The Cinema Club kicks off a new season Sept. 22

Nearly 10 years ago, my friend and colleague, the noted film scholar B. Ruby Rich, asked me to speak to a group of film lovers on a Sunday morning about a new Israeli drama she had programmed for them to see. It was a film that hadn't opened yet theatrically--Nir Bergman's Broken Wings--but I was excited to talk about it with others.
    "Is it a film class?" I asked.
    "Well, not exactly," said Ruby. "It's a club. We screen new movies and then talk about them, sometimes with guest speakers. You probably know some of the club members, there are about 150 film fans from around the Bay Area."
    Straightforward enough...but then Ruby added the twist: "Just don't tell anyone beforehand what the film is. The whole point is they don't know what movie they're seeing until they show up at the theater."

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    This was my kind of film club. I had realized from attending many film festivals that one of the greatest pleasures of seeing a film early on is being able to experience it as a tabula rasa, before the hype, trailers, reviews and even word-of-mouth had influenced my perception of it. (This is the premise, for example, of the Telluride Film Festival, whose selections are not announced, even to the press, until it opens.) Seeing films this way, especially when you trust the curators, heightens both your sense of discovery and the surprise of enjoying something you might have skipped when influenced by preconceptions.

    That screening with Ruby turned out to be the beginning of a long relationship with San Francisco's chapter of The Cinema Club--a nine-city network--because the following year I joined Ruby as a co-moderator (I was later joined by my colleague from the San Francisco Film Society, Rod Armstrong). I've been co-moderating now for about eight years, and we've had the pleasure of early screenings of Slumdog Millionaire, The Artist, A Separation, Silver LInings Playbook, No, and Melancholia, among many others, programmed from the home office in Washington, DC, with input from several of us moderators. Sure there have been some clunkers along the way, but the conversations afterwards are invariably stimulating.

    On September 22, the Fall 2013 season kicks off with a screening of the much anticipated new film....(ha! tricked you. We still don't announce them beforehand. Or more precisely, if you are a subscriber and you really want to know, you can find out one day beforehand. But I recommend the surprise method.)
    If you'd like to learn more about the club, which meets seven times in both the Fall and Spring seasons at the Sundance Kabuki, you can check out the website or read Sam Whiting's San Francisco Chronicle feature, which ran a couple of years ago.