2008 is coming up fast, and I've been coming up with a rough draft of resolutions for the new year. One of my main resolutions is to watch 120 new films throughout the year, broken down into about 10 films a month. Now that may not sound like a big number to someone who constantly watches films, but with graduation and a thesis to write in the next few months I won't exactly have a lot of freetime to kick back with a good flick. Not to mention going to the movies these days is getting extremely pricey, and new DVDs aren't cheap either. Still, I'm going to try and make time to watch that many movies.
Looking back on 2007 is still fun though. Despite my year being fairly ordinary (yet incredibly fast), I did manage to see a lot of good movies. To me it felt like this year was big for comedies, as most of my big picks for the year seem to consist of such. Good to see that something so "simple" can get the appreciation it deserves; comedy is harder to pull off than you'd think though.
Anyway, here are my top ten favorite films of this year, including some that - before 2007 - I had never seen before:
7. Devils on the Doorstep, 2000 -- Despite seeing dozens of new foreign films this year this is the only Chinese film that actually made my top ten list. It's really one of the most stand-out films I've seen in a long time, and one that deserves a larger appreciation than it currently has. Jiang Wen, one of mainland China's most premiere directors, was banned from directing (until this year) because of this film.
6. Shaun of the Dead, 2004 -- Yeah, I'm surprised I never saw this movie before too, being the huge George Romero fan that I am. This film is quite possibly the best homage to Night of the Living Dead I have ever seen, and it's a romantic comedy to boot! What I find funny is how many people say that this film is to zombie movies as Scary Movie is to slashers and other horror films; they just don't get it. Ah well, now fans and non-fans of zombie movies have something they both can enjoy.
5. Chasing Amy, 1997 -- Take Kevin Smith's sharp, witty dialogue, an oddball romance, eccentric characters, and you've actually got one of the most romantic films I've seen in a long time. It almost feels completely different from Clerks and Mallrats, and I can definitely see why Criterion decided to put this one out.
4. Memento, 2001 -- As a writer I just love the narrative structure of the film. It's perfect for this gritty neo-noir whose focus is memory and revenge. The dark and somber mood is also something I particularly like, and overall the film is a mix of everything I'd like to achieve as a filmmaker and writer. And that's saying a lot.
3. Superbad, 2007 -- Remember when I said this year was big on comedies? Yeah, this one here is one of the biggest reasons why. Superbad is one of the funniest movies I've seen since The 40-Year-Old Virgin (one of my favorite comedies, period), and it's one of the few comedies that I'd gladly pay to see in theaters - which I did. Despite being a teen comedy that doesn't pull punches when it comes to potty mouths and sex jokes, it definitely speaks to my generation.
2. Rushmore, 1998 -- I don't ever remember actually finishing the entire movie before this year, which is the reason why it made my list. Oh god, I can't even think about where to begin with Rushmore... it's just pure genius from start to finish, a film only Wes Anderson could make. And the soundtrack is incredible.
Honorable mentions: The Most Terrible Time in My Life, The Seventh Seal, The Killers, Stray Dog, A City of Sadness, Silent Hill, Heat, The World. (Hey, it was hard picking just ten...)
Well, those are my top ten picks from 2007. With over a hundred new films to watch in 2008, I'm sure I'll have an even more difficult time trying to narrow it down to ten by this time next year. Ah, well. Happy New Year, all!
I know it's been awhile since I've posted anything, but believe me, there's a good reason. Try having to write about thirty pages worth of analytical essays across three different classes in the span of six days. Yeah, it's a lot of freaking work. Fortunately I managed to finish up everything on time, but by the last few pages I was mentally exhausted and completely out of gas. It's just so hard to do so much in so little time. On the plus side, I think fall was probably the hardest quarter I'll have all year, so I should be pretty well off until graduation.
