Guild Theater Exterior
“This is the best film I’ve ever seen” a woman said after a screening of JOURNEY FROM ZANSKAR at the Guild in Albuquerque Sunday night. That’s the 4th time that a person has made the same comment to me. (Yes, I’m counting. But it’s not hard; it’s a pretty memorable comment.) The Guild is my kind of theater – independently owned and operated, surviving on a shoestring, showing great movies from 115 years of cinema. You have to climb a ladder to get to the projection booth – a bird’s nest over the front lobby. The “office” is behind the candy counter – fax machine, phone, and files squeezed between a coffee machine, candy boxes, and a stool to sit on while selling tickets through the outside ticket window. When the show starts Keith has to lock the front door since there’s no one left to man the counter and stop potential theft. This is what the death of theatrical exhibition looks like. You may mistakenly think the death of theatrical exhibition is not yet upon us when visiting your local multiplex. Not true. That is the upscale morgue. They exclusively present the most recently embalmed. That is where you go after you’ve taken the Matrix’s blue pill. Actually, going there is taking the blue pill.
If it weren’t for cinemas like the Guild, and devoted owner/operators like Keith, I never would have ended up a filmmaker. My mentor Ron Epple used to show movies in his attic. We’d sit on busted old movie seats screening 16mm prints. On big nights maybe 12 of us would jam in a space barely bigger than Keith’s booth.
When the Bell & Howell projector would tear the print we’d pop the reels off, throw them on the rewinds, splice them together, and be running again in under five minutes, allowing just enough time for a bathroom break, fetching more beer, or ordering pizza. There was never a single moment I can recall thinking “wow, I’m learning all about cinema here,” and yet nothing less occurred. I’m not nostalgic for uncomfortable seats, too much smoke, rickety old projectors. But where can I find the same fevered passion today debating the merits of obscure experimental shorts from Bulgaria sitting in front of 70 inch wall-mounted HD screens with DVDs from Netflix? I hope that passion is alive and well on college campuses. But is it elsewhere? In museums maybe? Does it exist in the lobbies of the last few remaining theaters like the Guild? I hope so.
What follows is not false modesty – I think Journey From Zanskar is a very good film. But is it possible that those young people who find it the best film they’ve ever seen do so because they’ve seen so few films? Seen so few good films projected on a large screen in a darkened hall, sitting breathlessly beside numbers of strangers having a suddenly intimate communal experience?