Fast-forward to mid-way through second year, myself and twelve-or-so other hopeful writers crammed into Innis College’s dreaded seminar room for “Critical Writing on Film''—important to these early contours of my life for a number of reasons. Four thin tables are arranged in an awkward square to encourage discussion, leaving a narrow margin of space on the outskirts of the room and a carpeted chasm in the center, which all but the boldest among us (enough to sit cross-legged, surrounded and towered over by their peers) are reluctant to fill. We sit at 45-degree angles and twist slightly toward the front of the room. The blinds are incapable of properly and completely closing, so the faint glow of an overcast day casts a numbing sheen over this week’s screening: Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1914), ever-so-slightly vertically squished in the projection so that Keaton looks 4 feet tall instead of his modest 5'5. I react audibly, and involuntarily, to Keaton’s athletic fusion of his body with his camera, but my gasps and guffaws echo in solitude (by this point I am not yet used to being the lone laugher).
"I sit forward in my chair and can feel my heart drop to the core of the earth."
Another filmic victim of the seminar room finds me wedged in the front-right corner next to the screen, coffee clenched in hand to no avail—a 9 a.m. start means that they’re lucky to see me at all, let alone on time. Sans Soleil (1983) at a 160-degree angle meshes perfectly with the morning’s hypnagogia, its lulling stream of audiovisual stanzas briefly off-setting the crushing sensation—brought on by one of the most parodically Academic courses I’ve ever suffered through—that I am wasting my time with this degree.
Another screening comes along to salvage my morale in a similarly logorrheic class (this one mandatory) taking a much-needed turn toward genre thrills with a week on “heroic bloodshed.” We file into the school's spacious public screening and lecture space Innis Town Hall for John Woo’s The Killer (1989), the prof says his remarks, and then he leaves to do other things. On comes the wrong film by the right filmmaker, Woo’s blistering and devastating Bullet in the Head (1990)—a crime movie-Vietnam thriller mashup that charts the violent dissolution of a trio of friends (possibly inspired by Woo’s falling-out with producer Tsui Hark). But what a happy mistake! To this day, I still haven’t seen The Killer (or Hard Boiled for that matter), so I can’t pretend to be a proper Woo-head, but over the course of those swoony and kinetic two hours, I got the sense that I was being shown some intimate corner of the man’s soul.
Town Hall increasingly becomes a site of wonder eclipsing boredom. Highlights include Ken Jacob’s enrapturing short film Capitalism: Child Labor (2006), in which the director digitally and dazzlingly manipulates a stereoscopic photograph capturing the titular phenomenon in alarmingly quotidian terms, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), my first Fassbinder (heart doing cartwheels), which I encounter again a year later in the seminar room for my “Stardom and Performance” class. The second pass is greatly enhanced, and in many ways transformed, by a rewatch of its major reference point All That Heaven Allows (1955) the night before—on a beautiful 35mm print with my beautiful boyfriend—but I digress.
A laptop interlude: I watch The Straight Story (1999) for a David Lynch paper in “Four Studies in Film Authorship” and cry uncontrollably at five-to-ten-minute intervals. I’ve been rewatching Twin Peaks and other Lynch stuff (for class and for pleasure), which puts Straight Story’s many incongruities, and essential similarities, with his neighbouring output into sharper focus; a true, linear story expressed through the visual language of everyday life is steadily perfused with digression, discord, and abstract cosmology—as moving an argument for auteur theory as you’re likely to find post-studio-era.
The middle ground between Town Hall and the seminar room is the “special screening room,” number 222. Forty students can squish semi-comfortably into its rows of semi-plush seats as long as they alternate leaning forward onto their (usually broken) built-in desks and backward onto the stippled fabric of the cushions. On this bleary October day, in “Adult Film History,” I’m a little too comfortable, and a little too cozily hemmed in by my peers, as we watch Joey Yale’s committed butt double get fisted in close-up during the finale of L.A. Plays Itself (1972), verified freak Fred Halsted’s gorgeous and sinister poison pen letter to, and dispatch from, the City of Angels’ sleazy netherworld.
