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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/gilberto-perez-imprint-life-cinema-screen/"></div>Some time ago, UPS delivered a box to me from&#8230; let us say the past. On browning cardboard, in fading Sharpie letters, I recognized my own handwriting, circa Kurt Cobain’s demise: COLLEGE NOTES. I rifled through the box in search of one binder only — the one containing my notes from <a href="https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/gilberto-perez/">Gilberto Perez</a>’s Film Studies lecture class, which I took the semester I graduated from Sarah Lawrence College. Ever since Perez’s unexpected death in 2015, at age 71, I had wanted to reconstruct, as closely as possible, the lilt of his Cuban-American voice in that small lecture-and-screening room, where he initiated me and perhaps 50 other students to his love for films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Buster Keaton, Agnès Varda, Luis Buñuel, John Ford and — I wanted the syllabus to recall exactly which films Perez screened for us. Even though the lectures took place in the afternoon, Gil — Sarah Lawrence relishes its first-name informality — set the screening times for six o’clock or so, because, he said, he wanted our experience to approximate that of actual moviegoing.
In one sense, I didn’t really need those missing notes, because Gil’s book, <a href="https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/title/material-ghost">The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium</a>, now a classic in Film Studies, contains his lectures’ intellectual ballast as well hints of his willingness to poke laconically — and, in person, with slight smile and raised eyebrow — at academic shibboleths: “No one understands Lacan very well”; “Does Hitchcock deserve his reputation?” The opening autobiographical section that recalls Gil’s movie-going adolescence in 1950s Havana, before he to came America “in the early sixties,” is worth the price of admission. Both <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/a-tribute-to-my-teacher-gilberto-perez-and-his-eloquent-philosophy-of-cinema">Richard Brody</a>, and, in our own pages, <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-art-of-persuasion-on-gilberto-perezs-the-eloquent-screen-a-rhetoric-of-film/">Lanie Presswood</a>, illuminate Gil’s complex interweaving of film studies and rhetoric in the posthumously published volume, <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-eloquent-screen">The Eloquent Screen: A Rhetoric of Film</a> (2019). However, I haven’t actually “read” either of Gil’s books in the usual sense. Instead, I’ve scrabbled backward from their indices, looking for clues to what seemed, during his lectures, like passing comments on particular moments in films — asides that seemed, even then, to lead deep into the films’ very mysteries.
Gil’s dialectical turn of mind — pointed out movingly by his wife, Diane Stevenson, in her note to The Eloquent Screen — pervades all his thinking and may have given his ideas, at least to my less-trained mind, that just-out-of-reach quality when I was 20. “[T]he camera is not the only machine that makes the film image,” he emphasizes at the outset of The Material Ghost. “The projector, the magic lantern, animates the track of light with its own light, brings the imprint of life to new life on the screen.” I thought of Gil’s formulation when I saw this photo, taken from Film Forum’s projection booth, of Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (1962), a film I first saw in his class. The image of Karina, her face in profile against the window, while her character, the prostitute Nana, is interrogated by a policeman, seems to emanate from the screen itself; but at the same time, because the projection booth’s light casts a bright square on the glass that separates the booth from theatre itself, we are aware of another, co-equal, source of “new life.” I’m sure Gil’s near-rhyme of “light” and “life” isn’t coincidental.
Gil, who considered film an “art that peaked in the sixties and has not been matched since,” emphasized how his beloved French New Wave directors — many of whose films, it later occurred to me, he probably saw in theaters as they were released — broke with convention by relying exclusively on natural light. He pointed out how, in this very scene, the sunlight coming through the window behind Karina’s face leaves it under-exposed, whereas previous directors — such as, I wanted to ask him years later, Otto Preminger in <a href="https://youtu.be/f19ID58VTMA">Laura</a> (1944), when Dana Andrews, playing a detective, shines an interrogation light directly in the face of Gene Tierney’s character? — would have lit her more conventionally.
