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Film
is the ultimate art.
Combining
the written and spoken word, music, and visual expression in a way that
nothing else can, the world of film is a world in which all things are
possible. Film isn’t reality; it’s more than reality: bigger,
brighter, louder, faster. In films you can go anywhere, or to any time;
you can meet anyone and experience everything.
The
film that you watch in the theater or your living room the result of an
amazing collaboration between people with widely divergent views and
abilities, but somehow, it all comes together. Every moment in a film is
purposeful, and every frame represents the creativity of at least one
individual. Watching a movie –
even a bad one – is like getting inside someone’s mind and looking at
the world through his eyes.
When I
was growing up, my father was a movie projectionist. These were the days
when the projectionist was a trained specialist, before the days of
automation when the popcorn guy can also be the projector guy by just
pressing a button. My father spent years in the projection booth, loading
reels, perfecting focus and getting picture and sound into perfect sync.
When the film broke he took pride in careful splicing so as to minimize
any distraction for the future audiences.
There
were three really cool things about having a dad that was a projectionist.
One was hanging out in the projection booth, a tiny room with a deafening
noise that eventually would affect his hearing, but that I found exciting.
The second was getting tiny pieces of film that had been cut out during
the splicing process; over the years I filled an album with .35 mm images
of everything from “Bongo” to “Jaws.”
The best thing was getting into movies for free (something I took
for granted at the time). We could see any film we wanted, and if we liked
it, we could see it again.
Probably
my earliest memory of a movie is watching the first few minutes of
“2001: A Space Odyssey,” released in 1968 when I was four years old. I
remember something about monkeys and a stick and a big stone thing, and
then I remember curling up on the seat and going to sleep. I found out
only recently that my mother had seen the film numerous times, trying to
“figure it out,” and bringing me with her each time.
This
web page isn’t meant to be any sort of official film critic site, but
simply a place for me to store and share my own thoughts about various
films that have affected me in some way. My taste in film is nothing if
not eclectic – among my “Top Twenty-five” are everything from “The
Sound of Music” to “Pulp Fiction.” No doubt the list will grow over
time, but I’ll still call it my “Top Twenty-Five,”
because I like the alliteration.
 NUMBER
ONE: “Citizen Kane.”
1941, Orson Welles, Joseph Cotten, Dorothy Comingore,
Agnes Moorehead.
Sorry I couldn’t be more original, but once you’ve seen Welles’
masterpiece, it really ruins you for other movies and so must remain in a
class by itself. Only in his mid-20s at the time, Welles broke every rule
in the film industry (both visually and politically), and arguably prodded
the evolution of motion pictures toward what they have become today.
I’ve watched this movie more times than I can count and I always
discover some new detail that I’ve missed before. Thank you, Mr. Welles,
for thinking out of the box and creating this timeless work of art.
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