Months later, I’m back in 222 for an even more cramped screening of Rabbit of Seville (1950), a manic film befitting a manic course on the significance of sound recording in cartoons. Bugs Bunny epitomizes almost every deviant social impulse I’ve had in my short life, from his petty and punitive sense of anarchic play (fond memories of pranks played on a neighbour’s much-older stepbrother back in barefoot days), to his aspirational disguises in drag (inextricable to his transformation from huntee to hunter).
In the same room, on alternating days, is “Black Cinema,” which immeasurably ennobles the academic study of film to my cynical mind. There’s a specific image I’ll take with me: a modest and masterful lateral tracking shot from Losing Ground (1982). The camera follows two actors—one an amateur and one an out-of-work professional—as they traverse a row of trees lining a car park. In the distant background, a student filmmaker calls instructions to them (sound will be added later) while the pair flirtatiously discuss their respective relationships with the scene. Their gestures, both arch and natural, are performed for the watching camera, but the words they share are person-to-person, a private exploration of the desire they are pantomiming. The director yells, “I should have prepared you for this, but could you kiss? Really kiss?” and their lips and bodies finally meet with a fire you’d think is impossible to fake. I sit forward in my chair and can feel my heart drop to the core of the earth.
I fiercely love all the films mentioned here, not just for the ways they each shook and shaped my malleable mind and how I, to this day, relate to the images I consume. But it’s images like the one described—which blur the boundaries between performance and embodiment, exactitude and play, and the material and abstract—that demonstrate the value of combining the practices of film production and film study, which most cinema programs keep entirely separate. I always feared that I’d chosen the wrong film program, and that my efforts spent pouring over the history and form of the medium I love, instead of acquiring certain practical skills, would prevent me from contributing to its future. As with many of the thoughts that used to bounce relentlessly through my weary and ever-juvenile mind, I now get to smugly say, as I will again and again in the oncoming years as my brain expands and shrinks and inexorably changes shape: what a crock of shit!
Fast-forward to mid-way through second year, myself and twelve-or-so other hopeful writers crammed into Innis College’s dreaded seminar room for “Critical Writing on Film''—important to these early contours of my life for a number of reasons. Four thin tables are arranged in an awkward square to encourage discussion, leaving a narrow margin of space on the outskirts of the room and a carpeted chasm in the center, which all but the boldest among us (enough to sit cross-legged, surrounded and towered over by their peers) are reluctant to fill. We sit at 45-degree angles and twist slightly toward the front of the room. The blinds are incapable of properly and completely closing, so the faint glow of an overcast day casts a numbing sheen over this week’s screening: Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1914), ever-so-slightly vertically squished in the projection so that Keaton looks 4 feet tall instead of his modest 5'5. I react audibly, and involuntarily, to Keaton’s athletic fusion of his body with his camera, but my gasps and guffaws echo in solitude (by this point I am not yet used to being the lone laugher).
"I sit forward in my chair and can feel my heart drop to the core of the earth."
Another filmic victim of the seminar room finds me wedged in the front-right corner next to the screen, coffee clenched in hand to no avail—a 9 a.m. start means that they’re lucky to see me at all, let alone on time. Sans Soleil (1983) at a 160-degree angle meshes perfectly with the morning’s hypnagogia, its lulling stream of audiovisual stanzas briefly off-setting the crushing sensation—brought on by one of the most parodically Academic courses I’ve ever suffered through—that I am wasting my time with this degree.
Another screening comes along to salvage my morale in a similarly logorrheic class (this one mandatory) taking a much-needed turn toward genre thrills with a week on “heroic bloodshed.” We file into the school's spacious public screening and lecture space Innis Town Hall for John Woo’s The Killer (1989), the prof says his remarks, and then he leaves to do other things. On comes the wrong film by the right filmmaker, Woo’s blistering and devastating Bullet in the Head (1990)—a crime movie-Vietnam thriller mashup that charts the violent dissolution of a trio of friends (possibly inspired by Woo’s falling-out with producer Tsui Hark). But what a happy mistake! To this day, I still haven’t seen The Killer (or Hard Boiled for that matter), so I can’t pretend to be a proper Woo-head, but over the course of those swoony and kinetic two hours, I got the sense that I was being shown some intimate corner of the man’s soul.