The last day of classes I stayed behind and had a nice chat with one of my professors, who's sponsoring an independent study I'm doing for winter. We talked about a lot of things ranging from film and getting a job teaching at the university level to earthquakes and car crashes. Tracing the line of the conversation was pretty funny. Anyway, what struck me as a bit interesting was how one gets a job teaching.
Essentially you turn in an application and resume as usual, as well as a thesis (I think). From there, the university narrows it down to a small number of candidates who run a colloquium or talk on the subject of their choice, and after all the candidates have presented, the faculty of the university decides on who - if anyone - they want to hire. Apparently it's not uncommon for the university to not hire anyone, even after going through all those stages. It's pretty shocking to imagine, given that all of this takes place over six months or so.
Guess it'll take a lot longer than I thought if I want a job teaching film.
The other day in my seminar we were talking about Christian Keathley's cinephiliac anecdotes, and how they can be used as springboards for larger discussions. Keathley used an example written by a student studying Fritz Lang's M; essentially the student focused on the use of bowler hats in the film to talk about the origin of bowling as a sport, something about it being used by German cults to "cleanse" sins. The student then related this back to the film, in which he describes Peter Lorre's character as a "pin" being chased around the "alleys" of the city and such.
At this point in the discussion one of the other students in my seminar goes off on a tangent about how this example doesn't make any sense at all, since bowler hats have nothing to do with bowling. His whole argument was that since there's no real connection between the two, the student's reading of the film is totally wrong and therefore invalid. I'm not quite sure what was said immediately afterwards, but it lead to a discussion about filmmakers and theory. According to this guy, every film has to involve some sort of theoretical framework, otherwise it automatically is labeled - as he put it - as "bad". I don't know why, but this struck a cord with me.
The guy in my seminar is a total example of how snobby a lot of film students are. He talked a lot about the Russian school of film (i.e. Eisenstein) and how a lot of those filmmakers were also film theorists who infused their films with their theories. He's always comparing everything we watch in class to these theorists and putting down a lot of other ideas and theories that are just as valid, which is something I've grown tired of over the course of the quarter. What's worse is that this guy made it into the Critical Studies concentration, which is something I wanted to do. It's bad enough that our department is already so U.S./Euro-centric when it comes to film theory, but to have an elitist guy like him teaching a seminar in the spring is just ... baffling.
Truth be told, sometimes I do get a touch of elitism when it comes to "knowing" more about film than others. But hey, everyone's like that at some point or another. People just love to show off their knowledge, especially when they know the other person doesn't know certain things. My friend Derek is like that all the time, but there's a difference between simply passing on factual information and trying to eliminate a certain way of thinking. When dealing with non-film majors it's easy to get carried away, but this poses the problem of alienating people away from film studies, as Keathley writes.
What we need to do is to open up film studies, to make its appeal a little more broad. Film studies, especially in regards to theory, is not completely dictated by the Russian montage theorists or the French writers of Cahiers du Cinema, despite how influential they've been in helping to create film studies as a discipline. Literary studies have already begun to delve into the individual experience, but until film studies can do the same, you're only going to see the same people talking about how Eisenstein's a genius, French films are the "best", and how your interpretation of (insert name of film) is completely and utterly wrong.
So please, be a little open-minded when it comes to film. We're not all a bunch of pricks.
There's a reason why I haven't blogged in almost a week, and it's because I had to write a little over fifteen pages' worth of essays during that time. Ah, midterms. I'm sure after graduation when I have nothing better to do but work I'll actually miss them. Speaking of which, my quarter is ending in another three or four weeks, which means finals are right around the corner. For me that entails two more lengthy essays and a final project for my seminar on film theory. The other day I came up with an idea of what I want to do.
The assignment essentially calls for a project that expresses how each of us in the seminar views cinephilia, and we can do this in any way we want to so long as there's the inclusion of a written portion (another eight or ten pages). Some suggestions my professor noted included an autobiographical element, something I've always been good at (well, most people should be good at talking about themselves). Immediately I thought of writing about my passion with collecting DVDs.
