The great geodesic hemisphere of the Cinerama Dome Theatre sits half-buried in the concrete off Sunset Boulevard, the way it always has, since a time before most Angelenos can remember. Technically the Dome is an artifact from the wide-bodied, big-finned early ’60s, but that’s a time before the Big Bang in an amnesiac’s paradise like L.A., and that makes the Dome a mysterious artifact—like the La Brea Tar Pits, or maybe Stonehenge. Pocked with angles, bone white as if bleached by the sun, the Dome stares down at passersby, an ancient god’s colossal golf ball that sliced off Heaven’s Fairway and rolled into the cosmic sand trap of downtown Hollywood, where the silicon petrified around it and latter-day troglodytes put a screen inside the orb’s dead husk, where they could dream.

Those dreams are films, of course, and thousands of them have flickered across the Dome’s curved interior over the last 44 years. This week the AFI Film Festival (or AFI Fest) will take up intermittent residence in this theatre originally created to house a three-projector format that is as dead today as Egyptian heirgoglyphics —deader even, given the rise of the emoticon, an attempt by the language to revert to pictures, ancient-Egypt style. In a city awash in film festivals—the Hollywood Film Festival, the L.A. Film Festival, the L.A. Harbor International Film Festival, etc., etc.—AFI can lay claim to having been way ahead of the curve. At 21, it’s L.A.’s oldest and most enduring such event, and this year, its 97 feature films and 51 shorts (screened mostly at the Dome’s smaller siblings, the ArcLight Cinemas) indicate once again this is a festival that has its own personality, poised somewhere between Sundance and Showbiz.

Where else can you see a film like Caramel, described by the L.A. Times as the “Steel Magnolias of Lebanon,” next to documentaries about exploitation movie kingpin William Castle and insult comic Don Rickles? Where else do new pictures by or about hometown heroes like John Sayles (an alum of Roger Corman’s Venice, Calif., schlock factory), Alex Cox (British by birth, Marxist by temperament, but a UCLA Film grad nonetheless), and David Lynch (AFI alum and the subject of a documentary on his recent Inland Empire) stand beside Danish, Romanian, Norwegian, Mexican and Estonian films, plus every other variety of international product?

It would all be very exciting, if Hollywood weren’t currently living through the End Times. Or didn’t you know? It’s been raining fire out here lately—people are still washing the ash-black silt off their Jaguars and Mercedes Benzes. The screenwriters are about to go on strike, which means pretty soon if producers want to make movies or TV shows, the actors are going to have to speak in tongues. A few blocks from the Dome, the Capitol Records building, a symbol of the other entertainment industry that used to thrive in Hollywood, has been sold off by the music label that built it, because music labels have been made obsolete by downloads and MP3s. And if there’s anything that stalks the theatrical film biz right now, it’s the Four Horseman of what everyone fears is a similar digital apocalypse: YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Google, any one of which may become the new distribution paradigm for movie product if future trends continue.

AFI Fest seems to sense that Judgment Day in the air; last night, the festival launched with a Robert Redford picture called Lions for Lambs, and as any student of the Book of Revelations knows, when the lion and the lambs get together, the Big Curtain in the Sky is on its way down.

Oh, well. Guess there’s nothing to do but watch a couple of festival films while we wait …

Watch this space for details ...