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Although it isn't as well-known as, say, Grauman's Chinese in Hollywood, or the Grand Théâtre Lumière in Cannes, the Sala Leopoldo Lugones on the tenth floor of the Teatro San Martín in downtown Buenos Aires belongs on any list of the world's great movie theaters. A permanent screening facility for the Argentinian national cinematheque and a regular venue of the annual Buenos Aires Festival of International Independent Cinema, the Lugones is celebrating its 40th anniversary next month. To mark this historic occasion, the Lugones' excellent chief programmer, Luciano Monteagudo, asked a sampling of critics (including this one), filmmakers, and other Lugones faithful to write brief reminiscences of the theater for a commemorative supplement of the newspaper Página/12, where Monteagudo is also the film critic. The results appear in today's issue. For those who can't read Spanish, my contribution (originally written in English) appears below.

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La Lugones y yo

When we speak about the movies we love, too often we fail to mention the places in which we saw them, though the two entities are hardly independent of one another. Perhaps this is an antiquated idea in an age when the next generation of cinephiles—if there is to be one—will have grown up watching movies on laptops, video iPods, and those other lamentable descendants of Edison's single-viewer motion-picture machines. And yet, I would propose that for those of us who still relish to see movies on the big, public screen, in the company of a few hundred (or perhaps just a few dozen) strangers, the right cinema can make a great movie seem that much greater.

The Sala Leopoldo Lugones is one such cinema—one of the world's greatest, in fact. It is not the biggest, or the most palatial, or the most state of the art. (Nor, I should add, are most of the films that are shown there.) It is, rather, warm and lived-in, a bit battered by time, and as comfortable as the weathered loafers our feet may prefer to a pair of gleaming new ones. Its chief quality is one that can not be drawn on architectural blueprints, but which is similar to a quality possessed by the world's great cathedrals. It is a feeling one gets upon crossing the threshold, a shared feeling of being that says this is a place where others like you—the true believers of cinema—have come throughout the decades to worship at the altar of the flickering light. To take the metaphor one step further, getting to the Lugones requires an ascension—ten flights, to be exact, either by slow-moving elevator or, if one is less lucky, by staircase, after which you are sure to feel penitent for whatever earthly sins you have committed.

My own first visit to the Lugones occurred in April of 2004, during the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema—a true annus mirabilis during which the Lugones played host to retrospectives of John Ford, Glauber Rocha, Jonas Mekas, and James Benning, as well as sidebar of rarities (including Frank Capra's silent The Matinee Idol) on loan from the Cinematheque Francaise. Some of those days I entered the building at mid-day and did not re-emerge until well after dusk. And I have since returned to the Lugones many times, during subsequent editions of the BAFICI, and in my own mind whenever I have reflected back on movies seen there. We are a fundamentally transient people, we cinephiles, wandering the earth in search of new moviegoing horizons. So we must, like all pilgrims, seek adoptive homes in various far-flung corners of the globe, and the Lugones is one in which I know I will take shelter again, as soon as the needle on the compass points due south.