Cinemascope

A man who was coming down the steps from the balcony as I was going up whispered to me that the movie had started fifteen minutes early, and though I instantly composed the letter of complaint I would write to the Cinema at the Whitney, whose Fall 2007 calendar is a sort of a life-map for me, an atlas of my routes through space and time, I felt fortunate to be walking into a screening of Contempt fifteen minutes late, with the movie standing against me as an event indifferent to my will, a flow of picture-stuff already under way, a stream in a channel whose true dimensions of reference and resonance I was lucky to actually see as beginningless, and my favorite seat was still free, a lone desk chair directly below the projection booth, in the center of the catwalk between the two wings of the balcony, where, if you lean forward and peer over the banister, carefully, so as not to eclipse the projector’s rays and enter the film as a silhouette, you can see the whole sweep of the seats below, all the heads facing the the screen, framed in a series of oaken proscenium arches receding to the stage, your comrades in luxurious imaginative privacy, even solipsism.