My DVD collection's currently sitting at 110 (box sets and multi-disc movies count as single DVDs), with three more on the way that I wound up winning on eBay for a good deal. Before the year ends I'm hoping to bring that number as close to 150 as possible. Why? Because I want to build a massive library of films that I like - and I just happen to like a lot of films. One of my bad personality traits happens to be that I'm a huge materialist, and I attribute that to growing up on the edge of being poor. My theory is that if you spend money on something, you should be given a tangible object, something you can keep and enjoy again and again. I'm not a big fan of one-time experiences, especially the more enjoyable ones, which is why I don't go to the movies as often as I'd like these days. It's just too expensive, and if I'm going to spend that much money I might as well go to Streetlight and get a DVD for the same price.
To tie in to that part about materiality, I have to say that I just love how my collection looks. Whenever I look at my bookshelf and see it filled with movies I just have to smile. There's a kind of pride in having such a huge collection because it represents a part of myself. One girl in my seminar talked about her library of books. She said that even though she probably won't ever reread the majority of her books, she loves keeping them on display because it gives a measure of "intelligence" and "experience" (her words) - it shows others that she's read those books and consumed them. To an extent I agree with that position as well.
Another facet of collecting I'm interested in exploring is how certain companies seem to cater to those types of crowds. Take The Criterion Collection, for example (the word "collection" is right there), and the more recent Dragon Dynasty. Both companies prominently tag their DVD releases with numbers and keep a catalog list that acts as a handy checklist of sorts. And, if you like the films they put out, collecting them all becomes a habit because you know that there's some kind of overarching element that connects them all; one film leads to another through a common connection.
The same goes, in a way, with "special editions". They feel special, and having those editions instead of regular, more mass-market editions gives you a sense that you own something slightly more valuable. And typically they're a better value, especially on sale. I made the mistake of buying the single-disc edition of Pan's Labyrinth when it first came out on DVD, and a week later I saw the two-disc set for only $5 more. Needless to say, I kicked myself for that blunder. Hard.
I think based on this idea, of special collector's editions, I want to make my own DVD, cover and all. My essay will take the form of a booklet insert, and the DVD itself will ... actually, I'm not sure. I was thinking of doing a short film asking people about their own forms of collecting and/or viewing experiences, but that might take more time to do. We'll see how I feel by next week. I definitely need to do the writing portion as soon as possible, especially since I have to present my outline in two weeks.
But hey, I think it's a good start. My DVDs are a big part of my life, and I hope that I'll be able to pass them on when the time comes.
This past week I was finally able to watch Hou Hsiao-Hsien's A City of Sadness. Ever since coming to college I've been trying to explore the Chinese side of my identity, mainly because up until college I was never considered as such. In high school everyone always saw me as white because of the way I looked; I guess it was expected, seeing as the majority of my high school was made up of Chinese kids, many of them actually from China. Since coming to college it's been the opposite. For once, I'm actually being considered Chinese (due in part to my open regard for my own "hapa"-ness), and it's a great feeling to be accepted ... for once.
As I mentioned briefly in my last post, I'm interested in researching the Taiwanese New Cinema movement which took place in the 1980s-1990s (and, as it can be argued, is still continuing to this day). I've already seen a small number of films that have made their way to the United States, as well as spent some of my own money on books to use in my own personal research (see my book list for a few). It's been a slow process, but I'm really starting to learn a lot about the movement, as well as about the history of Taiwan itself, which is something I haven't thought too much of until recently.
The reason why I'm so interested in Taiwanese cinema as opposed to mainland China or Hong Kong is that I'm technically half Taiwanese. My dad was born in Taipei, and the majority of my family on his side still resides in Taiwan. My dad's never even been to the mainland, and despite considering himself Chinese, his real home was in Taiwan. Now, from what I've learned about Taiwanese identity and history, that's kind of a paradox, because the Chinese population living in Taiwan technically aren't real Taiwanese, at least not in the sense that everyone except Native Americans aren't real Americans. From what I've heard, my family actually came over from the mainland sometime around the Chinese Civil War, around the same time as the Kuomintang (KMT). If you're familiar with Taiwan history at all then you'll know that the KMT was highly oppressive with the Taiwanese people that had been living on the island for decades under the Japanese occupation, and they essentially treated the Taiwanese people like colonists and slaves rather than compatriots.
