Film As Image and Idea - Journal   

Lisa Boston Frye

 

         “There is nothing to writing;  all you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”  Red Smith

 

         And so it begins, this formidable venture I have undertaken to shape and develop a journal of ten pages, a series of ramblings for Claude, on this elusive subject, Film As Image and Idea.  Could somebody please pass me a razor blade?

         During the first class, we spent time reviewing expectations and thankfully, I first thought, not playing the name game.  Now I wish we did.  Although it is time consuming and torturous, (to me), to have to introduce yourself and address each person (who is likely to be a stranger), it is helpful to know everyone’s name and also something about the person.  The introduction erases a sense of spending time with an assembly of question marks.  Oh well, minor annoyances.  Like the k key that races across my screen when I’m not looking, but doesn’t register when I actually hit the key.  I need a new computer.  Or keyboard. 

         Yawn,  listen to me, boring right off the bat.

         A Personal Journey Through American Movies with Martin Scorsese,  was engaging to watch, and his movies are riveting.  He says “to be a good director, a man must have humility.”  I agree that a man must have humility, but then again, one doesn’t have to be male to be a director.  Penny Marshall, Diane Keaton, or any other female who’s also in the business of telling stories may possess that quality.  That could have been a slip on his part.  I did like the way Scorsese is filmed, close up, his face takes over the screen.  He says, “every decision is made with what the audience wants in mind.”  How many great films were never made, promoted or shown enmass because their message wasn’t popular or in demand at that time.  But when a writer creates, their audience must be kept in mind also.  If no one wants to watch it or read it, then what is the sense of making it?  Yet if you feel strongly about sending your message, are inspired in the delivery, and you actually have a story worth listening to, then you may be able to change and/or create what the public wants.  I guess anything worth doing comes with some risk.  If you won’t take a chance with what you believe in you may as well get in line behind all the other dweebs.

         A director is in the business of telling stories.  I never really thought about directors of pictures before, except during Oscar night.  “I am the king of the world!”  Oh please!  I hated that guy, especially after I heard he dumped Linda Hamilton for the blonde in the movie Titanic.  Since taking this class I realize that I favor some directors over others. I do like Alfred Hitchcock, (“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”),  Frank Capra, (“My advice to young film-makers is this: Don’t follow trends. Start them.”), Stephen Spielberg, (“People have forgotten how to tell a story.”)  Whoever directed the films set during the Roaring Twenties where gangsters were portrayed as tragic figures or as businessmen gave me much enjoyment in my childhood.  The shootouts were not too long, and were shot in black and white so you couldn’t see crimson gushing, squirting, pumping.  I liked the gangster’s lines from Scorcese’s Journey, “I die almost every day, thats the way I live,” and “You die even when you’re breathing.”  Life on the razor’s edge. (Please watch The Soprano’s on HBO.  You would love it, there are a lot of reaction shots.  Humor me.)   Bonnie and Clyde, made in the 60’s, starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.  The only part I didn’t like was when Blanche was shot in the eye.  “My eye!”  And of course when the star characters were riddled with bullets in the final scene.  That was sad, but how much can you work with a true story?  You can’t change the ending.  

         Some of my favorite movies were from the 30’s and 40’s and starred Katherine Hepburn and Bette Davis, strong and smart but beautiful women.   Hepburn said, “I have not lived as a woman.  I have lived as a man.  I’ve just done what I damn well wanted to and I’ve made enough money to support myself and I ain’t afraid of being alone.”  She was as gutsy in real life as she was on film.  I also liked Mae West whose sultry movies were filmed earlier.  Truman Capote described her as possessing, “Scimitar eyes with sword length lashes, the white skin, white as a cottonmouth’s mouth, the shape, that Big Ben of hourglass figures.”  And Maureen O’Hara.  Full of fire and life. Finally a redhead.   

         We watched The Grapes of Wrath, directed by John Ford, during the first class.  I liked the cinematography in this film, how it was filmed in bleak, I mean black and white, (eventually won’t it be colorized?), which helped to convey a sense of hopelessness, of depression, of oppression, of futility.  The scenery the family traveled through, especially the Southwest at night, stirred memories of evening journeys home through desert shadows to my tent, when I lived in Arizona.  Dark.  Eerie.  Haunting.      

