My Write Up

The beginning
I had a difficult time figuring out what to do for my Winter Term project this year. I had lots of ideas, but nothing I was really excited about. While I was trying to figure out what to do for my project, I kept adding to and refining my list of films I wanted to see over break. When I narrowed my list down to about fifty films I absolutely wanted to see over break, I realized there was no way I could watch that many and do another project. There were movies on my list that I’d wanted to see for years: The Godfather, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Dreams, The Big Lebowski. In our Cinema 390 class, so many films kept getting referenced, and I started to feel like I’d barely seen anything! It finally hit me, as it probably should have before, that my Winter Term project could be sampling all of these different directors, most of whom I wasn’t familiar with at all.
For this learning experience, I’ve tried to follow Langois’s method of learning by osmosis. I want to take in a lot of films before I start writing (hopefully I won’t start writing too late). I’ve read Roud’s A Passion for Films and Lopate’s
Totally Tenderly Tragically so far, and they’ve both been helpful in starting my project. The latter has inspired me to try to see as many films as possible. The former has helped me to develop my cinematic eye. Both gave me plenty of films to add to my list of films that I want to see before I graduate.




My Top Thirteen (because I couldn’t stick to just Ten)
To be completely honest, I haven’t written anything formal yet, and I’m already back in Oberlin. I wanted to write a lot this month (or I guess, last month, as it’s already February), but every time I sat down to write, I thought, “I could be watching a film instead”. So, I did. I watched around 80 movies, a dozen or so of which I’d seen before. I think I would have made it to 100 if I hadn’t supplemented movie watching time with watching Project Runway. When I tell people what I did over Winter Term, they either say, “Wow, that’s really easy.” or “Didn’t you get sick of watching movies?” Well, no, it wasn’t, and no, I didn’t. I got to see about 70 films that I thought were wonderful, and about ten that I thought were just okay. The only movie I listed that I couldn’t finish was Fanny and Alexander. It was my fault for trying to watch the television version. I thought it was 112 minutes (thanks to its worn out case) versus the theatrical version’s 188 minutes; it’s actually 312 minutes.
Getting to see so many films was amazing, and also strangely addicting. For a couple of weeks, I would go to the public library almost everyday and check out three new DVDS (and bring back the three that I’d watched the previous day), all the while keeping up with my Netflix 4-at-a-time subscription. After the month was over, I felt like I’d really accomplished something, which might sound silly, but I got to see many films that I might not have otherwise seen the rest of my life, but that I’m so grateful to have seen (Diary of a Country Priest, for example). The most important thing that this month has done for me though was give me many more films to look forward to. I want to see so much more of Ozu and Bresson, I still haven’t seen anything of Molière, Mizoguchi, Bunuel, Satyajit Ray, and too many others. I’ve barely seen any silent films. I never got around to see El Mariachi or The Killer of Sheep, or any other films by directors in the Austin Film Society.
Even though it was great to get to watch all of the movies, it was also demanding in a way. Certain movies demand to the viewer to think about them for days: Do the Right Thing, Citizen Kane, Ace in the Hole, The Bicycle Thief, Sullivan’s Travels, the Up Series. Movies can be a great escape from thinking (National Treasure II), but those usually aren’t the most satisfying to watch for me. I often found that two random films I paired up on a day would have strong connections, despite having different directors, being from different times and different countries. I often get caught up in thinking about the writing process that goes into making a film. For example, I try to imagine how Ernest Lehman put together all of those weird elements into North by Northwest. That can sort of distract me from the film itself at times. I am beginning to internalize the process of analyzing a film’s stylistic elements, which is harder for me than analyzing the thematic elements. This Winter Term project really cemented my love of cinema, and has opened me up to new directors: Ozu, Bresson, De Sica, Wenders, Wilder. I’ve come to understand (or begin to understand) what I love most about films: I love films that don’t hurry, with long segments that don’t move the plot forward, and are calm and contemplative. (My favorite part of Nights of Cabiria, which I didn’t watch over break, is when Cabiria travels around to the caves with the man.) I can’t stand movies where the main character is in trouble the whole time because of misunderstandings, such as in North by Northwest, because they literally make me tense to the point of feeling sick. I guess I empathize too much. Characters are more important to me than plot. I love stark lighting. I love the soft glow around movie stars, like Ingrid Bergman. Films centered around faith, doubt, desperation (so long as the character’s not misunderstood), and identity resonate with me most. I appreciate intelligent characters who aren’t evil masterminds, which is fairly rare in my experience. I’ve never seen a film that comes close to my own day to day experience of life. (I wish someone would create an image of lower-middle class, middle America that is closer to the “truth” and less vulgar than the TV series Roseanne.) I want there to be more representations of old people in film, ones that show them as complex, dynamic human beings, and not just cranky old men or grandmas who rap at weddings. I guess the only thing to do is to start making films myself. So, here were my favorites of the month. I included Picnic only because it was filmed in Kansas, making it one of the only, and probably the most successful, film ever made in my lovely home state. My responses to the films are, unfortunately, less specific than I would have liked and than they would have been if I’d actually written them right after my viewings.
The Kid
When I was little, one of my uncles had an 8mm projector that he used to project movies in my grandparents’ basement. The only thing I really remember watching was Laurel and Hardy. I liked the juxtaposition of the short, skinny man with the (slightly) taller fat man, and I liked all of the onscreen physical gags. As I watched the Chaplin films over Winter Term, they seemed vaguely familiar, although I’m not sure if I’d seen any of them when I was little. They reminded me a little bit of Laurel and Hardy, and I regret not making the time to watch their collection, so as to compare the two.
I loved every Chaplin film I saw this January, and I think I loved each one more than the last. I think I chose The Kid as my favorite partly because it was the last one I saw. I watched it immediately after seeing Vertigo; both films have famous rooftop chase scenes with the police, one of the dozens of strange connections I saw between films over break.
The film’s tagline is, “A picture with a smile, and perhaps a tear…”, and I think this is fitting, because the movie is both one of the best comedies and dramas I’ve seen. The film dealt with the thin line that separates comedy and tragedy so well, I think perhaps because some aspects of the film were adapted from Chaplin’s own life. I read (online, so I don’t know if this is true) that Chaplin had lost a newborn son shortly before the filming of The Kid began, and this helped to make his onscreen relationship with the child so moving. The scheme of the child breaking the windows, while the father followed behind to repair them was supposedly taken from the real life of a man Chaplin once worked for, the comedic theatre actor, Fred Karno. Perhaps most importantly, the scene where the boy is pulled away from his father is also supposedly taken from Chaplin’s life, when he was taken from his mother to go to a workhouse. My uncle with the projector has several books on Chaplin, which I discovered during my last week at home, but I will hopefully get to read some of them over the summer so I can see how Chaplin drew on his own life in his films.
I love this movie for so many reasons. The plot is simple, there are few developed characters, but the film is emotionally rich. We talked in Cinema 390 about how annoying it can be when directors use heavy-handed symbolism or images that are so obviously supposed to draw an emotional response. Even though The Kid does play on the emotions of the audience by mixing the comedy and tragedy, I think the emotional moments are well supported. Seeing the child get taken away by the authorities not only devastates the characters involved, it devastates the audience as well. I think Chaplin’s Tramp character is one of the most lovable characters in cinema because he is a simplified form of what people hope to be on a basic level. His most important quality is, as sappy as it may sound, that he puts the wellbeing of others before his own, lovingly and ungrudgingly . He takes on the enormous responsibility of raising a child whose parents are strangers to him, and despite seeming to be totally unfit to be a parent, he loves the child simply and completely. The only recent film I can think of to compare to The Kid in its humor and its poignancy is La Vita è Bella.
Dreams
I’ve seen Waking Life so many times, and I’ve always wondered what movies are shown during the section with film screening and the monkey. I think (or at least I don’t remember) if it’s included in the commentary of the film, but I used to periodically check Wikipedia to see if anyone had added the names of the films to the Waking Life page. Now that I’ve finally seen Dreams, after about three years of trying to find it, the information is now on Wikipedia, but it was more fun to find it out myself. I’m talking, of course, about the clip of the man running down the hill.
This film was stunning. It was the kind of film that invites the view in to be part of it. The landscapes were incredibly beautiful, and it felt like a spiritual experience to be watching the film for me. I admit that I fell asleep during the part where the men are frozen in the snow (I was very tired, and I’ve fallen asleep during Waking Life plenty of times). The film is interesting and compelling, but it’s not urgent, and because it’s broken up into segments, the audience is able to leave and rejoin the film. I would like to see the whole film several more times, but it was rather pleasant to be in a half-sleep state during part of the film. Dreams put me in a calm, meditative, happy state, but I need to think more about why the film seemed so great to me and had such an affect on me.
Tokyo Story
One of my biggest regrets of Winter Term is that I watched this film so late in the term. I think I watched it a day or two before I came back to Ohio, technically after the end of Winter Term. If I’d seen this earlier, I definitely would have made the time to watch much more of Ozu. This was listed as one of Linklater’s favorite films on the Criterion website, and it’s easy to see how he was inspired by this in making It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books. Somehow, even though the camera stays still at all times and in the same positions throughout the film, a feeling of movement is still conveyed. To me, the camera doesn’t seem static or stuck; when it cuts from one shot to the next, like when someone leaves one room and enters the next, the camera seems to glide along with them. One that note, when someone leaves a room, the shot usually continues, staying on the empty room. Each place has its own identity and presence in a way. I think in one of the books I read over WT, the other said that Ozu (similar to what I said about Dreams) invites the audience in to be part of the place. I watched Late Spring much earlier, and I think I made a mistake in watching it with other people. It made me anxious for something to happen. Watching Tokyo Story alone gave me the patience to enjoy each moment of the film without trying to look forward to where it was going. The themes of family and duty also resonated with me deeply. I didn’t watch the whole film alone, because my mom came in and watched part of it with me. She said it was nice to see a foreign culture from its own perspective, because seeing a caricature of the culture (I’m paraphrasing), you get to see how much people everywhere are alike.
The Bicycle Thief
I watched this film with my mom, and I think it may have been the first full movie she’s seen with subtitles, or at least the first one in a long while. With its simple plot and fairly simple characters, this film was incredibly powerful. I knew the man wasn’t going to get his bicycle back, but I still found myself desperately hoping he would. My mom and I both loved the film; the situation was so close to experiences in our own lives. I’ve been told that one’s reason for liking something shouldn’t be based on how much one relates to it, but I don’t think you can be moved by this movie to the same extent if you haven’t been through desperate circumstances. In Sullivan’s Travels, the main character goes looking for trouble and ends up finding it in a way he’d never imagined. I can’t imagine many people at Oberlin seeing The Bicycle Thief and really understanding it, not to imply that my family too has had to sell the sheets right off of their bed. I left the film, not feeling in despair exactly, but somewhat hopeful. The man has lost his bike forever and his job, he’s been humiliated in front of his son, he may lose his home, his spirit has been broken in a way. However, maybe because my own experience has shown me that no matter how bad things get, they usually can get better, I felt inspired by the man’s determination to find his bicycle, and I believe that determination can be turned elsewhere to make his life better (because, of course, characters keep existing after the film).
The Up Series
The Up Series is incredible. I decided to watch it because it was mentioned so many times in my cinema class last semester. The first segment, Seven Up, didn’t seem that remarkable to me. The angle the director is trying to take is fairly obvious, that the lives of children are fairly predetermined by their socioeconomic background, which I think is a horrible way to look at people. I believe, as the professor at UT says in Waking Life says, that we are not just a “confluence of forces”. I tried to space out watching the programs. I found myself depressed after some of them, especially 35 Up. Far from getting better as they got older, most people seemed to be getting worse, or at least not progressing in any sort of way. By 35 most people had sort of given up on the idea of improving their lives, either because they were content with them, or because they felt it was hopeless to try. My favorite person in the series is Bruce, because I identify with him well, and I hope to be like him in many ways as I get older.
Picnic
Picnic was over acted in parts, edited strangely (or poorly), and the ending I thought was terrible. But it was shot in Kansas! It was filmed in Hutchison (where my mom grew up), Nickerson (where my best friend’s grandma lived), and Salina. For a brief moment in the film, you can see on the newspaper that they’re in Salinison, which doesn’t actually exist. It was neat seeing a movie filmed in places that I’m familiar with. So many times, we’ve driven by the grain elevators in Hutchison or the other locations in the other towns, and my grandma always points them out. I am running out of time, so I will list the rest of my favorite films of Winter Term.
They are:
Diary of a Country Priest
Vertigo
Ace in the Hole
The Third Man
Do the Right Thing
Lost in Translation
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly