Viewed from the perspective of a passholder, people seem strange. They seem strange from any perspective, of course. But as a passholder, you get to see a steady stream of people having the same experience for the first time. "Is this the ticket line?" "What are you in line for?" "What's going on?" "What movie are you seeing?" "Is this the ticket line?"

And you get to see the same annoying promotional clip before each showing - fifteen times and counting, and its small quotient of humor leaked out by the second viewing. But the audience still chuckles, a little bit, every time.

Being in crowds brings out my (never deeply buried) misanthropy. Large crowds of people, healthy young people, walking up stairs at the pace of the elderly. And on the way out the ballot box is always a surprise, always a choke point.

At the afternoon screening, someone in the aisle front of me chose a seat at the end of the row. When you choose a seat at the end of the row, and you start your careful nesting of belongings, taking off the sweater to lay underneath the seat where you can get to it later, turning around three times to discover your purse on your hip where you left it, digging in pockets - you're blocking the whole row, and this is what the woman in front of me chose to do. So I went past her, down two more aisles, strode in three empty seats, and bounded up over the seats two rows, heading for the sweet spot that is my due as a passholder, as a faithful queuer, as someone who follows the rules. There were two empty seats in the right zone, bounded by a fat woman and a skinny woman. You would have done the same. My bag was already in the empty chair next to the skinny woman and I was turning back for the fresher air of the lobby when the skinny woman, who had been watching me approach, announced that the seat was taken.

"Thank you for indicating that," I snarled, snatched my bag up, tossed it into the next seat, and bounded away. I guess she's never been to a movie before; where I come from, we put a garment or a folded newspaper over the claimed seat, or when we see someone charging towards a seat we want we drape an arm over it. All I'm saying is that humans are naturally territorial and for her to fail to mark the seat appropriately was not merely an omission but in fact must have been a deliberate, conscious supression of instinct in order to annoy and bother. (And the seat was not retroactively claimed in response to the anticipated foulness of the author's company, as you less generous readers may assert - there really was a second party, he really did sit in that seat, and he really did talk and grunt and snort throughout the movie. And there was a distinct smell, probably a body odor, like sour oranges, but both he and the fat woman on the other side left at the same time so I was unable to assign responsibility.)

And speaking of grunting. At the evening showing, a Bukowski documentary, I sat in nearly the same location and this time the grunter was a woman on my left. She seemed nice enough before the film, chatting with her male friend on the other side, thanking him for the tickets. She did squirm convulsively, but I failed to heed the warning sign and in any event the movie was very sold out and changing seats (as I did several days ago at a Hungarian movie, when a young man sat down next to me, argued with his girlfriend, took off his boots, and turned to me to say something - I nodded, not hearing him, got up, and moved to a different row) would have been impractical. But what the hell is wrong with those people who vocalize throughout a movie? I'm not talking about talking, whispered comments with piercing sibilants or even low-toned conversation; I'm talking about the subconscious grunts of the weak-minded, who must vocalize every moment of revelation, every surprise; must second every strong statement with a sound. The grunting is distinct from the gasping; most grunters also gasp but plenty of gaspers do not grunt. The gasping attends moments of shocking revelation: she was just 12 years old! (gasp) He was killed in the chemical attack! (gasp) And then I found out I was pregnant! (gasp) Whereas the grunting accompanies quiet understated revelation; "And that was why I told her to leave, and after that day I never saw her again." (huhn.) "I spent ten years doing that." (huh.) And sometimes the grunting is almost a sigh, when something sad is revealed. "And this is the bathroom where he beat me." (ahh.) "Most of them have HIV." (ohhh.) Death to the grunters and gaspers, people unable to absorb information without forcing their emotional response on everybody around them.

In other news, Pacific Place burned another print. I used to go to a weekly screening Sunday mornings at Pacific Place; while there was post-film discussion and the films were usually pre-release, the big plus for me was that we never knew what we were going to see, and often I was completely surprised. They would have flyers on the table and some of us (not me - I was behind the curve, but grateful) complained and so they put the flyers face-down so as to preserve the mystery another ten minutes. During that series of perhaps a dozen films one Spring, I think they burned two and broke a third. But hey, small price to pay for breaking the projectionists' union, right? Anyway, Pac Place's pimpled popcorn pubescents struck again, cooking Spring Subway right good. Next showing of that print should be a good minute shorter. Broadway Performance Hall has done a bunch of video projection, and that's gone as well as can be expected given that they don't appear to actually test the equipment before using it; a short film this afternoon went several minutes without volume (and with the dull glare of the promotional slide projector bisecting the screen); once volume was fixed, it apparently didn't occur to the projectionist (or was beyond her capabilities) to restart the short from the beginning. Fortunately the rest of the short wasn't very good so probably nothing was missed. (It was Walls, for those keeping score at home.)

On the bright side, SIFF is showing surprise short films before many movies this year. The short film definitely needs more exposure and more distribution outlets - I wish that mainstream movie theaters would show shorts packages. If the multiplex has sixteen screens, why not use one to show a 90-minute collection of short films? Charge for it like a movie; plenty of shorts producers must be so desperate for any money at all that they would happily collaborate with one another for the packaging and distribution. And while many of the shorts at SIFF are flawed, they're short, so you can enjoy the good parts and ignore the bad parts, which is much harder to do for a two-hour meditation on loss and longing shot in the desert without budget for a steadicam.

I did a triple-header at Pacific Place - that't the multiplex. It's nice because you don't have to wait in line on the sidewalk, which gets old. I made the discovery that with a sufficiently large number of Matrix Reloaded screenings, all with staggered start times, you essentially have a fast-forward control for the silver screen. So I left my bag in a good seat and went and caught part of the Oracle's scene, and much of the freeway scene, and Agent Smith's multi-sneer when Neo flew away. Then I went back and they had started the movie on time, so I scrambled for a seat by the front near the aisle, unwilling to squeeze past everybody to my primo bag-reserved seat. And well that I did, because when the movie was over and I was looking for my bag, a guy came over and asked, "Are you looking for your bag?"

"Yes, I am. A black bicycle bag with hooks."

"Yeah, well, it was unattended so I gave it to the lady at the door. It was making me uncomfortable." He was apologetic, but still an idiot. What, does he think that there's a bomb in my bag? That an Turkish nationalist is bombing the screening of an Iranian Kurd movie set in Iraq? People leave bags in seats before the screening of films. This is not an abnormal occurance. The bag is not unattended; it in fact is attended to reserving a seat. What the hell is wrong with you people?

So overall, I'd say the festival is going quite well; I haven't seen any four-star movies yet, but about half of the films I've seen have been excellent documentaries (with of course that one hideous exception, which seemed to have been made by and for the righteously indignant gaspers and grunters.) and I'm back in the subtitle-reading groove, to the point that occasionally I forget I'm reading subtitles and then am surprised to notice the people on screen are speaking French. (That only happens with languages I can follow a bit, though; no such effect pertained to the Kurdish and Polish films.)