What's been the most shocking for me about my interest in film is the ways it has expanded my interest into other important issues. I grew up on Hollywood melodramas and I sadly wonder if I would have been content with them if not for the by chance encounters I had with a few foreign films during my late teens, namely Tarkovsky's Stalker and von Trier's Dancer in the Dark. I ended up going to college in a town with only one movie theater and where the best I could do to feed my curiosity was a sparse shelf or two's worth of foreign films at a couple of video stores. Mind you this is all pre-Netflix and I had trouble justifying not only purchasing videos I had never seen and had little knowledge of but of renting them as well since I was on a rather limited budget. And so it remained a passing interest until recently. But I digress!
A couple months ago I watched my first to Kiarostami films and although I struggled a bit with the first (mostly due to wrongful preconceived expectations which created more distance and confusion than any sort of dislike per say), halfway through the second film I was hooked. But as I began researching Kiarostami as a director, my studies began to diverge more into an interest in modern Iranian history and culture than on cinema directly. This was in part sparked by recent viewings of a few documentaries on the Iraq War, which emphasized my complete ignorance on the Middle East. This correlation between cinema and understanding history, politics, and cultures is nothing new though. I had already struggled with this during my periods of studying early Russian, modern Chinese, and post-war Japanese cinema, among others. But this time, something in me had changed.
Before my interest was predominantly cinematic but now feels more sincere. I genuinely want to understand global issues in the hopes of becoming more actively involved/invested in them. I've used passivity as a defense mechanism for survival and always saw it as a bad habit in need of being unlearned. I think one of my friends said it best when asked if he saw me as a rebel (off one of those cheesy how-well-do-you-know-me forwards), he said he saw me as an admirer of rebels, planning her escape. I question the likelihood of that escape, but I am approaching it now with a velocity never before expected.
And so how is this all materializing? I'll expand on this tomorrow.
A couple months ago I watched my first to Kiarostami films and although I struggled a bit with the first (mostly due to wrongful preconceived expectations which created more distance and confusion than any sort of dislike per say), halfway through the second film I was hooked. But as I began researching Kiarostami as a director, my studies began to diverge more into an interest in modern Iranian history and culture than on cinema directly. This was in part sparked by recent viewings of a few documentaries on the Iraq War, which emphasized my complete ignorance on the Middle East. This correlation between cinema and understanding history, politics, and cultures is nothing new though. I had already struggled with this during my periods of studying early Russian, modern Chinese, and post-war Japanese cinema, among others. But this time, something in me had changed.
Before my interest was predominantly cinematic but now feels more sincere. I genuinely want to understand global issues in the hopes of becoming more actively involved/invested in them. I've used passivity as a defense mechanism for survival and always saw it as a bad habit in need of being unlearned. I think one of my friends said it best when asked if he saw me as a rebel (off one of those cheesy how-well-do-you-know-me forwards), he said he saw me as an admirer of rebels, planning her escape. I question the likelihood of that escape, but I am approaching it now with a velocity never before expected.
And so how is this all materializing? I'll expand on this tomorrow.
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