This week, for a variety of reasons good and bad, I have been thinking a lot about going to the movies. Of communing. And I've set into motion how and with whom I will make my return to the enveloping darkness and lights of the movie theatre.
So, when I read this absolutely beautiful paragraph from Jason Shawhan's lovely Nashville Scene piece on Goodbye, Dragon Inn, I had to put it here right away, so I can always find it when I need it.
There’s a feeling that cinema excels at conveying — a collective isolation that paradoxically allows a viewer to experience art on an individual basis, even when surrounded by others (the Eraserhead effect), while at the same time providing a soft, slack link between everyone who ever watches a film at any point in time. Because film depicts the act of living, to view a film while alive creates a connection. And that connection is what Goodbye, Dragon Inn excels at. The film has never played Nashville before, at the old Belcourt* or at Sarratt, yet I have memories of seeing it there. It wouldn’t have played a press screening at the 2003 New York Film Festival at both the Walter Reade Theater and in Alice Tully Hall — but memory disagrees, letting fuzzy edges and the comforting casserole of the past turn us all into the unreliable narrators of our experience.
I am ready to live again and make new memories to misremember.
*The one time I saw a movie at the Belcourt, it was The Girlfriend Experience.
