GOING TO THE MOVIES
Jonathan Baumbach
LETTER FROM SEATTLE
That the natives, mostly resettled Midwesterners, perceive
Seattle as God's country makes it difficult for the visitor to give this
beautiful city its due. Seattle is a centerless sprawl of parks and lakes, of
used-car lots, shopping malls and ugly overpriced suburban settle–
ments, surrounded by an astonishment of mountains. The weather is
not as bad as advertised (Seattle is so assured of its virtues as a place to
live that it exaggerates its own bad climate as a means of deterring
settlers), although it rained almost continuously the first month I was
here.
It
rains with not much ferocity, but with patient commitment to
the long run. During the winter, which is mild by Northeastern
standards, precipitation seems constant, a part of the ambience of the
environment. A moviegoer's climate, I thought, and was immediately
disappointed to discover that there were almost no movies being shown
in the afternoons. The "foremost city in the Northwest" seemed a
Puritan outpost with too little (or too much) respect for the illicit, too
committed to the ennobling life of the outdoors. Film offers an
insidious, interior wilderness.
Despite the omens, for a city of its size (Seattle's population is
about 500,000), there is an impressive amount of movie activity here,
including an imaginative and enterprising film society, and an annual
international film festival in its third year. Displaced Easterners I've
talked to complain that there are too few serious films available in
Seattle, that half a dozen long-running successes monopolize limited
theater space. What they object to-a distribution system that avoids
risk-is symptomatic of the film scene everywhere. Economics predom–
inates esthetics. For all its provincial culture-chasing and middlebrow
snobbery, there is probably more concern in Seattle for making
available original and difficult films than in the large cities in the East.
Much of the Seattle film scene exists for its own reward.
In my first month in Seattle, I caught a double bill of Robert
Bresson's
Pickpocket
and Samuel Fuller's
Pickup on South Street,
sponsored by the Seattle Film Society and shown in a makeshift
auditorium in an old church. Subject matter would seem to be the only
thing these films have in common, but Bresson's austerity and Fuller's
