Chautauqua / Superman

Just returned from our annual vacation at Lakeside, Ohio, at the Chautauqua on Lake Erie. The theater there is beautifully old-fashioned in many respects. Before the showing of Superman Returns, I snuck up to the balcony and snapped a few pictures.

I also did an experiment for an article I am writing, watching the film with my son's iPod on shuffle, loud enough so that I could hear none of the dialog. Instead, I watched the movie to the random songs on his iPod, as if it were a silent film. The radical beauty of the images on the screen--easy to dismiss in the context of the familiar comic book genre of the film and the utilitarian dialog--was clearer than ever. Watching Clark Kent and Lois Lane to R.E.M.'s "The One I Love" or the furious CGI surrealism to the tune of They Might Be Giants's "Experimental Film" was almost breathtaking. My theory is that we don't see the beauty and artistry of these CGI films because we have never really learned how to appreciate them. Watching them with random music frees us from the prison-house of narrative compulsion; we see them with new eyes. With open eyes.

The iPod, charged and ready to go just before the movie:

The theater (Orchestra Hall) in daylight, and at night:

Just before the movie began, I snuck up beneath the alert (but not-alert-enough) eyes of the Very Old attendant to the balcony to snap this (too dark) picture of a little projector:

Most of the CGI sequences in Superman Returns were of an order of art that really should be appreciated at the level of still frame. Watching these sequences--for instance of Superman saving an passenger jet plane as it spirals toward earth--with no dialog, just random music from the iPod, the strange beauty of the images is clearer than ever. Perhaps for too long, we have judged movies by the criteria they themselves pronounce. Maybe it is time for a new way of seeing, one as slyly alluring as the images on the screen.