Welcome to the Eclipse

Lupe Vélez in Lady of the Pavements

This is my first post on my first blog, so please be indulgent as I stumble my way into the film blogging community. I don't really know what direction this experiment will take, but I know it will be a highly subjective account of my relationship to film (and music, literature and the other arts as well). My emphasis will not be on serious, scholarly film criticism or analysis since I feel that countless others are doing that much better than I possibly could. Instead I plan to discuss some of my favorite films as they relate to my personal experience as a 54-year-0ld gay New Yorker living in 2009. As I learn to navigate this new medium, I hope to incorporate more photos, video clips and links.

A word about the name of this site. As I tried to think of a catchy name I suddenly thought of Antonioni's masterpiece, L'Eclisse. Aside from the fact that this film, and its stars, are so beautiful to look at, it symbolizes for me the possibilities of film to combine narrative and formal elements in new and astonishing ways. The final 7 minutes, in which the two main characters disappear as their everyday environment takes on new and menacing forms, remains for me one of the most haunting sequences in cinema. The titular eclipse also brings to mind the magic moment when the lights go down before the start of a film, and the gradual eclipsing of film altogether in the 21st century in favor of digital video. Godard in Histoire(s) du Cinéma saw the approaching end of the 20th century as the fin du cinéma, and in many ways he's been proven right, but I hold out the hope that, at least in my lifetime, there will still be places to see celluloid projected on a silver screen. Long live the Walter Reade Theater, MoMA, BAM Cinematek, Film Forum, the Museum of the Moving Image, the New York Film Festival, and in my sister city by the bay, the glorious Castro, the Roxie and PFA.

I just want to acknowledge a few people for inspiring me to start this blog. My friend Dan in the San Francisco Bay Area first put the idea in my head when he started a blog last year. Then I recently made the acquaintance of blogger Michael Guillén, host of the wonderful site The Evening Class, when I visited San Francisco for the Silent Film Festival. Michael, or Maya, strongly encouraged me to write more so I'm giving it a shot. Last but certainly not least, many thanks to my cinephile friend and companion Juan, who inspires me to think and talk about films and life from a new perspective every day.