In his lectures on <a href="https://www.criterion.com/films/27975-toni">Jean Renior’s Toni</a> (1935), Gil emphasized not light, but sound. At the time I didn’t realize what an idiosyncratic choice it was for him to screen the proto-neorealist Toni, shot on location in the South of France, with a cast of many non-professionals, including Charles Blavette in the title role, instead The Rules of the Game or any of Renior’s other canonical films. When Gil replayed <a href="https://youtu.be/RvMyEZnSuyU?t=39">the film’s dramatic ending</a>, he drew our attention to the sound of Blavette’s feet pounding on the metal bridge that leads to the station in Les Martigues. The moment carries high drama because Toni — who, like the many immigrants in the film’s narrative, entered the town by train on the same bridge — flees the police, who believe he has committed a murder. When I first picked up The Eloquent Screen, I flipped straight to the index to see if Gil had written about that moment, and indeed he refers to “the sound of [Toni’s] hurried footsteps on the bridge, an eloquent human detail resounding against the big alien machinery about to crush him.” Gil’s point isn’t about film technology per se — Renior used sync sound on Toni — but about the use of that technology to humanize a character. Very shortly, the sound of Blavette’s human footfalls, recorded by another human with a hand-held microphone, end when his character reaches the other side of the bridge and a townsperson, overeager to help the police, shoots him to death.
Gil’s knowledge of the films he loved was so comprehensive that, at times, he seemed to speaking to us from within the filmic world itself. In the transgressive ending of Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961), <a href="http://bit.do/shakeshimmydoll">the camera cuts</a> from a flaming crown of thorns’ circular shape to the revolving circle of a rockabilly 45 vinyl, “Shimmy Doll,” whose staccato guitar part accompanies a card game — or a threesome in the making? — between a former nun-to-be, her male cousin, and their female servant. If Gil had seen Viridiana upon its release, he’d have been eighteen or so, just about his future students’ ages, and records like “<a href="https://youtu.be/-TIN-OwbiXE">Shimmy Doll</a>” would still have been in jukeboxes — though not in Spain, where Buñuel, Gil related to us, made his film in the teeth of Franco’s censors. Actually, I didn’t notice the implied equivalence between the crown of thorns and the record until I’d seen Viridiana, oh, seven or eight times over about the next twenty years. However, I was initially drawn back to the film in order to relive that moment when Gil stood before the movie screen with his Cheshire Cat smile and recited for us, from memory, the rockin’ lyrics that close out the film: “Is she fat or is she thin? / I wish I knew what shape she’s in / Shake, shimmy doll, shake / Shake your cares away&#8230;.”
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Top image courtesy of Carolyn Funk.
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Gilberto Perez and “The Imprint of Life” on the Cinema Screen

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<div class="at-above-post-homepage addthis_tool" data-url="https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/essays/farewell-lacmas-bing-theatre/"></div>Over the past summer, whatever’s left of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s film program screened a number of films in their “Final Cut” series, which was devoted to great directors’ last films. The series also functioned as a goodbye of sorts to the Leo S. Bing Theatre, which, like rest of the 1965 campus designed by William L. Pereira, would be demolished to make way for Michael Govan and Peter Zumthor’s <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lacma-suicide-by-architecture/">hotly-contested</a> incarnation of LACMA, if that plan reaches whatever the highest level of approval may be. Perhaps destruction by wrecking ball of the Bing Theater is not a fait accompli. I hope it’s not, although Govan’s ability to get what he wants approaches a Shakespeare villain&#8217;s. Zumthor’s plan has a screening room half the space of the Bing, which says more about Govan’s priorities vis-à-vis film at LACMA than it does about Zumthor’s design skills.
In any case, one night in late June, my wife and I went to the Bing to see Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu’s final work, An Autumn Afternoon (1962). Perhaps the film, described in the <a href="https://www.criterion.com/films/784-an-autumn-afternoon">Criterion Collection</a> as “a gently heartbreaking story about a man’s dignified resignation to life’s shifting currents and society’s modernization,” was screened last to encourage the attendees’ “dignified resignation” to the Bing’s demise. To me, it seemed like a film about how architecture determines human identity.
