Night at the Cinema

This evening Nike and I went to a film club screening. The movie, The Grin Without a Cat, was in French and the subtitles were in Spanish so I spent much of the time confused. Especially since we both thought we were going to see this visually rich, surrealist Czech film (which I had already seen, but thought would be fun to see again). Anyway, besides an extended exercise in comprehension, it was a sort of fascinating look at a subculture here. Well, subculture might be to strong a word for six middle-aged, leftist film buffs. Since I understood approximately every seventh word, I was relying heavily on audience reaction, gesture and tone to follow the post film chat. But I was definitely picking up some, "Oh no he didn't say that about Chris Marker!" kind of facial expressions. The film itself (which I have since learned is something of a classic, in the scope of documentaries dealing with the failures of the left in the late sixties) relied more on voice over than a non-fluent viewer would hope. But I really enjoyed the spectacle of the event itself: in a basement screening room of a university building, the strange blend of men with graying hair and film students, the guy sitting next to me with a Che Guevara pin and a paperback copy of a Balzac book... It was familiar but completely different.