Pioneering

The great Sergei Eisenstein - Soviet film theorist and the director of such masterworks as STRIKE, POTEMKIN, and OCTOBER - haunts me through the daily business of putting together film programs. Eisenstein is of course best known as a theorist of editing, a philosopher of the cut, whose studies of the relations between two images next to each other suggest numerous possibilities for film programming. In showing one film before or after another, for example, an exhibitor can suggest a dialogue between the conceptual ideas, styles, and politics embedded within the films. Historical retrospectives, of course, exploit that kernel idea, though that kernel is something an exhibitor can and perhaps should study, nurture, and develop.*


Eisenstein and his ideas may haunt my mind. But his subconscious influence has granted some rather perverse progeny, at which he may chuckle but of which I don't think he would be particularly proud.

Last September 30, for example, I discovered I had programmed this triple bill: I WAS A TEENAGE FEMINIST, CHASING ERECTIONS, and DEEP THROAT. This was not on purpose. These movies came from different sources, and were booked for different reasons. Only as I looked at our displays on that day did I realize what had happened. Everyone at the theater had a good chuckle, as did the neighborhood blogger who took the picture that illustrates the current note.

This Friday, that triple bill is topped by:

The Unintentional Anonymous Sex Triple Bill:
LAST TANGO IN PARIS, 24 HOURS ON CRAIGSLIST, and GAY SEX IN THE 70s

Yes, that's right. Friday, January 27, starting at 6:30pm, you can witness Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider's escapades in anonymous butter, then learn about wireless sex in San Francisco, and finally go back to the bathhouses of NYC's swingin' 70s.

Tickets:
LAST TANGO IN PARIS: Fri Jan 27 6:30pm (bring a stick of butter and get a free buttered popcorn)
24 HOURS ON CRAIGSLIST: Fri Jan 27 9pm
GAY SEX IN THE 70s: Fri Jan 27 10:30pm
(If you buy for two back-to-back shows, select the member or student rate and claim a discount when you pick up your tickets. If you're already a member, well, that's still a terrific deal.)**

Eisenstein must be so ashamed.***,****

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* However, this broad stroke description hardly exhausts Eisenstein's relevance for film exhibition. But more details are, perhaps, topics for other times. Nor do I claim that, for Eisenstein, "film is the cut," an atrocious simplification a teacher once scandalously declared to myself and some classmates. Eisenstein's thinking about cinema was infinitely more profound than that.

** Yes, I know we need to improve our membership structure. We're working on it.

*** See also this piece on our November 21 "documentary odd couple" of SIMULTANEOUSLY COINCIDENTAL and ARISTIDE AND THE ENDLESS REVOLUTION.

**** Note to self: make fewer footnotes.