The retired Tokyo businessmen of Ozu’s film dwell in cramped apartments with the daughters or wives; without an office to go to, these men become reduced versions of themselves. Most of the film’s spaces are confined, even the golf course surrounded by nets atop a building where one of the younger men goes to blow off steam. The film’s dilemma — should the main character marry off his daughter, who is approaching an unmarriageable age, and sacrifice his own comfort — is not much of a predicament for the daughter, who is just going to move from one servile position to another, in another hemmed-in apartment. Ironically, these thoughts occurred to me in the Bing Theater, which has always functioned as a space of imaginative freedom for me. If architecture does determine, or at least affect in some way, one’s identity, then the Bing’s screen has opened my mind to new worlds — the many realms of Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965), an wildly mythic treatment, epic in scope, of Ukrainian Hutsul culture, or the wintry French countryside that closes in around an increasingly desperate female drifter in Agnès Varda’s Vagabond (1985).
It’s not just the films that have changed me, but the spaciousness of the 600-seat Bing Theater itself, with its gently curving seats at a slight incline, the bright red curtain that rises at the beginning of each screening, and the screen itself, which can accommodate 70, 35 and 16 mm film, at virtually any aspect ratio. It’s even a pleasure to go to the men’s bathroom, which is right next to the projection room, and catch a glimpse through the half-opened door at the projected film’s brightness as it streams screenwards from the booth. Although I’d recently attended events where the Bing was filled to capacity — most recently a screening of the newest cinematic King Lear starring Anthony Hopkins, with Sir Anthony in attendance, all eyes on his rakishly grizzled face and black leather jacket — this Ozu screening was more typical of an evening at this theater. Scattered across the theater, far fewer than even half its capacity — here I realize I may be making Govan’s argument for him — sat the typical art house crowd for which I have so much affection, ranging from natty hipster filmmaking and film studies students to aging cinéastes with unkempt white hair, the possessions on their laps in ratty plastic carrier bags, and, in this case, well-dressed older Japanese-Americans who might even have seen the film in 1962.
I’ve been saying goodbye to film at LACMA for years now, ever since Govan pushed out the museum’s longtime film curator, <a href="https://www.laweekly.com/lacma-film-remembering-ian-birnie/">Ian Birnie</a>. From the late 1990s until about 2011, I took advantage of Birnie’s encyclopedic knowledge of film. He and his staff programmed a brilliant series called “Fassbinder and His Friends,” which paired rarely-seen films, like Max Ophüls’s Caught (1949), with Fassbinder films such as Martha (1974) and Lola (1981) — themselves hard to see in a theater — that bore their influence. When Birnie hosted a series of the films Luis Buñuel made in Mexico, it was programming-as-outreach: I’ve never heard as much Spanish spoken at LACMA as I did at the screening of those films, which I’ll probably never see on celluloid again. Even Martin Scorsese protested Birnie’s ouster, but Govan has the brilliance of a rapier-wielding high-level courtier, and just waited the controversy out. His own vision of a film program involved, big surprise, celebrity curators, who did some programming, had some so-called “table reads” before moving on, as celebrities do, leaving the “film program” reduced to Tuesday afternoon (?) screenings of classics you can see on TCM.
But even in the post-Birnie era, the Bing has felt to me the way I imagine church feels to the devout. I went to all the Stanley Kubrick screenings that went with the exhibition, and fell in love with Barry Lyndon (1975), a movie that defines the big-ness of the “big screen”; that terrible duel between Barry and his stepson’s been imprinted in my mind ever since. However, even as I relive my favorite movies seen at the Bing, reports from today’s City Hall meeting come through on social media. At issue: the airspace above Wilshire that Zumthor’s LACMA, with its 300-seat movie theater, would occupy. <a href="https://twitter.com/esotouric">@esotouric</a> reports, “Done deal, just like the Board of Supervisors, City Council members parroting LACMA talking points, can’t wait to give away our precious Wilshire airspace. LACMA crew celebrating so loudly in chambers they had to be shushed.” An autumn afternoon indeed.
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Banner image courtesy of Bill Counter, 2018.
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A Farewell to LACMA&#8217;s Bing Theatre

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Eric Gudas is the author of Best Western and Other Poems (Silverfish Review Press, 2010). His work has appeared in&nbsp;The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Flash, Raritan, and elsewhere. For more information, visit&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ericgudas.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ericgudas.com</a>.

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Eric Gudas is the author of Best Western and Other Poems (Silverfish Review Press, 2010). His work has appeared in&nbsp;The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry Flash, Raritan, and elsewhere. For more information, visit&nbsp;<a href="http://www.ericgudas.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ericgudas.com</a>.