Town Hall increasingly becomes a site of wonder eclipsing boredom. Highlights include Ken Jacob’s enrapturing short film Capitalism: Child Labor (2006), in which the director digitally and dazzlingly manipulates a stereoscopic photograph capturing the titular phenomenon in alarmingly quotidian terms, and Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), my first Fassbinder (heart doing cartwheels), which I encounter again a year later in the seminar room for my “Stardom and Performance” class. The second pass is greatly enhanced, and in many ways transformed, by a rewatch of its major reference point All That Heaven Allows (1955) the night before—on a beautiful 35mm print with my beautiful boyfriend—but I digress.
A laptop interlude: I watch The Straight Story (1999) for a David Lynch paper in “Four Studies in Film Authorship” and cry uncontrollably at five-to-ten-minute intervals. I’ve been rewatching Twin Peaks and other Lynch stuff (for class and for pleasure), which puts Straight Story’s many incongruities, and essential similarities, with his neighbouring output into sharper focus; a true, linear story expressed through the visual language of everyday life is steadily perfused with digression, discord, and abstract cosmology—as moving an argument for auteur theory as you’re likely to find post-studio-era.
The middle ground between Town Hall and the seminar room is the “special screening room,” number 222. Forty students can squish semi-comfortably into its rows of semi-plush seats as long as they alternate leaning forward onto their (usually broken) built-in desks and backward onto the stippled fabric of the cushions. On this bleary October day, in “Adult Film History,” I’m a little too comfortable, and a little too cozily hemmed in by my peers, as we watch Joey Yale’s committed butt double get fisted in close-up during the finale of L.A. Plays Itself (1972), verified freak Fred Halsted’s gorgeous and sinister poison pen letter to, and dispatch from, the City of Angels’ sleazy netherworld.
Months later, I’m back in 222 for an even more cramped screening of Rabbit of Seville (1950), a manic film befitting a manic course on the significance of sound recording in cartoons. Bugs Bunny epitomizes almost every deviant social impulse I’ve had in my short life, from his petty and punitive sense of anarchic play (fond memories of pranks played on a neighbour’s much-older stepbrother back in barefoot days), to his aspirational disguises in drag (inextricable to his transformation from huntee to hunter).
In the same room, on alternating days, is “Black Cinema,” which immeasurably ennobles the academic study of film to my cynical mind. There’s a specific image I’ll take with me: a modest and masterful lateral tracking shot from Losing Ground (1982). The camera follows two actors—one an amateur and one an out-of-work professional—as they traverse a row of trees lining a car park. In the distant background, a student filmmaker calls instructions to them (sound will be added later) while the pair flirtatiously discuss their respective relationships with the scene. Their gestures, both arch and natural, are performed for the watching camera, but the words they share are person-to-person, a private exploration of the desire they are pantomiming. The director yells, “I should have prepared you for this, but could you kiss? Really kiss?” and their lips and bodies finally meet with a fire you’d think is impossible to fake. I sit forward in my chair and can feel my heart drop to the core of the earth.
I fiercely love all the films mentioned here, not just for the ways they each shook and shaped my malleable mind and how I, to this day, relate to the images I consume. But it’s images like the one described—which blur the boundaries between performance and embodiment, exactitude and play, and the material and abstract—that demonstrate the value of combining the practices of film production and film study, which most cinema programs keep entirely separate. I always feared that I’d chosen the wrong film program, and that my efforts spent pouring over the history and form of the medium I love, instead of acquiring certain practical skills, would prevent me from contributing to its future. As with many of the thoughts that used to bounce relentlessly through my weary and ever-juvenile mind, I now get to smugly say, as I will again and again in the oncoming years as my brain expands and shrinks and inexorably changes shape: what a crock of shit!