And here's where my post connects with A City of Sadness. Hou's film is set during the transitional period between the end of the Japanese occupation and the KMT's takeover of Taiwan in 1949. The focus is on a local family, who experiences death, political oppression, and incredible loss during this time. It's pretty depressing despite the film beginning with a birth and ending with a wedding. There's an ambiguous feeling by the time the credits begin to roll - does the film end with a suggestion of hopefulness or hopelessness? It's hard to tell.
The film really kind of tore me up inside, knowing what I know about both Taiwanese history as well as my family's own personal history. Can I say that I'm really part Taiwanese despite my family's Chinese heritage? Is there even a difference in contemporary times? Taiwan's current president seems to think so, which is why he's vying for independence from mainland China (something I won't go into). My identity is already divided in half, and now those halves are threatened to be divided into quarters because of these issues. I'm not even sure where to stand on certain points.
Funny that as soon as I begin to feel comfortable with my identity everything goes to pieces because of a single film. I guess that's the power of film itself as a socio-political medium. It definitely has the power to make you think if you're willing to look at the larger social issues and history. Of course, I'm sure half the people in my class were just wanting the film to end because of its length (over three hours) and the obsessive use of long shots and long takes, but I'm still glad I managed to see it, and subtitled in English. It's not readily available over here like Hou Hsiao-Hsien's other films (Millenium Mambo, The Puppetmaster). I'm going to try and seek out a copy for myself.
I've also been reinvigorated to go back and watch Edward Yang's Yi Yi, which has been on my shelf for awhile now, calling me to watch it again. In fact, perhaps I'll do that this weekend since I have off on Monday.
One of the biggest worries I've been having this past year is what exactly I'm going to do with my film degree once I get out of college. Believe it or not, college hasn't exactly been what I expected it to be, and if anything I didn't get to accomplish what I originally set out to do - which was to earn degrees in Creative Writing and Critical Studies in Film & Digital Media, a more intensive program which would've allowed me to get teaching experience this upcoming spring. Well, I won't get to do that naturally. It just feels like these past four years haven't amounted to much other than about $10,000 worth of debt that I'm going to start freaking out about since the interest is going to start up after graduation.
I mean, really... if you're not going into production, what does once do with a film degree? The reason why I wanted to go into Critical Studies was because I could have gone further into the academic side of film and maybe been better suited to move on to a graduate program somewhere like USC or NYU. I could've had more of a focus instead of taking classes that gloss over a variety of topics but never really goes in-depth; being half Chinese with my family based in Taiwan, I wanted to explore the Taiwanese New Cinema and how Taiwan's ever-changing identity has helped to shape their identity in contemporary cinema. My professors all seemed to think it was a good area for research since there hasn't been that much written about it in English, but ultimately I was turned down for the concentration because of my narrative evaluations (I haven't received a lot of good evals because up until now I barely talked in lectures and discussions). Bah.
One of the jobs I've really wanted since venturing into the academics of film is working for The Criterion Collection. Granted, a lot of my classmates and friends feel like Criterion DVDs are overpriced and their choice in films is slightly elitist and prone to European and American art films, but I think what they're doing is a great step towards the mainstream acceptance of international cinema. Naturally, I do think they should start focusing more on films from East Asia, but I'm hoping in time they'll realize that as well. But yeah, I'd love to actually work with Criterion and help produce their collection.
Kino International would be a similar choice.
Uh, but how does one apply to places like those? It's not like they have an online application on their websites.
