Movie watching within the beneficent form of intentionality

Those of us gathered here, by invitation, at the Tokyo Bar in Montreal (aterraced) will have come to agree that the ideal way to watch a movie is at home, in the dark, severed from the sensate universe (that is to say, not in a barnful of crude masticators and slothy respirators). DOWN BY LAW (Jim Jarmusch) will stand for us, as the paragon of cinematic accomplishment, on the order of "King Lear" or the work of Philip Whalen, because it is a movie; it does not aspire to be a movie, as, shall we say, do all others. All the others, from Griffith to Renoir to Kubrick. We will presume that the root of Modern evil is intentionality --- that is to say, the widest measure of intentionality that is equivalent to suborning, usury, vanity, poaching, and the more well-known perfidies; (we will not speak to the evils that have persisted since pre-history). But the golden temple on the hill and the sun's lance coming to rest at the precise spot aesthetically, are also expressions of that rarer form of intentionality, the one that is still, and peaceful, and slow, and officially transubstantiating, though it shares its name and skin with its creepier form. By one name are known our equanimity and our bedlam. Ulysses is guided home to Ithaca by the truer lighthouses, and by such afternoons as driving or bicycling half-lost along the many roads of upstate New York, among its ravines and hills and lakes and green copses, or by watching a movie in which disarray is quelled by companionship, by the shaking off the bonds of reduction, by an open cookfire, and for one of the fellows, the utterest of deliquescences into the warmest den of love.