A New Direction

My wife and I recently attended the Vail Film Festival. We did this last year also, but my mental landscape was very different last year, and while I enjoyed it then, I feel like I actually learned something this year.

My experience began a few of weeks ago with some podcasts. First, I want to clarify that by “experience” I mean the what-I’ve-learned-about-myself-and-life-and-whatever type of event that we are all searching for on a constant basis (I hope.)

For whatever reason, I’ve decided lately to start listening to more podcasts. I think it’s because I sometimes need something different to listen to on my way home, and audio books are expensive. Also, it seems like everyone is doing them, so there are no shortage of talky-talky thingies to listen to on all of my favorite subjects. I think the real origin was The Watchtower, which I came to by way of a link from a webcomic, and which I thoroughly enjoy even though it’s about the comics that I generally don’t care about.

One such podcast that I’ve started to listen to is The Triple Feature—a movie themed show by webcomic artists. I’ve listened to this show in the past, but for whatever reason stopped a number of months ago. Now I’m listening regularly again, and it’s wonderful. But, it’s also carving a hole in my chest.

I miss talking about movies. I miss the intense analysis of a scene, sometimes to the point where the scene would be forever deconstructed and lose almost all meaning. I miss being able to confidently talk about Neo-realism, Surrealism, French New Wave, and all of those other film-nerdy types of things with any kind of authority or confidence. Most of all, I used to feel like I understood the history of film and could talk about it with some intelligence, but I don’t feel that way anymore.

The next rung on this twisted ladder was the 43 Folders podcast, specifically the most recent, which is a recording of a lecture Merlin Mann and John Grubber did for the South by Southwest Interactive Festival about blogging. The basic idea was this: blog what you love, don’t worry about money, carve a niche and live there. My favorite idea from the ‘cast: “Topic (which becomes ‘obsession’) times voice.” This is where the germination for my “experience” began, where the ladder eventually ends, and why I’m writing this.

Now we can actually talk about the festival. We got to Vail that Friday night, checked into our hotel, and went to see a film. When my wife and I got to the little theater—which was thankfully in the hotel so we didn’t have to venture out into the snow—the room was ice cold and packed with people. Everyone was shivering a little and we spent the entire time cold and huddled together for warmth.

The movie was preceded by a short by Disney, which was obviously both an attempt for them to try a pixar-esque cuteness and also an experiment in CGI snow dynamics. It was both cute and snowy, and I liked it, but it still wasn’t able to reach the level of both heart and comedy that Pixar can.

The film itself was a British ghost/thriller type of thing. My wife liked it even though it was too intense for her at times. I liked it despite its problems, which were many and varied. But I discovered something almost immediately after leaving the theater: I wanted to talk about it. Almost immediately I wanted to discuss all of the finer points and the duller points. More than anything, however, I wanted to talk about how the film could be “fixed.” This, to me, is the difference between reviewing a film and film theory. One of many differences, but all of them are the same at the core: the surface vs. the deeper meaning. Of course, if you review films, you have to talk about why the film is or is not good more than just, “I liked it,” or, “I hated it.” But that’s not what i’m interested in. I want to know why a film is or is not good, but I also want to know how it could have been better and how it fits into a greater context.

I sat down and wrote about the movie we saw after we got back to our room. That will be available to read at a later date.

The next day I had planned to get a massage and then go to the screenplay reading. Vail does a screenplay competition, as many festivals do, and every year they organize a reading of the winners, which ends up being like a table read. I had been really looking forward to going, even though the winner from the year before had not been what I would call a great piece of work. I think it was my attempt to connect with that part of myself that feels lost. In some ways, I just needed to see that I still “got it.”

The first reading was the short screenplay, written by an Irish guy who’s real interest is directing. The story was okay: it was one really great visual idea with a story propped up against it. But the writing itself wasn’t very exciting, and I was upset that I might be disappointed. While it’s important to me in my quest for film knowledge to come across pieces that I don’t like so that I can understand why I don’t like it, I would still like to be able to come across things that I like so that I can understand that, too.

When it came to the feature screenplay, however, my world opened up. The plot had to do with a woman who has lived a hard life dealing with the death of her father. Her brother is also trying to deal with it, and he decides that they need to take a road trip that mimics one they took when they were children. What struck me about the screenplay was the prose. His scene descriptions were dense and dangerous; toeing the line that screenwriters are not supposed to cross between what can and cannot be seen on screen. But somehow, this guy made it work. My heart filled up as the scenes were read, and invariably whenever I would think, “He needs to show that with an action,” or, “He’s about to make this too long,” the ‘play would seem to answer by showing me an action or stopping the description at just the right time.

I’ve wrestled for sometime with the question of whether a screenplay can be a piece of art in an of itself. Most writers will tell you it cannot. It’s a foundation at best; incomplete until the movie is made and the building completed. I, however, need to believe that it can be something more, maybe just for my own ego or my own self esteem, but I am not willing to let go of that idea just yet. This screenplay relit that fire for me.

There were other experiences at the festival: we went to the awards show and saw Kevin Smith and laughed our asses off. I went to another movie that night, but as an animated film with no dialog about an asshole who grows wings that make him do good, it didn’t really carry me to the end of my “experience.” That had actually already happened.

I realized after going to the awards show and seeing Kevin Smith, a man whom I have tremendous respect for, and finding nothing about the show inspirational or moving, that I had already come to all the conclusions and had all the epiphanies—i just needed to put them together.

So here they are. What I’ve come to realize, beginning with the podcasts several weeks ago and leading into Vail and through, is that I need to start talking about movies again. I learned that from The Triple Feature. From 43 Folders I learned that I need to take my obsession, add my voice, put it all in my blog and see what happens. And from the Vail Film Festival I learned that my obsession is film and film theory. I’m not going to write reviews. I’m not going to write about who signed on to do what movie and what director is optioning what book or whatever. I’m going to talk about history, theory, and craft. This is what I love, and since I don’t see a whole lot of people out there doing it, i’m going to take a crack at it. Who knows, it could become something great.

So I’m taking this thing apart again and putting it back together in that image. Let me know what you think.