I suppose I'll start at least learning something new this winter. One of my professors approached me this quarter asking if I wanted to help subtitle a pair of older Chinese films from before World War II, films that aren't available on DVD, nor available with English subtitles (obviously). So I'll get to mess around with some subtitling software as well as DVD authoring software since my professor would prefer a DVD with divided chapters as opposed to having a pair of VCDs, which we'll be transferring from. It sounds like a good project, and I'll get paid for it too, so that's always nice.
When I get back to San Francisco next summer I really should also try to pick up Mandarin again. I realized only way too late that it'd be a great advantage that would've opened a ton of doors for me. Ah, well.
The first time I made a film was in high school. I remember my friends and I heading over to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco with a camcorder, and when we got there we made our friend Gordon take his shirt off and cover himself in ketchup to simulate blood. Of course, without his shirt on he wouldn't lie down on the dirty gravel, so he kind of hunched next to the wall of a tunnel while another of our friends investigated the bloody "corpse". All of a sudden - boom! - Gordon starts moaning like something out of Romero's Night of the Living Dead and slowly ambling forward while our other friend pops off five or six rounds from a cheap toy gun that doesn't actually shoot anything. We didn't want to shoot anymore since we didn't have a script, an idea of where to go, and Gordon wanted to wash up. We never picked up the film after that.
Senior year I had to make more films for my AP English class. The only one I remember really putting any effort into was a crappy rendition of Shakespeare's Othello, but since my group comprised of me and two of my Chinese friends, we changed the story around so that Othello was white (which I looked and identified more with in high school, despite being half Chinese) and living in a world made up of Chinese. The work was grueling and long, but we wound up finishing up the project thanks to my friend Derek. We dubbed the finished work O², after the other Othello film with Josh Hartnett, Mekhi Phifer and Julia Stiles. Unfortunately we still got a B on it, despite it being "epic" in our eyes.
Fast-forward to fall of my Freshman year of college, and I'm asked to make a film for my Core course. At that point in time I didn't have a camcorder of my own, and none of my close friends had one that I could use for my project, so I wound up shooting the film - a short interview with my dad regarding his immigration to the United States - in thirty-second intervals using my digital camera. My classmates liked my film, as did my professor and TA. They said it had a very "cinematic" quality to it. I think it was at that point that I realized that I liked making films. By the following spring my parents bought me a camcorder and my friends and I - the two I had worked on O² with, Derek, and another friend who went to UCSC with me - formed a production group under the named JAWED Productions; the name was derived from our first names (Jeff, Austin, Will, Edmond, Derek).
Of course, we never actually completed a film under that name. Our first real film, PWNED!! (2005), was done under the modified name "MAWD" since my then-girlfriend thought it was "unfair" to use a name when not everyone was represented (yeah, whatever). We shot the film in my dorm room as well as the laundry room and dining hall of my residential college, finishing everything including an all-nighter for editing in about four days. We submitted it to an on-campus student film festival and got a great reception by all of our friends who attended, later getting even more praise for the film by our friends online after putting it up on YouTube.
It was then that we decided to take our filmmaking to yet another level. At the time I decided that I wanted to study film as a medium, so I made the decision to double-major in Film & Digital Media as well as Literature, which was what I was currently majoring in (although I had planned to do Creative Writing, which is a concentration of Lit for some reason). We changed the name of our production group to something more fitting, something we all understood, loved, and instantly clicked with - The Breakfast Machine.
Since then we've made a number of short films and been in a couple of film festivals. Hell, we won a viewer's choice award last year at another UCSC film festival. By now we've gotten fairly good at the technique of filmmaking despite the lack of equipment and personnel to work with. Every film we make is another step forward, and even though we generally only churn out one "solid" film a year those films wind up being huge strides for us in terms of production. From PWNED!! we moved on to a 20-minute neo-noir, Delivery (2006), which was radically different than anything we had done; and after that we pulled off the experimental action/thriller HK (2007). Now we're working on a number of other projects, including a film I've been working on since last year, Purgatory.
