Life I went to the first night of a new evening class at the university, The Philosophy of Film. So far it's just excellent. Long term readers might remember I've had a pretty mixed experience with these courses, ending up at something called An Introduction to Pop Music and not having any examples to hear and that film course were we spent the first two weeks working our way through chunks Milos Forman's Ragtime without actually seeing the end.
This is different. The tutor has his own definite ideas about movies and those which we are going to discover over what is now nine weeks. Already tonight we saw the earliest of films, La Sortie des usines Lumiere (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory) a great example of how just a moving image without sound capturing a subject can fascinate. There were also clips from Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, Cassavette's Love Streams and Gun Crazy (one of those B movie which transcends its form -- the kind of thing Scorsese eulogises about in documentaries). One of the core ideas seems to be that a film doesn't have to be stupidly expensive or even perfectly made to have value, something forgotten time and again now.
Of course I'd never heard of these films, let alone seen them and really that's what the magic of this course is going to be -- having a guide into yet more filmic forms being educated about all things I really should be. John the tutor had a looked stunned that we hadn't heard of this stuff, which makes him my kind of film fan. But there is a genuine love for film in the room -- for a change I can mention I've seen something like House of Flying Daggers and other people also been there or know what it's about or know the director. It's good to know there are still corners of the universe were this can happen.
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