A Sunday in the Alameda Central

It is storming out. And I am feeling somehow lonely. I can't really explain it, perhaps just the typical melancholy that hangs over me on Sunday afternoons. The sky ripped open with a chorus of thunder and lighting bolts to light up the night. Just like every other day at the Cineteca, but this time the storm wasn't over by the time I emerged from the film.

I spent the day alone, but in that good way, were the city streets glide beneath your feet, I took to the historic center armed with nothing but my camera. That, and a nectarine, dried apricots and almonds, oh, and a bottle of water, of course. I sometimes feel like my eyes are the only part of my body that exists, like I am a specter floating through the air, invisible. Today I wanted to be invisible, and mostly I was. I wanted to be so non-descript that no one would say anything at all to me. Almost. I listened to Argentine rock from the 80's turned up way too high. I wore sneakers, and just kept moving to the pulsing beat. The city is so full of life, and I am so far removed from it all, in any real way.

I didn't feel so lonely, not until I stepped out of the theater into the wet night, reminding myself that I am going home to a lonely bed. That isn't so bad, but there was something. What could it be? I don't know that I can name it now, ergo we'll just ignore that feeling for the moment. So the last two films prior were interesting, but neither moved me to tears: Jodorowsky's remastered El topo (Mexico, 1970) a surreal, grotesque view of border relations and gender relations, though I am quite sure that it didn't conceive itself as the latter. I can't say I loved it, though I know it was part of my filmic education, there was a good deal of eroticized violence, but in that strange early 70's way that was innovative then, but seems hackneyed now, and Las caras de la luna (Mexico, 2002) directed by Guita Schyfter, which was a metafictional look at feminist filmmaking. I think that what it should be lauded for is the way that feminism was treated not as a univocal movement but a beehive of contradiction in and among its practitioners, all with a good sense of humor. Nevertheless, today's film Godard's Notre Musique (France, 2004) actually made my bones ache and my heart feel like it was being compressed into a tiny metal box. It was set in Sarajevo but the woman about who it was loosely assembled was a Franco-jew of Russian descent who lived in NY. Goytisolo declaimed poetry about the decadence of modern times, and Godard himself appeared, giving a treatise on the two sides of every image - like the two sides of every truth. She manages to kill herself, by carrying a bag of books on her back, and saying that anyone who wanted to die with her for peace as opposed to war was welcome to stay. She dies alone. Perhaps what most hurt was the way in which everyone is implicated, our hands are all bloodied, which is true. And yet, I still love life more than my curiosity to uncover its alternative, and it turns out, I might in fact be something of an optimist, because I still have hope, and I still believe that art's function is to give us that hope, to take it away, to twist our insides out, and to make us act.