Way back in my film school days, I had an interaction with a favorite cousin whom I had not seen in some time. This opportunity to reconnect saw our first interaction since I had been accepted as a film student, and so he asked me what basically everyone asks me right after I tell them I’m studying film, “So, like what’s your favorite movie, then?” When approached with this question, at least by associates who are not necessarily film buffs, my default response is usually something I know has been on Netflix in the last year. (Though if I had to pick an answer ... maybe Silver Linings Playbook .) I think this time I said James Cameron’s Titanic . He then had a sort of illuminated reaction and followed up with, “I see, so you like … old movies.” My response to this was something in the vein of, “Well, yes , but NOOOO …” Steven Spielberg being a 29-year-old on the set of Jaws In academic circles, t he demarcation between “classic Hollywood” and “new Hollywood” falls
So here’s some light table talk … what is cinema? What is it for ? On the one hand, film is the perfect medium to capture life as it really is. With the roll of the camera, you can do what painters and sculptors had been trying to do for centuries and record the sights and sounds of a place exactly as they are. On the other hand, film is the perfect medium for dreaming. Is there any other place besides the movies where the human heart is so unfettered, so open to fantasy? If you’ve studied film formally, this is probably one of the first discussions you had in your Intro to Film theory course, in a class that may have forced you to read about Dziga Vertov and his theory about film and the Kino-eye (another day, another day …) In some ways, we could use basically any of thousands of cinematic works to jumpstart this discussion, but I have a particular film in mind. The lens I want to explore this idea through today is not only a strong example of strong cinematic cra