Films and Feelings

            I recently came across  a clip from a lecture  that filmmaker extraordinaire, Orson Welles, gave to a class of aspiring filmmakers. The relevant bit has Welles advising his students to  not  watch so many movies and to allow one's storytelling to be informed by one's own experiences.      What a time for me to stumble across this bit of counsel ...       I wonder if this advice, should we choose to accept it at all, is applicable more to film makers  than to film  critics . My incentive for exposing myself to as many films as possible, even during times when I'm not literally watching a new film a day, is because I want to have a wide base of knowledge for the subject I claim to be an expert in.      That said, I have come to observe the limitations of inhaling too much media ...      If you haven't heard, I set a goal this year to accelerate my study of film by watching one film I hadn't seen for each day of 2022. What a way to familiarize myself with a

            Legendary film critic Roger Ebert gave the following words in July of 2005 at the dedication of his plaque outside the Chicago Theatre: Nights of Cabiria (1957) “For me, movies are like a machine that generates empathy. If it’s a great movie, it lets you understand a little bit more about what it’s like to be a different gender, a different race, a different age, a different economic class, a different nationality, a different profession, different hopes, aspirations, dreams and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us. And that, to me, is the most noble thing that good movies can do and it’s a reason to encourage them and to support them and to go to them.” Ebert had been reviewing films for coming on forty years when he gave that assessment. I haven’t been doing it for a tenth as long. I don’t know if I’ve really earned the right to ponder out loud what the purpose of a good film is. But film critics new and old don’t need much