1. Today I spent all of my time at Vizio University absorbing the expertise of my two current favorite writers about movies and on a host of movie directors.
I listened to the first of these two writers, Farran Smith Nehme, on Episode 137 of the Criterion Now podcast. Nehme is the kind of movie critic I enjoy the most. She's an enthusiast. She's also a cinephile devoted to watching and writing about movies from the 1940s and 1950s, while at the same time staying current with contemporary movies. I've got to go back and listen to this podcast again with a pen in hand and jot down the many movies she referred to and discussed with hosts Aaron West and Jill Blake.
2. The second writer I've been following enthusiastically is Imogen Sara Smith and I discovered on the Criterion Channel today that she presented a superb introduction to the movie Leave Her to Heaven (1945), one of the movies in a collection currently featured on the Criterion Channel called Noir in Color. Her discussion of Leave Her to Heaven included a terrific overview of director John M. Stahl's career and also explored the moviemaking of Douglas Sirk who directed remakes of Stahl's Imitation of Life and Magnificent Obsession. Most of all, I was riveted by Smith's explanation of Stahl's use of Technicolor to tell a noir story, stories commonly told in black and white movies. Her analysis of how the noir themes of obsession, jealousy, mendacity, anxiety, and depravity were enhanced by the movie's use of color fascinated me and enlarged my understanding of filmmaking. By the way, I'll be treating myself to an encore viewing of this presentation, too, with pen in hand and will make myself a list of all the movies Imogen Sara Smith discusses so intelligently and insightfully.
3. After tuning in to Bill Davie's live broadcast of Poetry Break, with the words of Gary Snyder, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Peter Coyote, and others swimming in my head, I played a disc that arrived in the mail on Monday, Movies Under the Influence. It's a series of interviews with movie directors and actors who were involved in what's come to be known as the New Hollywood movement in film making, starting in about 1968 and continuing through the decade of the 1970s.
For anyone who is reading about my experience at Vizio University, maybe you can tell that I'm trying to do two things. On the one hand, I'm trying to understand better the influence the movies of the 1940s and 1950s in the USA had on movie directors who were so fresh and innovative in the 1970s, directors whose movies I love and frequently return to. (Some day, I might also try to understand better the impact of European and Japanese filmmakers upon these 1970s directors.)
Simultaneously, I'm trying to get a better understanding of why this surge of creativity and innovation took place when it did. I'm beginning to understand some of what contributed to this revolution in filmmaking. The studio system had run its course, audiences were ready and hungry for movies that more directly dealt with the darker elements of life, movies were no longer under the thumb of the Motion Picture Production Code and so movies could more explicitly explore sexuality and characters could, when necessary, use profanity, could speak the language that was being used in walks of life ranging from the streets to the workplace to the Oval Office. People cuss. Now the movies could, too.
I have a lot to learn. I just keep thinking that when I watch movies made, say, pre-1968 in the USA, I'm almost always aware that it's an old movie.
But when I watch movies like Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, All the President's Men, Nashville and many others, my sense is that they could have been made in 2022. They seem current to me (aside from car models and no cell phones) and I'm always trying to understand better why that is.
This is my way of loving movies and the more I learn the more I realize how little I really know.
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