My Introduction to Cinema

 

I’ll be using this blog to post all of my extended pieces of writing related to cinema and my life and how the two intertwine. Mostly new essays and reviews, but I’ll also share favorite bits from my book See You in the Dark: Two Decades of my Cinephilia in North Dakota. What follows – this inaugural post – is that book’s general introduction:

 

I select films for the Cinema 100 Film Society, a non-profit organization located in Bismarck, ND, and I’ve usually seen the films before we screen them, several times. Often, I’m mostly interested in our audience’s reactions as the lights go down. I’ll sit in the fourth row (why not the first row you ask? Because I’m not crazy I say) and occasionally turn around and watch the people.

Have you ever done that? It’s a beautiful sight, hundreds of eyes all focused on the same images and in each of those eyes, you see the images flickering back at you. It’s like watching hundreds of versions of the film, each being perceived just a bit differently. Films are like that. Millions of people may see them, but no two see them exactly the same way. Sitting in the dark, watching people, I often ask, “What do you see?”

Occasionally, a few of us will meet after the movie at the Hong Kong restaurant to discuss and I get my answer. Or, actually, I get answers. Everyone goes into a movie with a different set of experiences. They see the movie through different lenses causing different details to stand out like mountains on a relief map. A recent discussion of Beasts of the Southern Wild had people focusing on the prevalent use of heavy drinking, its depiction of poverty, its mixture of races, and its similarity to Native American culture with its closeness to nature and use of folktales, all interesting—and somewhat overlapping—ways of thinking about that film.

Maybe I think about film too much. I have been called an “odd duck” because of my cinephilia.

 

Cinephilia: a term used to refer to a passionate interest in cinema, film theory, and film criticism. The term is a portmanteau of the words cinema and philia, one of the four ancient Greek words for love.

 

I haven’t always been an odd duck though—or at least not this same sort of odd duck. Until college, I was a casual filmgoer, probably the very sort I now scowl at; always talking during the film, coming in late, leaving early, and crinkling candy wrappers at the most inopportune times.

My love began rather unexpectedly. The following entry from my Stan Brakhage blog tells the story:

 

In the fall of 1982, while attending the University of California, Santa Barbara, I was in a quandary. I was an engineering student and needed to fill a slot in my schedule designated “general elective.” I fanned through the class catalog and nothing caught my eye. “Why do I have to take a damn elective anyway?” I grumbled.

I wasn’t interested in much at the time. I liked math. I liked physics. I liked tormenting my mom by playing Some Girls by the Rolling Stones as loudly as possible. I was about to fill in the blank with a physical education class—volleyball, I recall—when a friend suggested, “Take ‘Intro to Film.’ It’s an easy ‘A’ and all you have to do is watch movies.”

Up to that point in my life, I’d seen only a few dozen films. I was a “go stand in line with the crowds and catch Star Wars or Close Encounters of the Third Kind” kind of guy. I didn’t know what subtitles were. Simply, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

Soon, I found myself getting hooked on films that I’d never heard of like The Searchers, Blow Up, and Rashomon—often encouraged by the infectious enthusiasm of the professor and his two young student aides. They’d point out little things like a blanket hanging on a rail as John Wayne first approaches the ranch house in The Searchers and how it disappears when the film cuts to the reverse angle showing Wayne enter the house.

When they’d propose that it was intentional and was meant to symbolize that Wayne’s Ethan Edwards had been accepted back into the home, many of my classmates would shake their heads and mutter back and forth, “No, ‘John Ford the Great’ just made a mistake.” I, on the other hand, was fascinated. Maybe it was intentional, maybe it wasn’t. But the very fact that it could be intended symbolism opened my eyes to a cinema filled with possibilities that I’d never before considered.

One day—as if daring his students to either follow him to the ends of the Earth or to abandon film studies forever—the professor (I wish I could remember his name. I’d love to thank him) dimmed the lights and unspooled something I’ll never forget—even though I’ve never seen it since and don’t really remember it in any detail.

What flickered upon the lecture hall screen was a dance of blurry splotches of green and red. No sound, just abstract light and color creating a series of pulsating patterns. And then, as abruptly as it began, it ended. No story, no particular meaning that I could tell. It was just pure pleasure that had been set free from the prison of the projector to frolic.

The professor described the film as being a documentary of open heart surgery that had been filmed by detaching the lens from the camera body, placing one part of the camera in each of the filmmaker’s hands. This made such things we usually expect in a film like stable compositions and images that are in focus impossible. This also meant that light would leak into the picture haphazardly from all directions. The effect was images that were photographic disasters—and images that I found to be breathtakingly beautiful.

I sat still for a long time as most of the other students made a mad dash for the exits—some probably headed to the registrars to see if it was too late to drop the class. I felt as if someone had taken my brain out of my head, reversed the wires, and plugged it back in.

I remember the professor saying something like, “That film was by Stan Brakhage. I hope you liked it. Sleep on it tonight. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

 

Everyone can easily look back and recognize mentors who changed the course of his or her life. That professor with his boundless enthusiasm was one of mine. I should try to get in touch with him and thank him properly.

After graduating from college with a half-assed degree in mechanical engineering (I skipped a few classes to sneak into screenings for film studies classes), I moved to Seattle to take a job at The Boeing Company. It’s telling that during my interview trip to Seattle I spent the evening, not driving about the city and deciding if it would make a nice new home, but at a screening of Amadeus.

I was thrilled by my new job, or not the job so much as the city of Seattle. I had landed in one of North America’s most avid paradises for film lovers. Their annual international film festival lasts more than three weeks and I’d buy a full series pass (nicknamed “fool serious pass” by those in the know) and watch films until they all blurred together.

I’d drag friends and my wife and her family all over town starring them in little Super-8 epics. I’d spend days at work arguing with co-workers that The Last Temptation of Christ really wasn’t the blasphemous creation they thought it was. I’d go to the Cinema Books bookstore and chat with the owner at every opportunity.

And then, it all came crashing to a halt. I showed up for work one day to find a pink slip with my name on it. I’m sure my name found its way onto the pink slip list quite easily. After all, what’s the value of an engineer who spends all his time thinking about film while his coworkers spend all their time thinking about how much force and vibration it takes to break a cruise missile in half?

My wife said I was now fresh out of excuses and it was our opportunity to move back to her home state of North Dakota. In my devastated condition, I agreed even though I’d, honestly, never ever considered living there. Have you seen one of those maps of the United States where Los Angeles and New York take up 90% of the country and North Dakota doesn’t even exist? I had that map in my mind.

During a visit to Santa Barbara, California—where I grew up—shortly before moving to North Dakota, I had a chat with my second grade teacher, Ms. Pigeon (I’ll never forget her name). I told her I was frightened that I was going to be unbearably unhappy. She said: “Todd. I’ve known you almost your whole life and one thing is for sure. You will find happiness in every place that you live.” I’ll never forget that.

This is my story of how I found not only personal happiness, but great happiness as a cinephile in North Dakota. From my beginnings as the publisher and film critic of a small monthly paper to a stint as the weekly guest reviewer for the Bismarck Tribune to becoming the regular film columnist for the Prairie Independent monthly, the past two decades have been a fun journey.