Page 68 - WTP Vol. V #5

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Cinema
The first film I remember seeing was
The Rat Race, with Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds, a blur of a memory, sitting next to my mother, who I believe was her way of preparing me, at the age of eight, for the society
I would eventually enter, and honoring the intuition of her death. I recall how she grasped me close next to her in
the seat beside her, only days later would she vacate her body and leave this world, with grave inimitable solemnity.
When I saw Doctor Zhivago, I knew I had something;
the mother’s death at the beginning of the film, and the scene with Zhivago passing Lara in the trolley, before they had
ever met, and the sparks that ignited above the carriage, over
their heads, will be with me forever, never mind the mysterious afterglow about their faces, when they are shown in bed together, baffling my twelve-year old nature; but it was when Zhivago was writing the Lara poems by candlelight in
the snow mansion, balling up early drafts and tossing them
on the floor, now that sung to me as what I could do with my life. Although it wasn’t until the summer after high school,
when I would begin to see films twice, once for enjoyment, and
the second time for critical effect, that I stayed several times for The Sting, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford; or when
I was reading Hermann Hesse, and saw Steppenwolf, with
Max von Sydow, that for me film started to become art, upon
which I referred to such productions as cinema, and my joining four film societies at Yale, my favorite being the one at
the Law School, where on Saturday nights there were always big films being shown, such as Fellini’s Casanova, with Donald
Wally sWist