Three Beautiful Things 07-26-2022: Self-Education, Preparing for and Watching *Stagecoach*, Cool Air/Cool Yakkin'

 1. From time to time, without regret for what I did in my life, I imagine myself pursuing different courses of study in graduate school rather than what I did. Repeatedly, I most often imagine myself becoming a film/movie student. Because I didn't do this, I tend to experience movies as if they were written stories, thinking about them and discussing them much like I would novels or short stories. 

Over time, I've wanted to expand my experience with movies and become more able to understand and use the vocabulary of film making, to be more attentive to elements in movies like long shots, deep focus, lighting, and many others.

Today, I read up a bit on terms like establishing shots, master shots, and others. I'd read that the producers of The Last Picture Show were originally frustrated with director Peter Bogdanovich not shooting more master shots. I didn't really know what that meant -- and I'm still working on my understanding -- but this will give me something to pay attention to when I watch the movie soon.

I'd say that I am embarking on an informal course of self-education in movie watching. 

2. To further this project today, I listened to interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Michael Cunningham as they discussed the 1939 John Ford movie, Stagecoach. 

I was less interested in their discussion of the movie's moral content and cultural importance (both of which I'm very interested in!) and more interested in John Ford's direction, not so much of the actors, but of the camera, shot composition, and lighting. 

I'm not articulate enough right now to write in much depth about these things, but I can say that I took notice of Ford's dramatic use in Stagecoach of close ups, his (I would call it) love for panoramic shots of the Monument Valley region, and his use of deep focus to often pack particular frames of the picture full of action or of characters' reactions to certain moments. 

I listened online to other directors like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and George Hill talk about all they learned about filmmaking from watching John Ford's movies. I read that Orson Welles watched Stagecoach about forty times as he directed Citizen Kane and was significantly influenced by John Ford's approach to filmmaking and story telling. 

3. I emerged from the Vizio room when Debbie returned home after socializing in Kellogg for a few hours. As is so often the case here in North Idaho, as the sun disappears, the day's scorching temperatures fall. Debbie and I sat in the back yard and talked for nearly two hours about the history of filmmaking in the USA, the parallels between breakthroughs in movie making and song writing, how and why these breakthroughs might have happened. There might not be clear explanations for the emergence and influence of Bob Dylan or John Cassavetes, of Joni Mitchell or Martin Scorsese, but not arriving at definitive conclusions hardly deterred us from talking about what we've experienced and observed over the course of our lives in the worlds of movies (and television) and music. 

I know one thing: I feel very fortunate to be alive in 2022 and to have grown up with the movies and music of my lifetime and even more fortunate that technology exists to be able to watch movies made over the past century and listen to decades of music and not only dive into the significance of it all, but to let it carry me away. It's also fun to discuss and write about.