No film was screened tonight. A very long tedious day eased into a very relaxing holiday party hosted by my favorite client. At the party, I was at one point introduced as being "...into very eclectic music and films." The woman I was introduced to asked me, "Oh? What is your favorite?" I stumbled for an answer for a moment as I always do when asked this. Then I said, "Well, I have a hard time thinking of a single favorite... I prefer to think in terms of trends or movements, or a director's entire body of work... but in that context I'm very fond of Italian film, especially from the 50s and early 60s... Antonioni and Fellini and others..." The woman graciously said, "I'm not sure who they are," and we found a more common topic. She ended up recommending a film called THE RED VIOLIN, which I've just now placed on my NetFlix queue.
The moment struck me as illustrative of something I love about cinema, something appropriate for the premiere of The Old Dark Arthouse. Cinema is a vast domain, vast enough to contain entire continents where people can live whole, rich lives without ever setting foot in the lands across the sea. You can be respectably well-travelled and still not have been to China. No matter how many films you've seen, there are entire genres, whole national cinemas, with which you are almost wholly unfamiliar. This is not a galling limitation, this is a reason to share!
