(For an explanation of the Forgotten Films project, go here.)
Forgive me for a second if this gets a bit personal. (Don’t
worry -- not that personal.)
The other day, while suffering from a rather grotesque bout
of food-poisoning, I found myself thinking back to the last time I’d been
similarly laid low. And, amazingly, I could remember the exact date: I'm pretty sure it was
November 27, 1997. Newly returned from nearly a year in Russia, I had just
cooked myself a surprisingly delicious Thanksgiving meal of Georgian chakhokhbili and was
now suffering from the even-more-surprising and previously unbeknownst-to-me fact that the chicken had
been thawed and refrozen before I’d gotten to it. Worse: The following day MoMA was having a very rare
screening of Luchino Visconti’s The Stranger, a film I’d been trying
desperately to see since the age of thirteen, and the reason I'd chosen to remain in New York during Thanksgiving in the first place.
