On movie appreciation
Beginning movie appreciation wasn’t easy. I don’t exactly remember when I started seeing acclaimed foreign movies (acclaimed here meaning a significant part of the population didn’t sit through it) and why. Maybe it was disgust with the corporatist nature of the hollywood and bollywood franchises where emotions were traded for cola and women were represented as objects of pleasure of a degenerated culture. Maybe it was extreme self-loathing and boredom. Most probably the later.
In the eye of a busy intellectual hurricane, when I was transitioning from graduate school ignorance to industrial bliss, I began with a movie subscription which would challenge the very existence of my being. I wasn’t earning then you see.
These were great movies by great directors. The Bergmans, the Fellinis, the Hefners. Movies where you had to listen to the included commentary to understand the movie in it’s totality. One such instance was when the Polish movie didn’t come with subtitles but the commentary did. Movies where the frames speak for themselves. Like the one spectacular Antonioni film where the climax was a long shot of buildings, like the ones in government quarters, for around fifteen minutes. Really drove the point in your sorry head.
These were times when you had to keep aside your established beliefs about cinema aside, and accept that you are a worthless fool. Once you make that humbling realization, movie appreciation is cake walk, if you prefer to walk through cake. It’s no different than a newly established good-intentioned dictatorship; cleanse your mind, accept torture (in this case, beautiful movie torture), and transform into a new improved person.