This past summer marked our two-year anniversary as The Breakfast Machine, and as we moved into our Senior year of college I started to look back at what we've done and reflect on what sort of things I actually want to do with film. When doing the rewrite for the Purgatory script I started to jot down what sort of themes and tropes I wanted to deal with in my films, what kinds of aesthetics I'd like to employ in telling my stories, and what defined my style and philosophy of filmmaking. Naturally, very little of what I wrote down has made it to any of our films, because my ideas tend to be long, drawn out, epic you might say. Beyond our current fiscal reach. But I'm starting to get to a point where I can work with what we've got.
Filmmaking is definitely something I like to do, and I definitely want to keep on doing it. In many ways I'm glad I'm not part of the production concentration here at UCSC, because I hate to be restricted and confined to doing certain things. I love having the freedom to express myself in whatever way I want. I only hope I'll be able to keep on doing just that even after college.
I realize that this post is long enough as it is, but it's only the first part of what I want to write about when it comes to making films. Next time I'll write more about those aesthetics and themes I talked about in the above paragraphs. For now I'll be content with the history portion, because if there's anything I learned from taking film classes here, it's that the historical context has just as much weight as the theoretical images within a film.
On the walk home, my friend and I got into a discussion about the film. We agreed that it definitely was one of the best films ever made, as any film scholar, professor, and student will probably tell you, but there's something more than just the classic narrative, the innovative use of the camera, or the terrific acting. There's a certain timelessness about Citizen Kane, something that still makes it relevant and fresh to audiences today, over sixty years since it was made. Hell, it was made before my parents were even born, yet here I am in the year 2007 buying it on DVD, and thinking that if/when I have kids I'll show it to them when they're old enough to understand it. There are few films that I feel like I'd show to my kids in the future, but Citizen Kane is one of them.
Yet I have to ask myself why that is. Kane certainly isn't one of my personal favorites, nor is it a movie I can stand watching over and over in a short period of time. What is it that makes the film so timeless to me then? Am I just following the film student mantra that "Citizen Kane is the best movie ever"...? Somehow I don't think that's the case. I mean, for me a movie like Jurassic Park is timeless, and that's definitely nowhere near anyone's top list except mine. The Goonies is timeless despite being a late-1980s type of film. And I guess to that extent Citizen Kane seems timeless to me because it's representative of "classic" American cinema.
So is that the reason? Maybe I just haven't been exposed to enough pre-1960s American cinema, but Kane is probably one of the biggest films that stands out from that era. Most of the other films I saw in my American Cinema (1930-1960) class have sort of slipped through the grip of my memory, yet Citizen Kane hasn't, and I saw it in my first film class along with Singin' in the Rain and Battleship Potemkin (another timeless film that I actually don't enjoy watching ... what the hell). It certainly didn't leave an imprint when I first saw it, but over time it's just come to be so ingrained in my memory that it's hard to forget. That's timelessness, I suppose.
Oddly enough I'm watching the film for my Senior seminar tomorrow afternoon, so I probably won't be popping the DVD in anytime soon. My friend and I are more interested in watching the documentary that the two-disc set comes with, so I'll probably spend more time with that than the actual film. And I still have to read Laura Mulvey's book, despite the fact that I'll probably write about Singin' in the Rain (and how much I used to dislike it).
I think my next post will revolve around filmmaking, since my friend and I also had a lengthy conversation about that while we were waiting for a bus. I just hope I don't forget what we talked about.
