Sal had been the projectionist at the Japanese Gardens until he’d gotten drummed out of the Local 306 for repeatedly supporting outliers during officer elections, candidates who were not really leadership material, guys who thought that John Berger was, like, the man, and who advocated for lectures before, during, and after the showing of movies. He’d appealed to the International and spent most of his settlement on a used DP70 and sound system. What was left he gave a sailmaker in Port Jeff to cut him a screen, which he installed in the abandoned YMCA, rent $10 a month. With the rest he bought boxes of bulbs. He showed whatever he could lay his hands on.
He was drawn to this work by a youthful experience (file under Abduction, Alien), not so much a trauma that needed working through as an event that he likened to being taken backstage at a production of life itself, and the whole reason he believed it was necessary to untie time from its frame and let it flap free in the whistling breeze.
If his method of showing films amounted to an ethos, it was this: After multiple viewings, even the worst film would become sublime. Same as when a child repeats a word until it becomes a clot of alien sounds, the film has to break loose from its prison of meaning. After five consecutive viewings, metaphor loosens and slips off like a snakeskin, revealing the clean unadorned weirdness of the world beneath the imagined dream. No longer does artifice conceal art. Art reveals artifice. Actors grasp at their chests, emoting death throes while silently cursing craft table tacos; stuntmen tumble off roofs into well-worn crash bags. Knives plunge into themselves, no longer piercing the pearlescent flesh of the showering beauty while her wounds squirt the sweetest Iowa corn syrup. Patrons of Cinema West embarked on an intentional attempt to view not the artificial but the actual, to reach a state of communion with the actors on the screen, not with their characters.
This was film as projectionists saw film, the daily cycle of the early bird special followed by the matinee and then the two and four o’clock shows, then the date crowd. Projectionists were forced to watch: they could not look away, timing the cuts from one reel to the next, checking focus. They loved A Clockwork Orange for the method of Alex’s rehabilitation. Why, then, did they come to Sal’s? To watch, finally, the full loop, to complete the revolution, and complete it again, and again. It was the breaks that soured the commercial experience, the artless previews and dancing tubs of popcorn, and the gray screen, the void between shows, the audience chattering blithely in their seats, stupid-faced, warming up their coughs, testing the creak of their chairs.
And what happened after days of uninterrupted viewing? Take the Gill-man from Creature from the Black Lagoon. Standard zoomorphic substitute for the adolescent male whose happy childhood has, thanks to puberty, given way to disenfranchisement, anger, fear, whose only desire is to touch a girl and relieve himself of the ignominy of solitude. Submerged in the depths of the Black Lagoon, the wretched aquatic monster lurks, so far beneath the bronzed girl on the boat. She enters the water, and from his nest on the lagoon floor, the creature looks up and sees an angel flying above him, soaring beyond his mortal reach, yet he dares swim upward, extending his webbed monstrosity of a palm toward her foot. Oh, Grendel, oh, Icarus, oh, Elephant Man—mustn’t we feel sympathy for this poor, sublime fool who only wants something more than himself? Who is this outcast but us?
Yet, watch again, and then again, and again. Note the staggering, unsteady gait of the aquatic monster as it tries to navigate the terrestrial world. You see that it is so like your own staggering passage through the world. Watch again, however, and you will come to recognize that the monster’s gait is a mechanical issue, the result of stuffing a man into a rubber suit that chafes at the crotch, rips the hair from his legs, boils him in the sun, drowns him in his own sweat. The suffering is not metaphorical. Ben Chapman, the man in the suit, suffers for all to see. The story is about his imprisonment. Do you choose to see, or will you continue to look away? And if you choose to see, what then? Could you begin to see the transparent world, the truth?
Or Psycho. After five loops, the rise and fall of Norman’s knife loses its fury, the stabbing as becalmed and as predictable as water dripping from a flower petal. Meaning peels away like a label from a bottle. Image surrenders its authority, reverts to its ephemeral origins, shadow and light. Watch again. The images change again and become memories. Watch again. They become secrets, stories related in strictest confidence, then confessions, then, finally, a crushing banality, a fact from which you can’t turn away, no matter how bored. Truth emerges, and becomes, always, boring. But like monks at meditation, Sal’s audience strained to transform boredom into a sublime calm, an effortless state of existence.
And that was why John, first taken to Cinema West by a Juilliard classmate, a trumpet player who liked to eat red devils and settle in for the cycle, visited that night: to join the disciples who sublimated themselves to the great flickering modern god, lord light, while their high priest at his pulpit, monitoring the
