In the past week I have watched four movies: Past Lives (exquisite), You Hurt My Feelings (major new york saturation but also quite compassionate), Franklin (shoulda just been the archival footage), and Fallen Leaves (about the depressed Finnish proletariat; completely unequipped to talk about race and had a very unrealistic hospital sequence but still made it really easy to understand how people end up in bad situations). This is a lot of movies, although admittedly all of them were in the 1hr 45 or less range, which is one of the main ways to make me watch a movie.
In the last month I have also watched Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, half of Tree of Life (lol), How to Blow Up a Pipeline (scary) and Barbie (good….mostly). This is maybe more movies than at any other point in my live; certainly more movies than I’ve been watching for most of the past year.
I’ve been reading about movies, absorbing them by osmosis through the mostly American media with which I am obsessed even if I talk loudly about wanting alternatives. Like Weyes Blood, I like movies, which I am trying to reflect in my behaviour. At the start of this year, it occurred to me that I read a lot of books, have my mind expanded by the ideas in them — but that ideas are not confined to the written word.
I spent some of last year talking abou the ideas of things you could learn without language: how a hill is folded is a lesson in geography without words, how a paintbrush curls around a shape might say something about sorrow, but silently. Movies are an extension of this: there are things I can learn about what the world is like and how people interact that are in movies, but not in books.
Part of what helped was having the discretionary income to spend on cinema tickets — I’ve seen perhaps 10 movies in the cinema so far this year which has helped me enjoy it a lot more, because you can’t hit pause and you can’t look away. Another thing that helped — and it did feel like work, a little bit, because books are so easy, so easy to love — was deciding that I didn’t want to watch just the most easy movies (your Mamma Mias) but movies that challenged me a little bit. How to Blow Up a Pipeline was seriously scary. The Banshees of Inisherin totally grossed me out. But they were interesting and compelling. Having friends to discuss movies with was great too, as was, well, reading lots about movies from online publications (I especially love Fran Magazine) and discovering Letterboxd (follow me!)
I’ve never hated movies — and it’s not like I’ve suddenly become a buff. I don’t know how so many people have so much time to watch movies, because I think books will always be my favourite medium (as well as possibly podcasts). But I like that they make me feel a little more Up With What Is Happening.
And what about the other claim — that there are things I could learn from movies that I couldn’t learn from books? Well, I don’t think I’d know much about Nan Goldin and her incredible photography if it wasn’t for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which is definitely worth getting a free trial to DocPlay to watch. The editing of Aftersun made me think deeply about grief as something tangible; I love how films make metaphors literal, playful, spin the world into a new shape. Tár…which completely breaks the hour 45 rule … well, Tár made me think much more about classical music. It made me think of music as a deep thing, a constant and lifelong avenue for discovery – and it possibly is also helping me with something I’m writing at work at the moment about profound abuses of power. I guess that’s part of it: I don’t know exactly what fingerprints these pieces of art will leave on me, but I know they are extending me, taking me to new places – and $20 for the cinema is much cheaper than a real ticket to somewhere else.
see also: becoming a newsletter person, becoming a podcast person, Stárting to stáre hárd
possibly en route: becoming a sourdough person (4 years late), becoming a spinning person, becoming a gardening person (aspirational)
Daylight Differentials 