Viewers coming together in an adrenaline rush or an aesthetic high as they soak in pristine images from a beautiful big screen. That's been the promise of American moviegoing as a major piece of our culture - a promise that the Senator Theatre has fulfilled year after year.
The good news from Wednesday's auction is that the Senator won't become a church hall or a college auditorium.
But it will take ingenuity and commitment on the part of movie lovers and arts funders to see that the bad news doesn't come. With the right backing and business plan, most likely involving moving the theater to nonprofit status and expanding its use for other cultural events, the Senator could maintain and even burnish its luster.
If not, we might see the diminishing of an institution that's become an anchor for North Baltimore, a point of pride for the whole city and a repository of the values that once made film fans around the world envy American moviegoers.
Multiplex cinemas are by nature an extension of mall culture, often a baby-sitting service by day and a teenage hangout by night. Although they boast many screens, they often stock three or four at a time with the latest Hollywood spectacle that desperately attempts to outstrip home theaters with ever louder bangs and ever gaudier effects.
The city's estimable art house, the Charles, has kept the hopes of adult moviegoers alive by catering to audiences both cultivated and curious. (Although the Landmark Harbor East is a pretty spot to see a picture, its bar is more adventurous than its programming.)
But the Senator, under Tom Kiefaber, has carried on the tradition of movie theaters as places where audiences of many kinds can view the best movies of any type - action blockbusters like the Indiana Jones series, art classics like The Rules of the Game and Rashomon - with a presentation equal to the craft of the world's best filmmakers.
With the right movie, in the right season, the Senator Theatre was a place where an audience could unite in an intense and complex shared experience, the way it did when I saw Dreamgirls during the 2006 Christmas season, and viewers clapped and cheered for Jennifer Hudson as if they were at a live performance.
In the new millennium, the Senator's single screen and roughly 900-seat capacity has made it seem like a movie palace. In its heyday, though, it was simply a great neighborhood movie theater. Under Kiefaber's ownership, it was both.
