Experiential Paper

On the topic of La La Land, it was one of my favorite films of 2016.  From the opening number, to the masterpiece that is the closing monologue, Damian Chazelle manages to express every single reason why I love cinema.  Call me naïve, but I dream of that world.  Maybe reality hasn’t sunk in yet, or maybe I’m just not yet jaded with the industry, but for me, film really creates that sense of indescribable magic that artists fight to achieve every single day.  For me, movies like La La Land only push me to work even harder.

There are many moments that continue to remind me why I chose to follow film.  Every awards season, every time I get that center seat four rows from that back of the theatre, that time I watched James Cameron’s Avatar from the very back wedged in between my mother and a stranger who cried at Sigourney Weaver’s death; Billy Crystal’s opening monologue at the 84^th Academy Awards, debating with my friends about which movie we want to see on a last-minute decision at the ticket booth, when my uncle took me to the midnight premiere of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and we sat in the front row and when the hand shot out of the lake the entire theatre jumped in unison.  Staying up late to watch old recordings of Julie Andrews interviews.  Dusting out the old VCR player so I can watch my Apo’s tape of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with slightly less fuzz than usual.  Posting a film review at 3AM because I couldn’t sleep and that one shot from Gravity was stuck in my mind.  Calling my mom and crying with her to tell her that I’d gotten into the Cannes Film Festival program.

My relationship with film is filled with sentimentality.  At the heart of it, film makes me into a child.  I’m entranced.  I fall in love as I’m immersed into a world, no matter how close or how distanced from reality it takes me.  I often say that the best movies are those that make me cry; even further, the best movies are those that make me feel real emotions.

Outside of our program, I met two people who had a complete and genuine love of film.

The first was an older woman named Linda Leonard.  She is a professor at the Boulder Psychotherapy Institute, here for the first time on invitation from her university.  She is obsessed with theories of universality, of a shared human consciousness that encompasses the globe.  The fact that a flood story exists in every ancient culture; the fact that the Hero’s Journey is a common theme in international literature – these similarities and aesthetics that attract human psychology is what she focuses on when she watches film.

What’s hilarious about this is that we both enjoyed completely different films.  Linda loved A Man of Integrity, which I fell asleep in.  She didn’t enjoy Wonderstruck, which I adored.  We both had mixed feelings regarding Jupiter’s Moon.  There was an equilibrium that we attempted to find, but we often found ourselves at opposite ends of the spectrum.  But we both loved how film could relate to audiences, and how film struck different chords of significance depending on life experiences.  We discussed the theories of studying film, or comparing film to literature, and of film in relation to philosophy.

The second person I met was a film student from Italy named Bianca Briocchieri.  For the second year in a row, she had a cinephile badge, and she epitomized that word to a T.  Bianca adores film, and she’s attending graduate school at Oxford for film criticism in the fall.  We met at the premiere of Loveless, seated high in the balcony section so that the screen was at an angle.

For the entire hour before the movie started, we talked about everything, from David Fincher to Jean Luc Godard, from Captain America: The Winter Soldier to The Graduate.  We debated the benefits of a compilation score versus an original orchestration; I personally hate the former, given the rare exception, but Bianca loves them.  We both love David Fincher, and she was ecstatic to be able to see the premiere of Le Redoutable later in the week.

Both of these people that I met at Cannes love film.  Both take completely different approaches to their love for it.  Linda analyzes film.  She breaks it down into Freudian meaning, studying the characters and the motivation, with little attention to the pacing or the technique.  She likes to analyze moments of a story, elements that related to movements of art as a whole instead of the movie itself.  Bianca, on the other hand, loves to watch a film.  She doesn’t understand how people could leave movies early, even in market screenings.  She wants to see every shot, every cut, and every expression that could be placed on a screen.  Bianca watches film as an art, and criticizes it in the same way.

What I noticed, though, is that I also analyze film in my own way.  I prefer the emotions.  I boil film down to those abstract subjects that exist only for myself.  I relate films to how they make me feel, their personal importance to myself, and I become biased.  Yes, I care about technique, but then I see a film like In the Fade, which, while not as technically brilliant as Loveless, I find myself preferring because of how I relate to it.  They, the film, might not have been as narratively sound as The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but I’m so emotionally connected to the subject that I can’t turn it away.

I watch films very much like my mother, to the point where our tastes in movies is inconsistent because of how we let our own lives interpret the scripts.

The point of this is, from Cannes, I realized more than anything that there is no perfect film.  There might be a documentary that premieres that is literally a home video, or there might be a huge studio blockbuster that uses every shred of capitalism to its advantage.  And while we can argue that one is better than the other, and one probably is, at the same time, every person will watch these films differently.  Film criticism has a place in the industry, simply because it allows us to express our love for film as how it pertains to ourselves.  Some of us will analyze film based solely on the story, others only on the technique.  Many of us will argue about representation, and again some of us are so used to it that we take what we can.

There are flaws in this industry, sure, but I don’t think that the solution is to become jaded.  What I learned from Cannes is that there is nothing wrong with the excitement I feel whenever I watch a film.  I learned that I’m going to disagree about everything with at least one other person, and I learned that that’s what makes this industry worth it.  No matter what anyone says, film really is something that we can’t take for granted, and it’s worth working for.