got" whatever one gets the first time.
This is what is so great about going to the movies and not just sitting at home watching stuff stream on our hdtv. a beautiful widescreen film, projected at 70mm (unfortunately, not in the preferred format, Cinerama, but that's hard to find these days, with a great sound system, is still overwhelming. Plus, when the SuperPanavasion cameras are in the hands of great cameramen like Unsworth and directors like Kubrick and David Lean, such films bring us a real sense of wonder and magic to motion pictures. You can understand why movie theaters were so ornate and elaborate: it's like the setting had to keep up with the brilliance on the screen.
Okay, I know some of that is probably hooey. This is America, and the theaters were so designed to justify higher ticket prices and bring in a wealthier clientele than the first generation of peepshow and nickelodeon customers. And movies went widescreen to demonstrate their superiority over television. But as we know, even in a commercially-driven system, artists create important stories in dramatic manners that audiences still love. D.W. Griffith made hundreds of short films working at Biograph, and not all of them were classics, but they showed a man who grasped a fundamental understadning of motion pictures' power: "you can photograph thought." And his best films articulate his vision in stunning fashion, even if that vision was clouded (to put it too mildly) by prejudice. The same holds true for the great autuers of Classical Hollywood: Ford, Hawks, and Hitchcock. Not all great directors offered a stunning visual power akin to Ford's work in Monument Valley; Billy Wilder's film's are driven by narrative, by story, and no one offered a more acerbic vision of American life than Wilder. Yes, some movies lose less of their power on a small screen: are we missing much watching Stalag 17 on TV? Probably not. But would I go see Some Like it Hot at a retrospective? Absolutely.
For me, movie theaters are temples; it always hurts when one closes. I'm lucky to live in a place where you can still see great big films on great big screens, but even here, there have been so many to shut down just in the last twenty-five years I've lived here as an adult. Watching old movies that show theaters -- like Woody Allen's films -- I cringe knowing that this or that theater is gone. One must take what one can get. And when you get a chance to see something special in a special, sacred place, you take it. and you take your kid with you.
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