The other day in my film theory seminar we talked about the relation between cinephilia (which is the overall focus of the course) and knowledge. We're supposed to write a five-page essay about it before November 5th, but I figured why not bounce some ideas around on my blog? Anyway, we're being asked to write about what it is the exact correlation between these two things, using Metz's idea of film as a "socio-psychological" tool and examining one of these two books and their respective film:
I have to admit, I wasn't too thrilled about seeing Singin' in the Rain again. The first time I saw the film it was in my first film class, an introduction to the "film experience", and I remember hating it (especially after seeing the "I Was Made for You" sequence dozens of times ... since we had to write an essay on it). Still, after reading Wollen's book and realizing how much work and hardship Gene Kelly put into the film (and how much he suffered after), I can actually appreciate it. When I brought this point up in class yesterday, my professor then asked, "Does this knowledge then make you a cinephilia?"
Good question. Personally, I don't think it makes me a cinephilia, but rather I feel like cinephilia's will always crave that extra knowledge that goes alongside any film. A cinephilia most likely will go for two-disc sets that come with hours' worth of special features whereas someone who just likes movies are content with regular editions that come without extra features; they just want the movie. Of course, this is all my opinion, and I'm generalizing a lot. For one, there is no standard definition and criteria to judge one as a "cinephile". Second, although I consider myself a cinephile to an extent, I don't actively seek information on certain films, especially if I don't actually like them (Singin' in the Rain is a prime example).
Yet I do feel like there is that desire for knowledge, that desire to learn about the history and the theoretical concepts behind a film. The problem is knowing whether that knowledge (1) makes a difference to certain people, and (2) whether the knowledge is sought or not.
Like I said, I'm just trying to bounce around some ideas. I've got a lot of time before my essay is due (though I need a draft by Monday), so most likely it'll hit me eventually. And with that, I leave you with this:
Ah yes, the introduction. There always needs to be an introduction to every film, every book, every story. Hell, every blog too, I suppose. Every time I start up one of these things I always start with some kind of introductory post. "Hi, my name is Will. I like stuff and I hope you find me interesting enough to read my blog. Later!" One of those. For some reason it's just so hard for me to start up a blog en media res, because it feels so incomplete. Maybe that's why my films are almost never like that either (eventually I'll write a post dedicated to my take on filmmaking).
So, let's see. What to write for an introduction. Oh, I know, I'll talk about why I'm starting yet another blog. The purpose of this blog is for me to talk solely about a subject that I've been studying now for the last three years: film. Given that I'm now in my fourth year of college and I've finally narrowed my focus to film history and theory, I figured I might as well start writing about film on a daily basis. I mean, I've been writing theoretical essays every few weeks for the past three years, so a couple of free-form posts shouldn't be too difficult to manage, right? Right...?
They always say that you should never major in a subject you love, because it takes all the fun out of it. To a certain degree I'd say that's true; originally I came to college to major in creative writing, but I've seen put down the pen and concentrated on another area that has now changed my entire way of thinking. I can never watch a film the same way again, unfortunately, thanks to Sergei Eisenstein, Laura Mulvey, and Christian "Mirror Stage" Metz. Still, there's a part of me that feels like this is the way everyone should be thinking about film, because it's not (always) just a mass entertainment medium. It has the power to really move you, to make you think seriously about something. D.W. Griffith seemed to think so.
I'm not going to just post film reviews and other trivial things that even a ten-year-old with a Xanga could do. I have more important thoughts in my head that sometimes I just can't keep bottled up, or ones that I just have to write down for my own importance before I forget it. Sure, I'll still post reviews here and there when I see a film worth watching (or one so utterly terrifying that you'll want to stray away from it completely), but I want this blog to have a more theoretical approach.
Hell, I've got to deal with this stuff every day as a film major, so I might as well put it to use.
And there's my introduction. It's a short one, but then again I spent most of my morning finishing up a four-page paper for one of my classes since it's due today. Besides, I've got some free time here at work, and I figured I might as well do something productive.
Eventually I'll come up with a more interesting title for my blog, and maybe I'll change around the design when I feel like putting in the effort. I don't expect people to read this - much like my personal journal or my Live Journal that I update every month or so - but it does still feel like I'm writing for someone. An anonymous someone, I suppose. The imaginary audience. Until then, I'll think of something more important to write.
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