I Could Always Live In My Art But Never In My Life

There's something about the moving tapestry of pictures that makes film as an artistic medium wholly unique in comparison to the others. There is, in the flow of all that, in the humanity there of the characters, of the world reflected back at you, a power unlike anything else that is difficult to fully describe. I find that it is a medium that is harder to sink my time into but easier to actually get invested in once I do; there are very few movies I watch that I don't like. Now, granted, much of this is arguably because I know what I like and I seek out what I like and it fittingly does not disappoint me often, but it is also the case that it is easier to get more emotion out of me through a film than through any other medium on the regular, even music.

My film journey started with Bergman's Autumn Sonata. Not that it was the first movie I ever watched or anything, that would be ludicrous. But it was the first movie I ever truly found myself recoiling in existential anguish and euphoria at once at a depiction and reflection of so much of the struggle I've gone through in my life. That was only last year; I am much newer to film as a medium and find it a lot harder to sink my teeth into as I said because sitting down to watch a movie feels like much more of a commitment (Although I still do it fairly often, a movie a week or so). I will write here about the experiences that have shaped me the most with the medium and I hope you enjoy it as much as you enjoy any of my other ramblings.

There have been a lot of movies that affected my trajectory in terms of bringing me to a greater love of the medium. Tarkovsky was my first real exposure to arthouse and for that I'll always be grateful, and I appreciated Stalker on first watch too, but it was really Bergman who made me dive all in. There are a lot of movies besides that have affected me; I despise how much I love Gaspar Noé movies considering how vile they are and how edgy he is but there is some part of my brain that continuously feels very attracted to them. Polanski is similar although it's a bit different considering that he seems like a far more actively despicable person compared to Noé's overgrown teenage self. There's also the amazing, incredible Sergio Leone, who I will almost certainly write about at length at some point. My taste tends to trend towards more minimalistic arthouse "chamber" movies as a friend of mine delicately put it, primarily because I find the conflict inherent to mere social interaction to be riveting in a lot of ways. It is this conflict that makes me adore Autumn Sonata alongside Bergman's other works and that of other directors like the aforementioned Tarkovsky plus Godard and Kiarostami and the like. Certainly not above a conventional Hollywood-esque action thing though! Tarantino is annoying but he makes the best straight-ahead movies I've ever watched, ones that function incredibly on both thematic undertones as well as pure entertainment (Pulp Fiction deserves every bit of acclaim it's ever gotten considering the incredible flow of the plot and the undertones of banal evil that underpin it, as well as the immense religious significance among other things).

There is, in essence, something more immediately gripping going on with cinema as I said earlier in comparison to music. There is a power that an amazing movie has over me that is a lot more visceral than the most amazing albums, although inherently so because of it's more immediate concentration, as opposed to how an album at least for me can be digested over time, listened to over and over again and dissected down to every last minute detail of it. Such can also theoretically be done with cinema, but there is a good chance that my attention span is too far gone to actually focus as much as I should.. alas, I still love the medium, and it is well and truly altering, a prime example of art as a transformative experience and something that is more than merely the frivolous undertaking of surface-level pleasure that many regard it as (even if entertainment is a perfectly worthwhile endeavour). The first time I watched Autumn Sonata, I couldn't stop crying for the entire duration and for a good while after having finished it too because of how powerful it was, because I saw too much of my life in Eva and Charlotte for it to but merely be another experience. It was the thing that made me understand the power of this medium and decide to give it more of my time. I'll probably write about it less regularly compared to music, but I'm sure it'll be fruitful regardless.

I think that about describes my relationship with cinema well enough. The essays will certainly expand on it in terms of more specific movies though.