Culture of Film
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At this point in my life I am finally able to appreciate many different films that in the past was not mature enough to understand. It has been a long journey getting to this point. My entire life nothing has made me as happy as going to see a movie in a theater with a big cherry coke. As a consumer I am open to seeing almost any film, because no matter what you see there is something you can learn or just be entertained. Films can be dissected in so many ways; even a terrible flop at the box office can be worth seeing to examine what went wrong. There are so many questions to examine to understand what went into the making of the film. Even if a film is terrible it can end up making a lot of money, which just seems wrong on so many levels. But to understand where I am as a consumer of film lets go back to where things really started.
The beginning of my real career as a student of film began my senior year of high school. A simply impossible man taught the class, he would give out the hardest assignments to a bunch of teenagers who had no clue what was going on. Looking back I owe him a lot, he started me on looking at film instead of movies.
The syllabus looks more like that of a college class. It was a chronological look at film, which was a good way to get started. We looked at the films of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, The Gold Rush, and The Tramp. Learning about the birth of an industry was great, to see where film came from and how everything is influenced by the films that have come before it. From there is was on to German Expressionism and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the Russian films of Pudovkin and Eisenstein. These are the ones which pushed me the most. Charlie Chaplin you could empathize with, but how does an American teenager relate to films about the Bolshevik uprising? I barely knew what happened. But seeing the films inspired me to look into the history of what made them.
Its not important to talk about the rest of the films I dissected in the class (with the exception of (Citizen Kane a clichй but one of my favorite films), these are the ones that have stayed with me. I should really revisit them; I know that these films are the foundation of modern cinema. Even if they aren’t mentioned, these are the films which came up with the techniques used in now. I remember one of my favorite things was looking at the Kuleshov effect. It is such an interesting thing that you can take the same shot of say a mans face and put it with different objects and the audience will swear that he has a different expression in each.
These are the things which have shaped me most as a consumer of film. Rather than simply going to see whatever “looked good” or had a good trailer. I had a much better idea of what to look for in films. It was no longer lets go see the new action movie, my tastes in film became more refined. Well, here is the part where I actually fulfill the assignment. I am not the best writer, and particularly like that I am finally beginning to feel comfortable with it.
The three films that have come to define me as a consumer are, Citizen Kane, There’s Something About Marry, and Batman Begins. Ive chosen these films because they are the ones that define the market segments that interest me most. Citizen Kane because it represents my desire to look into “classic” films, the ones chosen as the best of the. There’s Something about Mary because it represents exactly the form of humor I like in a film. Not this stuff you get today, in Hollywood the thinking is “Put Will Ferrell in a funny outfit and the movie will be successful”. That is simply not comedy, there is no substance, no build up. It’s the same fluff that’s been around forever but it has simply been repackaged for a new generation. Batman Begins because it is was the new beginning for films based on comic books that were geared toward adults, and Christian Bale is a bad ass.
Classic films are well classic, they have been analyzed and picked over. But for someone seeing one for the first time all the magic is there. Looking back through older films is great because they are references to different points in history and at the same time the themes can be universal. Citizen Kane tells the story of a turn of the century newspaper man but made in the 1940’s. Yes the film tries, and for the most part succeeds in showing what life was like, there are also remnants of the 1940’s culture.
The problem with the genre is that it has been overrun by film “buffs” who think they know everything about film, and that the director did everything for a reason. I have serious doubts that everything is planed in a shot, some of it must be coincidence. The culture of film snobs is one well worth avoiding. The great thing is that you as a consumer get to choose the setting in which you view the film.
Many great writers before me have defined