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I have far less to report on today than I did yesterday; last night was a much more standard, movie-going evening—the first of three in a row this week, as I burn through the rest of my SIFF screenings.
Last night's movie was at Pacific Place downtown at 6:00, and I didn't go home first, theorizing that at SIFF I typically need to get in line roughly an hour early so I can guarantee myself a decent seat. That turned out not to be so vital this time; I was second in the ticket holders line when I got in it maybe around 5:15. I spent a good amount of time trying to read this book I have to read for Book Club which, even though it's ostensibly about the 2018 influenza pandemic, it's so frontloaded with history of medicine that, 30 pages in, it does nothing so much as make me nod off every time I read it. Insomniacs should use this book as their own form of treatment.
Anyway, back to the movie, which was a documentary about an overlooked early-20th-century photographer, largely of male nudes, called
Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes. I was very impressed with it. Not necessarily so much with the filmmaking itself, which was pretty standard in documentary style, but with the subject, who I had never heard of, and who I am now deeply eager to learn more about. This guy was insanley ahead of his time, to a degree that it was almost as though, in the 1920s and 1930s, he operated outside of time, his comfortable approach to his queer sexuality and his work and his life being so out of line with his era.
To be fair, it
was New York City—and, to a large degree, Paris—in the twenties and thirties. Even then, he could not have gotten away with the same lifestyle virtually anywhere else.
I really, really loved his photography, though, virtually all of which looked very much like it could have been done today. I found it astonishing. The filmmakers were there, and in the post-screening Q&A they spoke about how no major exhibition of Lynes's work could ever be mounted without a sponsor, and no American company or organization has even the slightest interest in sponsoring an art exhibit that features such brazen male homosexuality in it. This bums me out, because I was so taken with the work that, for instance, if the Guggenheim showed an exhibition, I would immediate start planning for finally returning to New York for a visit, just so I could see it.
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— पांच हजार चार सौ तीन —
I have to admit, though, that I was a little bummed by the sparseness of the crowd at this screening. To be fair, this was in a rather large theater room at AMC Pacific Place, which makes the crowd look smaller when there are so many more empty seats. Although there had been only maybe six people in the ticket holders line when they let us in, as usual the pass holders were already inside, and judging by the amount of applause when the film was both introduced and when it ended, there might have been as many as thirty or forty people in there.
I still felt bad for the visiting filmmakers, the director and procuers and writers, for whom this film was clearly a labor of love, ten years in the making. And although it's entirely possible this theater would not have filled to capacity pre-pandemic, there is no doubt in my mind that had this screened prior to 2020 the crowd would have been
much bigger. Something that still seems lost in the wake of the pandemic is the broad reach of passionate SIFF goers: in the past, even the worst, pieces of shit movies would sell out. Not so much anymore, which further makes it amazing to me that somehow SIFF cut a deal to buy the Cinerama.
A volunteer was chatting with the guy ahead of me before the movie, and even she was commenting on how travel has really bounced back, as have restaurants, things like that. But people just aren't coming back to movie theaters in the same way. One thing I think she did maybe miss about that is how movie watching trends were already shifting before the pandemic, and the pandemic just shifted those changes into hyperdrive. I do think the movie theater going experience is basically permanently altered now, and will continue to evolve. The one ray of hope I have is that, in spite of shifts even among SIFF audiences, Seattle remains a movie watching town, and we have plenty of theaters to choose from still, at least for now. Granted, there was recent talk about the Regal Meridian 16 downtown closing (which I rarely go to anyway, because my monthly membership is with AMC), but the flip side is, for now anyway, SIFF's theater count is actually expanding. And I love SIFF more than any other film entity at the moment.
Anyway, I rode my bike home, and wrote my review, breaking in the middle to eat some of the yummy potatoes and paneer dish Shobhit made, along with frozen parathas I fried up for us to eat. When I was done with the review—giving the movie an A-minus—we watched an episode of season 5 of
Night Court on Prime Video, picking up where we left off a few months ago. It was one of the few episides I remember watching with Mom at home in Spokane when it first aired, back in 1988. It was just before my birthday when this particular episode aired, so I was still 11 years old. My memory of it was watching when I was a teenager, though, so maybe I watched it later in the early nineties in syndication.
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[posted 12:32 pm]
