They came funneling out of the lobby and moved down the aisles and found their seats, the anticipation of early evening largely depleted by now, and they settled in quickly, all business, and the second half of the film began.

Klara looked around for Miles. But Miles didn't show. He'd evidently sensed the impatience of his guests and decided to stay with the cineastes in the private booth upstairs.

"Does this mean we're unworthy?" Esther said.

It seems you are witnessing an escape. Figures moving upward through gouged tunnels into a dark rainy night. A long scene of silhouettes and occasional tight shots, eyes peering in the dark.

Then a spotlight swung across the orchestra pit and came to rest on a side curtain on the north wall, set slightly higher than the stage and some yards distant. And you knew what you were going to see half a second before you saw it and what a mood-booster, absolutely. The curtains parted and the horseshoe console of New fork's last great theater organ, the mighty Wurlitzer, stood framed and gleaming in the dark hall.

The organist was a slightish man, white-haired, who seemed to hover in the alcove, his back to the audience, wizardly in his very smallness, and he hit the thunder pedal just as a figure on the screen drew back cowering from some danger above, and laughter swept the auditorium.

The prisoners continued their climb, moving in grim proximity to each other.

The organist hit a series of notes that had an uncanny familiarity. The sort of thing that takes you hauntingly back to your bedside radio and the smells in your kitchen and the way the linoleum used to ripple near the icebox. It was a march, sprightly is the word, and it worked in ironic counterpoint to the foreground silhouettes on the screen, figures climbing in rote compliance, and Klara felt the music in her skin and could practically taste it on her tongue but wasn't able to name the piece or identify the composer.

She gave old Jack a poke in the arm.

"What's he playing?"

"Prokofiev."

"Prokofiev. Of course. Prokofiev did scores for Eisenstein. I knew that. But what's this march?"

"It's that Three Oranges thing, whatever it's called. You've heard it a thousand times."

"Of course, yes. But why have I heard it a thousand times?"

"Because it was the theme music on an old radio show. Brought to you by Lava soap. Remember Lava soap?"

"Yes, yes, of course."

And Jack chanted in sacramental sync with the organ.

"El-lay-vee-ay. El-lay-vee-ay."

"Of course, yes. It's completely clear to me now. But I don't remember the program," she said.

And Jack kept chanting because he was having such a good time with this, and so was the audience, eyes shifting from the screen to the console and minds locked in radio recall, those of you who were old enough, and somewhere backstage, in a dozen lofts, the enormous organ pipes sounded the tones-pipes, wind chests, shutters and blowers bringing this vintage theme, borrowed from a Russian opera, back home to the past.

And Jack left off his chanting to adopt the bardic voice of a veteran announcer doing the show's opening.

" 'The FBI in Peace and War,' " he spoke ringingly

It was nice to have friends. Klara remembered now. Neighbor kids used to listen to the show, faithfully, toward the end of the war, and she could almost hear the voice of the actor who played the FBI field agent.

The curtain closed on the organist just as the sun came out and Esther said, "Finally."

Yes, the film has climbed to the surface, to a landscape shocked by light, pervasive and overexposed. The escaped prisoners move across flat terrain, some of them hooded, the most disfigured ones, and there are fires in the distance, the horizon line throbbing in smoke and ash.

You wonder if he shot these scenes in Mexico, or could it be Kazakhstan, where he went to shoot Ivan the Terrible, later, during the war?

Many long shots, sky and plain, intercut with foreground figures, their heads and torsos crowding out the landscape, precisely the kind of formalist excess that got the director in trouble with the apparat.

The orchestra was in its covert mode, somewhere under the pit, playing faintly at first, a soft accent edged against the strong visuals.

You study the faces of the victims as they take off their hoods. A cyclops. A man with skewed jaw A lizard man. A woman with a flap of skin for a nose and mouth.

A series of eloquent largo passages begins to fill the hall.

The audience was stilled. You saw things differently now. If there was a politics of montage, it was more intimate here-not the themes of atomic radiation or irresponsible science and not state terror either, the independent artist who is disciplined and sovietized.

These deformed faces, these were people who existed outside nationality and strict historical context. Eisenstein's method of immediate characterization, called typage, seemed self-parodied and shattered here, intentionally. Because the external features of the men and women did not tell you anything about class or social mission. They were people persecuted and altered, this was their typology- they were an inconvenient secret of the society around them.

Now there is a search party on the prowl, men on horseback strung out across the plain. They recapture some of the fugitives, they shackle and march them in somber lockstep, in tired mindless versions of the stage routines, and Klara saw it retrospectively, how the Rockettes had prefigured this, only it wasn't funny anymore, and they bare the faces of those who are still hooded, and the shots begin to engage a rhythm, long shot and close-up, landscape and face, waves of hypnotic repetition, and the music describes a kind of destiny, a brutish fate that bass-drums down the decades.

Klara was moved by the beauty and harshness of the scenes. You could feel a sense of character emerge from each rough unhooding, a life inside the eyes, a textured set of experiences, and an understanding seemed to travel through the audience, conveyed row by row in that mysterious telemetry of crowds. Or maybe not so mysterious.

This is a film about Us and Them, isn't it?

They can say who they are, you have to lie. They control the language, you have to improvise and dissemble. They establish the limits of your existence. And the camp elements of the program, the choreography and some of the music, now tended to resemble sneak attacks on the dominant culture.

You try to imagine Eisenstein in the underground of bisexual Berlin, forty-five years ago, with his domed head and somewhat stunted limbs, hair springing from his scalp in clownish tufts, a man with bourgeois scruples and a gift for sublimation, and here he is in the Kit Kat or the Bow Wow, seamy heated cellars unthinkable in Moscow, and he's dishing Hollywood gossip with men in drag.

I'm terribly fond of Judy Garland, he once said.

But you don't want to be too modishly knowing, do you? He was a dynamo of ideas and ambitious projects but it isn't clear that he had the sexual resolve to realize actual contact with either men or women.

Look at the figures in long shot on the low smoky line of the plain.

All Eisenstein wants you to see, in the end, are the contradictions of being. You look at the faces on the screen and you see the mutilated yearning, the inner divisions of people and systems, and how forces will clash and fasten, compelling the swerve from evenness that marks a thing lastingly

You realize the orchestra has been silent for a time. All hoods removed, members of the expedition plodding in endless matching step, trailed by distempered dogs oozing from the eyes. Then you hear the melody again, one more time, the familiar march from Prokofiev, not the mock-heroic organ but full orchestra now, and the pitch is very different, forget the amusing radio reminiscence, it is all vigilance and suppression, the FBI in peace and war and day and night, your own white-collar cohort of the law.