Kathleen Norris: To celebrate the 50th issue of Soul Telegram, I’d like to say a few words about my life with the movies. I’ve been a film buff for many years but this is the first time I’ve had a chance to write about films. And by “buff” I mean the kind of teenager who, on Saturday afternoons in Honolulu, when many of my high school classmates were at the beach, was sitting in a dark theater watching the Ingmar Bergman trilogy: “Through A Glass Darkly,” “Winter Light” and “The Silence.” The latter remains one of my favorite films, not easy to watch but well worth it.
After graduating from Bennington College in 1969 I lived and worked in New York City. In the early 1970’s Manhattan was full of rerun houses, among them the Thalia, the Olympia, and the Paris. I went to all of them and by happy circumstance lived on the same block as the New Yorker theater. There I was able to see “On The Waterfront,” “East of Eden,” and Busby Berkeley musicals from the 1930’s on a big screen. The most powerful film I saw at the New Yorker was Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar” (above). I had learned when was ten years old that movies — “Bambi,” “Old Yeller” — had the power to make me weep. But the Bresson film took me by surprise: how could a film about a donkey provide such a searing look at human nature and the social ills we create? How could its ending leave me feeling so devastated?
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