Philosophy

NITRATE

noun

a salt or ester of nitric acid, containing the anion NO 3 or the group –NO 3.

STOCK

noun

1 the goods or merchandise kept on the premises of a business or warehouse and available for sale or distribution : the store has a very low turnover of stock | buy now, while stocks last! | [as adj. ] stock shortages.
• a supply or quantity of something accumulated or available for future use : I need to replenish my stock of wine | fish stocks are being dangerously depleted.
• farm animals such as cattle, pigs, and sheep, bred and kept for their meat or milk; livestock.
• short for rolling stock .
• (also film stock) photographic film that has not been exposed or processed.

Film is the great passion of my life.

I know nothing about film.

Which kinda sorta makes it the perfect girl for me.

In response to the numerous whinings, pinings, grievances, shin-kickings and sheer sullenry, all in the course of the daily bemusement over the lack of a devoted and fully tricked out repertory cinema in the five boroughs, I offer this substitute for the Bleecker Street Cinema of old, of the St. Mark’s Cinema, the 8th Street Playhouse, The Thalia, The New Yorker, but in no manner of offense toward Film Forum or BAM or MOMA, in any way indicating they are somehow inadequate. Indeed, I will celebrate them and their efforts to keep the great unwashed saturated in the best cinema had and still has to offer from decades past, and in the best and intended way, in the microcosm of Jung’s collective unconscious, in the seats built by Zukor and Laemmle and Loew, where we are awake but dreaming, alone yet surrounded, and sharing the same mythology, concoction, convocation, in the dark, beguiled by the Magik Lantern once more.

In short and without flubbery, this is my attempt to collect the various screens in the five boroughs and slightly beyond into a mass repertory cinema, A Cinematek Du Guiseppe, if you will, and this space will be your one page resource to finding what I deem to be the most important, unmissable, staggeringly beautiful films from our Planet Earth’s heritage that are planned for a screening that month. You may agree or disagree with my picks, but you are implored in either circumstance to explore further.

I want people to get excited by the cinema, from any era. I want to celebrate the very aliveness of film, as any art form is alive, as wine is alive and grows and matures and breathes. A movie changes with us, because of us, due to our individual changes and the shifting sands of the times we view them in. We should be stomping our boots at the ticket booth whenever a Lang or a Ford or a Hawks or a Chaplin or a Renoir or a Powell and Pressburger or a Hitchcock or a Kurosawa is booked for a week, stomp like we’re seeing a great rock band for the first and maybe only time, because we are about to watch the great masters and one of their vital works unspool in the format and venue it was designed for, and may never see it again in this way. Stomp because we occasionally need to be reminded that film is arguably the most important and sophisticated and inclusive of the art forms, that like painting and music it’s permutations each began in the slums and whorehouses of it’s respected eras and regions, but unlike them film had the fastest trajectory toward admission to the ranks of high art and is all-encompassing, and thusly perhaps the neatest trick whence pulled off. Stomp, ultimately, because it’s the most thrilling, exciting, alive, absolutely fucking fun of them all!

We who live in this cosmopolis are regularly privy to such screenings and seldom take advantage. This page will be my nag, my beating of the drum, my plea, for the uninitiated, or the lazy, or the skeptic, to jump out of your goddam seat whatever you define that to be but not to jump free of your trousers as they are required for admission, and to present yourself to your fellow theater-goers and the theater-owners, and to bring your vim and vigor and vinegar and root for the film EXPERIENCE! We may lose it after a period and a fashion, but for now we may still claim it between our clenched fists! It is the ultimate art form because it is made for everyone. I hope you will welcome my site, my advice, and my enthusiasm, and that I will see you at the next screening!