The seats at the Miami Beach Cinematheque, the cozy oasis for movie lovers on Española Way, are not arranged in parallel lines, as in most theaters. Instead, the rows have been installed in a V pattern around the screen, so at any moment you can turn and watch the faces of fellow viewers as clearly as you can see the movie.

''It's one of my hobbies, watching the audience as they watch the film,'' says Cinematheque founder-programmer Dana Keith. ``Seeing their reaction gives me as much pleasure as the films themselves. To watch someone discovering a film the same way I did is very rewarding. It makes me feel good.''

Lacking the splashy marketing campaigns of multiplex fare, as most of them do, the eclectic films Keith programs at the Cinematheque are, in fact, the types of movies that beg to be discovered by discerning cinemaphiles.

The month's calendar of screenings and events could include anything from silent films with alternative live accompaniment (opera music or wind instruments) to Q&A sessions with directors, in person (Francis Ford Coppola) or via webcam (Gus Van Sant).

There might be a retrospective of classic movies by a famed filmmaker such as Alfred Hitchcock or a collaboration with whatever special event is taking place that month (the Miami, Brazilian, Gay and Lesbian or American Black film festival).

There could be movies you have never heard of but won't likely forget (Sergei Dvortsevoy's Tulpan, Keith's pick for the best movie of 2008) or films everyone has heard about, such as Steven Soderbergh's two-part epic Che (which sold out every showing earlier this year).

Throw in exhibits of memorabilia, posters and rare advertising materials for the films being screened, and the Cinematheque offers a movie-going experience that's the antithesis of multiplex sterility.

Keith, who was born in Los Alamos, N.M., and grew up in Las Vegas, developed his love for film in early childhood, when his father would take him to the movies three or four times a week.

''My dad took me to see everything,'' recalls Keith, 49. 'For my 13th birthday, he took me and a bunch of my friends to see The Exorcist, and when the people at the theater asked him `Do you know what type of film this is?' he said `That's my business.'

'When I was 15, we saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and when a neighbor expressed surprise that he had taken me to see such an adult film, my dad said `You don't know Dana. Have you ever had a conversation about film with him?' ''

MOVIE PALACE

Keith studied film theory, criticism and aesthetics at the University of California at Santa Barbara and worked at that city's Arlington Center for the Performing Arts, a 1930s movie palace converted to a performance venue for groups such as the Tokyo Ballet and the B-52s.

''In between the concerts and the other stuff, I encouraged them to play movies, totally obscure things like Jean-Luc Godard's Passion,'' Keith says. ``Here you had a 2,000-seat house showing obscure art movies! It was great.''

After graduating in 1982, Keith accepted a modeling job in Paris.

''I figured I'd stay there a few months, and I ended up staying there 10 years,'' he says. ``I was never in love with the modeling industry, but I enjoyed the money and the opportunities. I have seen virtually every square foot of Europe because of that job.

``And I spent all my free time at film museums or festivals like Cannes and Berlin and Venice -- always with the idea in the back of my mind that I would eventually come back to the States and form something like the Cinematheque.''

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