         During the second week of class, we spent time watching film clips from student choices.  I thought I would swoon at all the action that was taking place, and noisily, I might add.  Seven starred Brad Pitt, who highly overated as an actor and a sex symbol, in my opinion, forced emotion as the psycho spilled the beans and gloated over the murder of Brad’s character’s wife, played by Gwynth Paltrow.  Was I supposed to care that her head was in that box?  I would have preferred to see it impaled on a post which would have been more entertaining by far.  

         A scene from the next movie, Heat, was overly long and too loud.  Why does a shootout with a lot of noise, and many people running and dying get so much attention?  How can such “action” keep a portion of the population engaged indefinitely?  Less is more.  I would rather have watched the scene with good guy/bad guy characters talking in the restaurant earlier in the movie.  But what do I know, I am but a hack.

         We also viewed The Waterfront, a Marlon Brando vehicle, driven by Elia Kazan.  Brando plays Teri Malloy, tough guy with a heart, who goes up against a corrupt union, and appears to succeed.  I usually like this type of movie where the little guy rises up and beats the big bad guys, but when I read that director Elia Kazan created this film as a response to his unpopularity after testifying against his friends and coworkers before the Committee on unAmerican Affairs, I just got turned off by the whole storyline.  Kazan used his power as a director to defend his own disloyalty which seems cowardly and self serving.  I guess many powerful people are able to get their ideas and points of view out to the public by way of the media through movies.  Movies as propaganda. 

          A high point of the evening was when you emoted the famous Marlon Brando line froly good at ad libbing.  I was glad we didn’t play the name game on the first day of class, but now I wish that I had a list of everyone’s so I would know what to call them.  I will struggle through on my own with identifying people and hopefully survive with no major blunders.    

         I enjoy viewing the movie scenes that the students (kids) bring in.  My favorites were Shirley Valentine, Breaker Morant, and Chevy Chase’s Summer Vacation.  May I say that I really hate Dumb and Dumber?  No offense to Lauri, but when I choose to see a human tongue frozen to metal, I prefer to watch  A Christmas Story.         

         While wading through the paper by Ken Faggiano that was completed in 1997, I was struck by word waves: “by their film picks you will know them”, and you said, “uncanny isn’t it”  I wondered how you would know a person just by noting what scene they brought in.  When I selected and showed  Sophie’s Choice, I wondered what secrets about me were revealed by that particular choice?

           I debated bringing in the scene from The Birds, the fire drill exit from the classroom as simple piano music (chopsticks?) plink plinks repetitively and the children walk obediently in single file to the outdoors, the awaiting birds, and panic.  Run!  I like the scene where the teacher is sprawled across the porch steps, legs splayed, eyes pecked out, and the traumatized kid, Veronica Cartwright, peeks out the window, and crys inconsolably.  When rescued, she wails, “She pushed me inside!  She pushed me inside!”  That was a convenient way to get rid of the ex girlfriend.  I almost chose the shower stabbing scene in Psycho, the music emphasized each penetration of the knife into Janet Leigh’s body.  It was kind of erotic.  Almost a kind of rape as well as a murder.  That assault will be etched forever in the minds of movie watchers as their own shower curtains rustle shut, and they hurry through their bathing after first double checking the locked door.  The ocean wave scene in From Here to Eternity is memorable, but I thought the movie was boring.  The funeral scene in Spencer’s Mountain makes me cry every time I see it, but if you don’t watch the whole movie, you can’t capture the full effect of the family’s grief.  The scene in Jurassic Park where the T Rex bites the lawyer in half is entertaining because the lawyer was whiney and annoying and because everyone hates lawyers anyways.  Vincent Price, as Prince Prospero, in The Mask of the Red Death, as he moves from room to vividly colored room in an attempt to escape his fate is also a favorite of mine.  I really like Vincent Price.  He has an uncommonly expressive face. 

         The scene I did choose from Sophie’s Choice is the one that disturbs me and still has the power to hold me in its macabre grip almost twenty years after the first time I watched it.  I believe that the scene where Sophie is forced to choose life for her son, thereby condemning her daughter to death has the same effect on everyone.  Meryl Streep is amazing in that movie.  She is great with an accent.  I love Meryl Streep.

