Love, Again

Dear Kate,

It was 1993, the year I fell in love with the movies, if I have to name one for the history book, for storytelling, that would be it, that year, 1993.

It was a year of waking up to life in the dark, despite--because of the dark, that light has broken in, spoken in a rectangular portal to heaven, the "cinema," back then when the word was still used, to mean, I thought, that to grease my hand with popcorn would be at the least a disrespect, if not desecration.

It was my freshman year, with fresh defeats on my back (money worry, family strife, almost failing English, quite unthinkable until I got my first essay back, etc.) and fresher freedom under my feet (second-run and indie theatres, VHS from the library), I answered to darkness beckoning and took a detour.

Since then I spent more time soaking up the sights and sounds of cinema throughout my university years than considering what I went in there for: to get a business degree.  I got myself one alright, with flying colors too, and since then did absolutely nothing with it.  "When he found one [fine pearl] of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it" (Matthew 13:46).  Cinema was where I first understood the power of storytelling.

 

Back to 1993, a vintage year for the cinema, in particular with two instant classics that would go down in history as insistent classics: Jane Campion's The Piano and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List.  I can write a book about these two movies, separately and together, in the year 1993, how they shaped the way I see the world, I hear whispers and gunshots, whispers that are gunshots.

 

 Why am I bringing this up?  Well, guess what, this year, 2021, Campion and Spielberg are at it again, together and separately, and I am smelling love and gunpowder in the air.

Campion's The Power of the Dog has already run the film festival circuit triumphant, and Spielberg's West Side Story remake looks and sounds like a new phenomenon. 

 

It's gonna be a holly jolly Christmas.

Yours, Alex

PS, I must also mention, my conversion was complete later in 1993, at a bus stop right outside of the then Ridge Theatre, after receiving the epiphany that is Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors: Blue and White.  I am telling you, something happened in cinematic heaven that year.