Temporary Cathedrals

I HAVE LOVED movies as long as I’ve loved anything, but these days I don’t love going to the movies. Multiplexes often feel like overpriced and overstimulating factories, in which we pay to be bombarded by advertising for other products. Industrial movie houses are more like planes going through turbulence than spaces for paying attention to art or even merely the pleasure of being entertained. Not an escape, but an ordeal.

This shadow has, however, provoked alternatives. Life-giving ways to watch movies are popping up—new independent theaters, community screenings, and festivals that interrupt the conveyor-belt method of get ’em in, sell ’em stuff, and get ’em out.

The Movies and Meaning community recently planned an “embodied screening,” where the gifts of a story could be allowed to breathe. We chose the film based on Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, for its honest facing of human brokenness and invitation to soul repair. We hosted the screening at the 90-year-old KiMo theatre in Albuquerque, N.M., one of the true cathedrals of cinema. No flashing lights or obtrusive advertising, no overpriced concessions, just friendly faces and a space to ready yourself for the experience of dancing light and sound, fictional adventures, and real-life hope kissing each other.

Walker introduced the screening with a delightful truth: The reason she wanted The Color Purple to be filmed was so her mother could see “a good movie,” one without gratuitous violence or superficial dialogue but also a movie in which she could see people like herself represented. The lights went down, the music began, the image of a field in Georgia revealed itself, and the story of Celie, one of the great characters in literature, unfolded: her suffering, her resilience, her rage, her losses, and ultimately her joy.

Afterward we invited the audience to a ritual of letting go, then received a blessing from our diverse community leaders—the West African elder Malidoma Somé, the Syrian-American Muslim poet and transformative activist Mona Haydar, and Walker herself. Then we danced, to a Motown playlist curated by Walker. It was a perfect evening, where lament was held lightly in a space where hope was ignited. We saw a story of human suffering and healing and built community through seeing our own sorrows and hopes mirrored in the faces around us.

This is what cinema is for. We can make such temporary cathedrals in our homes and community gathering spaces. It’s a small act of resistance against the commodification of everything. All it takes to begin is to decide to do something different.