The summer when I was 4, my mother took me each Friday to the town library to sit in the dark with a juice box, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and 10 or 20 other kids to watch a movie. This was a year or two before VCRs became ubiquitous, when watching movies was still by necessity a communal pastime. These library outings happened each week, but there's only one movie I can remember—vividly—seeing there that summer: a half-hour, nearly wordless French film from the 1950s called The Red Balloon.
from Slate, the London Review of Books, Bookforum, The Awl, New York Magazine, and elsewhere
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
In Search of The Red Balloon
Today in Slate, a little nostalgia (also, later in the piece, discussion of major Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien):