I'm at college.
OpenLink is mostly working, so I can get on the internet.
But it takes forever to load and looks weird.
I'm trying to read stuff for class.
You know, when I started Intro Movies I thought I loved film. The further through the unit I got the more I realised I had to define real careful exactly which film I meant. And now? *shudders* I do not loves any of the kinds of films that we have studied. I quite liked some of the silent film stuff, but we watched about 5 minutes of Chaplin and a few early silent movies from before they figured out editing, and Battleship Potemkin didn't suck. Everything else? Urgh. Man with a Movie Camera went out of its way to have nothing happening very busily. Un Chien Andalou was surrealist, so nothing sensible happened. Belle De Jour had stuff happen, while fuzzying up the difference between different levels of real in a not-real film. But it had *icky* stuff happen. Scrub brain out now type stuff. Then there was Peeping Tom, which was a serial killer film. I particularly dislike serial killer films. It managed to be kind of boring too though. Then there was Jules et Jim, which had as an actual point the characters not making sense. Somewhere in the middle a war happens. The rest of the time people shag, or don't, and then at the end she drives off a bridge. And okay, I can see how the formal features are interesting, but... the only stuff that happens is the stuff that would happen in five minutes around the outside of the plot of any show I actually choose to watch. And also, did I mention the not making sense? And they stand around *talking* about it at great length, without trying to be funny even. And it is in French. So far this year the only film in English was the serial killer one. Everything else was in Russian or French or silent or some combination thereof. With subtitles. Usually typo filled and clunky and with suspicions of poor translation. And how are you supposed to study the film form stuff while you're trying to read the subtitles? I know full well from English subtitles the vagaries of transcription, let alone translation, and the way one always gets a different impression of a subtitled text than one you're watching with the subs off. Notice completely different things, different feeling for the timing, all that. So whatever we're meant to be noticing in all this French, it's hiding behind subtitles. And now, oh joy, it's Breathless again, which is both French and something all but two of us have studied before at Access, because this teacher loves it.
I was trying to come up with an alternate list of films that would teach the same stuff without going above a PG rating.
Belle de Jour had things about surreal fuzzying up of which bits count as real, the establishing sequence not being in the same real as the most of it, and some about how women are perceived and, er, trained. Possibly some other stuff, I wasn't so much concentrating because as I said, *icky*.
Replace with non-icky: Labyrinth.
Starts with her in Princess mode talking to owls, but then we find out that's not the real the film will be playing in. Most children's films fuzzy up real/unreal/fantasy. It's a wonder it don't break our brains. And, okay, the point was BdeJ doesn't signpost it much if at all, but. And then in Labyrinth there's a lot about trying to figure out the rules, being put into role, by a man, but with the important difference that she realises at the end all his games were cause he had no power over her. I like that ending.
So, okay, it isn't by some famous name surrealist guy. And I have no idea how influential it is. But the thing is, these 'influential' films are ones nobody's seen or heard of. They're influential on a small segment of film makers, not audiences. Reading practices are formed while watching an entirely different set of texts - kids films. So we can study kids films to learn how we learn to read film.
Right?
And avoid serial killers and, in general, ick.
... I don't know, probably doesn't work, but... the point of an intro course isn't to winnow out the weak, it's to encourage further interest in that subject. And the choice of texts is fairly important to that. Could we not just stick to the kind of popular stuff there's a vague hope we'll already own the DVDs of? Cultural studies has much to say about the popular. And the one and only textbook I managed to read this semester chose films where I could have happily watched all of them, like The Matrix, and Sliding Doors, and ET. I haven't watched all them, but I could, from the sounds of it. And none of the films in the book made me want to scrub my brain.
... I should probably head to class nowish.
*sigh*
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