          If I had selected a scene from one of these movies, would that choice have said the same thing or something different?  Now that I have revealed some of my favorite movie scenes have I also ripped away my carefully constructed facade and exposed the real and wicked me?  Oh no, not that!  Please say it ain’t so.  Seriously, I believe that people watch movies in order to experience a spectrum of emotions they may not access usually.  They want to feel, to imagine, to be transported to another place even if they are scared or hurt or wounded by the experience.  

           The fourth class was kind of an ordeal, when we watched the documentary, Hearts of Darkness, and then the movie, Apocalypse Now,  90 minutes, and 2 1/2 hours respectively.  It was much like enduring a double gloom enema.  I do believe that the last words out of Marlon Brando’s mouth should have been, “Rosebud” instead of “the horror, the horror”.  That was kind of melodramatic.  Maybe if he just said, “I could go for a Bud.”  Sorry.  How many pages have I left to type? 

          Frances Ford Coppola is and was kind of cool.  He’s really intense and artistic.  I love that in a person.  Eleanor Coppola, his wife, says, “You have to fail a little, die a little, go insane, to make it to the other side.”  She supported her husband through the frustration of creating this movie while filming the documentary for publicity purposes.  But I think she spent too much time on the natives and why was she so interested in their cannibalism?  Maybe she caught some of their blood lust while she was there.  Or the insanity.  Why else would she think that the sacrifice of the water buffalo was beautiful?  I hated that slaughter scene.  No one cared when Marlon Brando was hacked up because we know he’s still walking around, but the animal, you could see the machete slicing through its flesh and the cruelty and savagery of it all, and the poor thing.  You knew it wasn’t improvising.  Well, no one wants to see stuff like that, even though bad things happen to people, yata yata yata, every day, who cares?  People deserve to be tortured and treated savagely sometimes, and more than the poor animal did. 

         The Graduate was the next film we viewed.  The movie was groundbreaking because it was the first to use popular music as a background; The Sounds of Silence was its theme song.  I liked the movie, I like Dustin Hoffman, but as with other movies he’s made, I am distracted from the action by his very large nose which is like a permanent erection protruding from the middle of his face.  Its hard for me to focus on what he’s saying because I am hypnotized by the nose.  I am really spilling my guts here.  

         I planned to film a documentary about my friends, the challenges they face in their lives, ongoing problems and how courageously they plow onward in spite of it all, but since my union entered into a strike against our employer, now called Verizon, I changed my mind.  Now my focus has become the strike, the operators, the media, the story, and hopefully before the class ends, the resolution.  My expertise with the camera is nonexistent, but I did try to do well even when I was told not to film, the operators were told to make no statements, and everyone was mistrustful about being quoted on camera especially when what was committed to film may affect their livelihood thus future quality of life.  My movie making skills are zero.  Please accept that I tried and we’ll leave it at that.

           Well, I took advantage of my family connections and asked my brother in law, Phil, who is a two time winner of the Emmy award for cinematography, to edit my film.  He is more than happy to help out.  I have told Phil, I don’t need perfection, only a film that I will not be humiliated to show in front of my class and my teacher, who is a perfectionist.  Please Phil, make it perfect.  Is this cheating?  What I had was an hour long and interspersed with white static, a bouncing camera, and overlong dialogue.  I hope that my asking for his help is okay.  

         Al Porche visited our classroom to speak about Apocalypse Now and its relevence in relation to the realities he experienced during his service in the Vietnam war.  Al liked the film and thought it was psychologically real, that it conveyed the surreal type of experience that was the norm during his time there as a soldier.  Al agreed that the film honored the soldier’s experience and said that veterans appreciated the film.  He credits his hypervigilence with getting him through his wartime experience and says it keeps him going to this day.  I think that Vietnam vets have gotten a bad rap.  I believe that atrocities happen during all wars and am weary of those who criticize Vietnam vets for drug use and cruel or crazy behavior.  Please, an original idea.  I agree with “?” (court clerk lady) who said if you had a tendency toward being a psycho killer when you went to Vietnam, you were a psycho killer in Vietnam.  Not all vets were twisted.  Look at Al.  

