To The Movies
This is not to be persuasive. I am a better editor than writer, a nonfiction film editor by trade. Whenever friends say “it’s like a movie”, usually about beautiful or dramatic situations, I am going to imagine all of the camera operators and lighting rigs and trailers and script supervisors and gaffers surrounding their frame. Those little gods, arbiters of experience and construction workers of imaginable fates.
Placed an order for “Experimental Film”. Behind the search engine, in one of the rooms kept neat by arts institutions. It’s all the same. This is the same screen I file for unemployment and the same screen that I edit weird little videos. Here I’ve signed up for all the newsletters so that I can receive things to put in the newsletter of my own arts institution’s online room newsletter to send and is this turning into a confession? It seems so.
Of course, the more movies you watch, the greater your ability to see the place of each one in the landscape of the film medium. There is less and then less concern for the grading scale from good to bad - though some. This scale can be very helpful for self soothing, and may produce the same results as a hefty cry when exercised correctly. Good and bad are considered feelings after all. The more squirrels you watch perform great brave leaps from one tree limb to the next, four stories above the ground, the more you are convinced that they can and are precisely designed to do just that. Their jumps weren’t anything like a movie and if I had lifted my camera & filmed it I doubt those aforementioned friends would be any closer to endorsing it as a movie. The more plants that are raised in a single garden, the more refined the process for growing a healthy plant. This is not true of movies. One reason being that movies are not healthy plants. Oh movies! I have no right to say I love you. Haven’t earned you, barely know you. You’re all too powerful.
Where do you think they wrote the movies? When they were lifting Fellini’s beachside scaffolding, what movies did they write. From Louis Armstrong’s personal archive, when Indonesia committed genocide, or on the concert trail of 60’s Bob Dylan, in the streets of France’s working class. What a relief to know there will be no grade assigned. How interesting though, Rotten Tomatoes. The word disappointing seems more satisfying.
