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Pedro Azara
God is in the churches. And also in the cooking pots. The party is a unique event that breaks with the established order. It is intimately related to all that is sacred: appearances and incarnations are occasions for manifestations of joy and fear. When speaking about parties, one thinks of Dionysus, in the Dionysus Euripides describes in The Bacchantes. These, often represented in Hellenistic bas-relief as entranced dancers, with their tunics entwined and their heads tossed back violently, eyes closed or gaze lost; they are crazed figures, possessed by god, by the devil of festivity and transgression, who go beyond the city limits, the established mark, impelled by an irresistible, irremediable force, to lose themselves, in the physical and spiritual sense, in intimate communion with the god of drunkenness. However, in this article, I have opted for a very different type of party and I have chosen a very different point of view. Rather than analyze parties, or a certain party, as total rupture with daily life -parties where norms are altered, transformed and inverted, as with the Carnival- I will comment on an apparently banal event, one that hardly alters daily life, and that most of us attend without placing much importance on it, such as the simple act of going to the cinema. I would like to suggest that the characteristics pertaining to parties and their relation, their bond with sacredness, are enshrined in this insignificant event.
Going to the cinema would be our modest weekly contribution to the cult of "the other", our habitual visit to the world that lies behind the mirror. On her first visit to the world of dreams, Alice fell, prey of vertigo, in a bottomless well. In her second incursion, on the contrary, she looked toward a mirror and saw… what we will discover below. Paradoxically, the transgressing nature of parties, their brutal
interruption and their total opposition to daily life, can be reached
and envisioned in such an anodyne, and basically non-disturbing
act as going to see a movie. (…) En su primera visita al mundo de los sueños, Alicia cayó, presa del vértigo, en un pozo sin fondo. En su segunda incursión, por el contrario, miró hacia un espejo y vio…lo que a continuación describiremos. Paradójicamente, el carácter transgresor de la fiesta, su interrupción brutal y su oposición a la vida diaria, se alcanzaría y se vislumbraría en un hecho tan anodino y en principio tan poco turbador como es el de ir a ver una película. (...)
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