          Do people who didn’t serve in Vietnam feel a sense of guilt for not having to go through that ordeal?  Should they?  I don’t think so.  Maybe we ought to come to terms with the fact that this was a difficult, life altering time for everyone, and try to put the bad feelings behind us.  We are only human after all.

         I loved the independent film, El Norte.  I liked the characters Rosa and Enrique.  It is terrible they had to enter the country by crawling for miles through an old sewer pipe, especially when it was swarming with all those man eating rats.  And only one dead cat.  Where do you find all these delightful films?  But then again, movie goers like a mess as well as readers. 

         Before I forget, with your favorite movie lines were the words, “Badges, we don’t need no stinkin badges!”  Was that from Troop Beverly Hills?  I loved that movie.  If I’m wrong, forget I said anything. 

         Getting back to El Norte, I have seen first hand how shabbily illegal immigrants are sometimes treated.  I lived for a short time at a sleazy  motel in Blythe, California.  Eight rooms were linked together in a strip on the side of a highway across from a bowling alley.  Fifty bucks a week, peeling paint, waterbugs the size of kittens, one palm tree outside.  On one side of our two rooms was a truck driver who would leave bologna and bread for us, in his refrigerator, when he was gone on trips.  (We spent all our money on beer.)  On our other side were several families of Mexican immigrants who worked for the landlord, Cotton, picking in his vegetable fields.  Cotton was a businessman who would set the men, women, and children up in the hotel rooms, put them to work toiling in the hot fields from dawn to dusk, and just before payday rolled around a couple weeks later, would call in the INS who would sweep the laborers swiftly back to Mexico.  Others would soon take their place.  I felt badly for these people then, and during the film last week I was again reminded of this brush with unfairness here in the promised land. 

         My twin sister dated a Polish man named Wesley for many years.  I enjoyed listening to the stories of his youth and life of poverty and of his struggle to get ahead, to survive in Poland.  He was always trying to make a buck, save money, and come to America where the streets, he knew, were paved with gold.  After many years of saving, time spent in a refugee camp, and much sacrifice, Wesley made it to the shores of the USA.  He found himself in New York City with six dollars in his pocket.  He was shell shocked when he looked around and saw how dirty everything was, but the biggest mystery to solve was why so many people were carrying around black plastic bags, and what could be in those bags.  When Wesley discovered that the poke folk were homeless and carried their belongings in trash bags, he was overwhelmed.  He sat down on the nearest park bench and cried like a baby, he says.  Wesley recovered and is now a millionaire, but that was his true story of disillusionment and despair as a refugee in El Norte.

          It must be difficult to leave behind everything you have known to come to a strange country and start over.  To find that America is not the land of milk and honey portrayed would be a hard lesson.  Usually only after years of struggle, hard work, continued education, and sacrifice will America become the dream.  Page 10 is completed and I still have much more to say.

         Boys Don’t Cry was a love story/drama type of film about a girl with a sexual identity crisis.  The character’s lifestyles reminded me somewhat of my own in my late teens and early twenties - the drinking, the dead end jobs, the lack of ambition, the risk taking.  I actually have known people like the girlfriend’s mother.  I guess if you survive that wildness and downward spiral into the abyss of poverty and ignorance you can survive anything.  If only we could accept the differences in people as they try to survive instead of being threatened and moved to destroy or condemn.  Education is a key.  And movie watching which has the power to open or close minds.

         Film as Image and Idea.  I have learned quite a bit in this class even though my quiz answers last week may lead you to believe otherwise.  I do watch movies more thoughtfully now and I have come to appreciate all the work that goes into the creation of each scene and ultimately an entire film.  I really am in awe of my brother in law who has achieved acclaim in his field of cinematography and who is lucky enough to be able to make a living at something he loves to do.     

         I want to let you know how much it has meant to me to have had you as my teacher these past two semesters.  You are a wonderful teacher- you always know what to say and you say it so well and so instinctively.  I wish I could be more like you, to be able to access words like that.  Your words intoxicate me.  You write so clearly, so poetically, so beautifully.  (I don’t want to call you Claude.  I want to call you Charisma.)  You have been a source of much inspiration and encouragement for me.  From my heart I would like to thank you so much.  You have a gift, the gift of sharing with and guiding others in a search for enrichment, purpose, and meaning in our daily lives.  PS. And you have a nice chest.