A New Year without Movies

Imagine:

Something like twelve hours after the film. Or a year. I mean, I have not seen even one film this year. The situation is quite sad.

Or it is New Year's Day. Eve. Day. My sister. My daughter.

The films in question: Cameraperson and The Witness. (I also watched Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies but those are not the inspiration for what I would like to write.)

I thought about writing about my favorite movies from 2016, but I think I will save that sort of thing for an entry about the Oscars next month. So, what I wanted to write about...

It was after midnight, the first morning of the new year. I realized after writing just that much that I was too tired to keep making sense for any real length of words. I put the keyboard away, got some sleep, then New Year's Day proper I watched no movies. I was going to get back to the entry once I was watching or had watched my first film of the year.

Then, things got weirder because I watched no movies on the second of January either.

For the most part, I had run out of movies in theaters. The few movies out there that I had not seen yet (notably Toni Erdmann, Silence, Elle, A Monster Calls, Live by Night) were playing far away, were playing only once a day, and/or were playing only at theaters my MoviePass could not get me into. Oscar-qualifying runs. They would be at other theaters soon. If I could just be patient.

I am trying.

Today, on the other hand, I am watching some movies. Well, that is the plan. I am only watching the first of maybe several. I noticed last night that a few of the documentaries on the Oscar shortlist are available on Amazon. Right now, "Weiner is playing.

I had intended to use Cameraperson as a jumping off point to talk about being grounded in reality through films. And, for the record, I do not just mean that a) only documentaries can ground us (i.e. that scripted films cannot also ground us), or b) that documentaries are so consistently objective as to represent reality accurately.

But, what is interesting about Cameraperson in particular is that it is personal. Deliberately personal. Documentary cinematographer Kirsten Johnson presents footage (mostly) shot for other documentaries pieced together as her memoir. She includes as well footage of her mother who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and footage of her children playing wither their grandfather. She grounds her professional footage in personal footage and uses disparate pieces of other stories to tell her own story.

I cannot find where I mentioned it in my old blog but a couple years ago I did this thing in Performance Studies class where I used biographical details about other men named Robert Black to explain who I was. So, I like this approach. Plus, that is a great deal of what the old blog was. My life in movies. My life through movies. My life with movies.

I figure this blog, if I manage to keep it going regularly (but apparently not daily), will be the same. I also figure that, given the Trump administration about to be in office, it may get political from time to time.

Like it was not often political before.

Like film itself is not inherently political.

Like writing itself is not inherently political.

 

 

 

 

 

For the record, this will not be a year without movies.

That is not a thing.