February 24, 2004
For the Love of Movies
So you love film and you decide you want to learn more about film and you go to grad school to study film and raise your taste level and you learn to see film differently, to think about film differently, to analyze everything, to move your experience of film from your emotions to your intellect, and you do, you learn to see every detail, to analyze as you watch, to constantly deconstruct, and you become a fearsome analytical beast, your brain a pulsating lethal weapon…
…and then you get burned out on all the thinking and analyzing and critiquing and your brain is fried and you see the lack of joy in what you do and you get tired of tearing everything apart in the name of understanding and you tell your brain to get lost, you abandon it, you find yourself gravitating to musicals and animation and Adam Sandler and sugary-pop movies and anything that does not tempt you to analyze…
…and you realize this was a necessary transformation, you have come full-circle, you had to go through the rigorious intellectualism of grad school to be able to more fully appreciate, viscerally, the movies you used to adore. You had to leave them behind, reject them, disdain them, so that you could come back to them knowing why you loved them so. You went from emotions to intellect and then back to emotions again. You go to a film festival with a friend who is currently embroiled in the rigor of grad school, and he likes the pompous structuralist film that humorously deconstructs the concept of naming, while you fall in love with the playful musical that is light and joyful and in love with movies.
And each of you hates the other’s favorite.
Filed by cynthia rockwell at 2:45 pm under Uncategorized
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