A piece of my mind.

Here's a letter I just mailed to the appropriate individuals about the closing of the LACMA film series. Dunno how much good this is going to do, but I figure it is better to do more rather than less about this matter.

( begin included letter )
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Like so many cineastes around Los Angeles and around the globe, I was appalled when I received word that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was discontinuing its film program indefinitely.
There's not much I can add not in eloquence, force of argument, and especially not clout to what Bertrand Tavernier, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Bogdanovich have already stated in their statements to Mr. Govan. What I believe I can add is evidence.
Allow me to explain, please. Some of the commentators you hear since this fracas started suggest that all us film lovers are whining now, but none of us actually managed to get our sorry selves in gear to actually see these films while you were showing them. I would like to rebut this notion with all the authority that I can muster by providing you with the following. I may have forgotten the odd short subject or two, but barring such a possible lapse of memory, this is a list of every single motion picture I have seen in the LACMA weekend film series since I moved to Los Angeles ten years ago.
The Petrified Forest (Archie Mayo, 1936)
In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1954) Asphalt (Joe May, 1929)
Berlin - Alexanderplatz (Phil Jutzi, 1931)
People on Sunday (Curt Siodmark, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann, 1930)
Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927) The Blue Angel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930)
Kurt Gerrons Karussell (Ilona Ziok, 1999)
Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972)
The Serpent's Egg (Ingmar Bergman, 1977)
The Automatic Motorist (Walter R. Booth, 1911)
Pinocchio (Giulio Antamoro, 1911)
The Doll (Ernst Lubitsch, 1919)
Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995)
Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (Kirby , 1997) Teacher's Pet (George Seaton, 1958)
Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964)
Mahanagar (Satyajit Ray, 1963)
The Adversary (Satyajit Ray, 1970)
Pickpocket (Robert Bresson, 1959)
My Night at Maud's (Eric Rohmer, 1969)
Pepe le Moko (Julien Duvivier, 1937)
Love is My Profession (Claude Autant-Lara, 1958)
Le plaisir (Max Ophuls, 1952)
French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1954)
And the Ship Sails On (Federico Fellini, 1983)
Arabian Nights (Pier Paolo Pasolin, 1974)
Kundun (Martin Scorsese, 1997)
Forty Guns (Samuel Fuller, 1957)
Advise & Consent (Otto Preminger, 1962)
The Milky Way (Luis Bunuel, 1969)
Wheel of Time (Werner Herzog, 2003)
The Burning Earth (F. W. Murnau, 1922)
City Girl (F. W. Murnau, 1930)
Baby Doll (Elia Kazan, 1956)
Who's That Knocking At My Door? (Martin Scorsese, 1967) I Confess (Alfred Hitchcock, 1953)
Freud (John Huston, 1962)
The Misfits (John Huston, 1961)
Wild River (Elia Kazan, 1960)
Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)
The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)
Who'll Stop the Rain (Karel Reisz, 1978)
Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)
Cutter's Way (Ivan Passer, 1981)
Forbidden Games (Rene Clement, 1952)
The Accompanist (Claude Miller, 1992)
L'avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
Le amiche (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1955)
Il grido (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1957)
Summertime (David Lean, 1955)
Pygmalion (Anthony Asquith, Leslie Howard, 1938)
Under the Olive Trees (Abbas Kiarostami, 1994)
Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002)
The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami, 1999)
ABC Africa (Abbas Kiarostami, 2001)
Blood of a Poet (Jean Cocteau, 1930)
The Mysteries of the Chateau de De (Man Ray, 1929) Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)
Du sang, de la volupte et de la mort, part I: Psyche (Gregory J. Markopoulos,
1948)Du sang, de la volupte et de la mort, part II: Lysis (Gregory J. Markopoulos,
1948)Du sang, de la volupte et de la mort, part III: Charmides (Gregory J. Markopoulos, 1948)
La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer, 1967)
Pauline at the Beach (Eric Rohmer, 1983)
The Lady and the Duke (Eric Rohmer, 2001)
Boy (Nagisa Oshima, 1969)
Death by Hanging (Nagisa Oshima, 1968)
Coup de Torchon (Bertrand Tavernier, 1981)
Shoot the Piano Player (Francois Truffaut, 1960)
See? Evidence.
Look carefully at that list, if you please. It reads like a who's who of the finest men and women who ever exposed a foot of film since this medium was invented.
Many of those pictures are available on DVD, and quite a few are readily so. Allow me to explain myself further, please... for you see, I shall not settle for hamburger when, for a few extra dollars, and a bit of trouble, I can have steak. As a friend of mine puts it, the quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten.
Movies are art. Movies are beautiful, beautiful things that belong in a museum. As long as anyone is screening them the real kind in a cinema, somewhere, and permits us the privilege of seeing light projected through celluloid, rather than make us look at a bunch of dots, I will be getting out to see them. I do this every week without fail, and then I go home and tell people all over the world how beautiful they are.
I look forward to still attending pictures on a regular basis even when I am 90... even if I have to have a nurse or other caregiver help me to my seat every time. Given my longtime affinity for horror films, I shall pay said caregiver well above market if she is young, cute, and will answer to "Vulnavia".
The funny thing is that I have never attended film school, or indeed any sort of art school. I come from a family of engineers. This affinity I describe is something that just happened... like falling in love in any other way, it happens to you, and one day you realize that you just can't deny it any more.
I am a software engineer by profession, and by inclination, and I put a great deal of time, creativity, and effort into building the civilization of the 21st century. Regardless of what stereotypes people believe and circulate about us computer people, however, let it not be said that I cannot appreciate what makes a soul worth having.
Did you folks ever see Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's priceless masterpiece A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven )? Remember the opening sequence, wherein Peter Carter recites a Walter Raleigh poem: "Oh give me my scallop shell of quiet, my staff of faith to walk upon, my strip of joy immortal diet, my bottle of salvation, my gallon of glory hopes true gauge, and thus I'll take my pilgrimage," then remarks, "Sir Walter Raleigh wrote that, I'd rather have written that than flown through Hitler's legs"? Can you understand what he meant? If you do not, I genuinely feel sorry for you.
By the by... Kim Hunter, as June, is so beautiful in that movie that, as ridiculous as it sounds, I actually believed the part where she and Peter fall in love over the radio. I very seriously doubt I would still have bought that if I had been looking at a bunch of dots at the time. Life is nasty, brutish, and short... and it's always disappointing, and it's pretty damn meaningless as well. However, I know what reason I have to get out of bed every morning. Can you guess what it is?
Oscar Wilde once observed, "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Do not take any of my stars away.

Thank you for your kind attention.
Regards,
Jack Maxfield
Citizen
( end included letter )

alt.flame Special Forces
"Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest." Anatole France