The Start of Something New!

Where to begin...

My name is Alan Lawrence. I'm a 29-year-old teacher and filmmaker. I am, to a very small degree, a published author, and a common and not necessarily very well-loved haunt of a number of online film and DVD blogs and message-boards.

At the advice of my friend Angie I'm going to start a blog posting my thoughts on the movies, mostly, and, perhaps as a secondary feature, life as I see it. Life, as I see it, is intertwined with my movie experience. I love teaching, but my first and most demanding love is the movies. I'm not always sure the reason the movies matter to me, so perhaps this blog will be a way in which I continue to discover new ways in which the movies inform and reflect life around us.

In the late, great Edward Yang's 2000 movie, "Yi Yi," the character "Fatty" suggests a piece of his grandfather's wisdom that offers perhaps an fresh perspective on the movies in general. The grandfather's theory is that since the advent of movies, we live twice as much as before, because the experiences we encounter vicariously on screen add to our daily intake of experience that continually informs our lives. A description of the Grotowskian acting style I once heard elucidated this point further. "None of us have ever killed anyone," the speaker said somewhat presumptuously; "but we all know what it's like when someone is killed because we've all seen it in the theater and on film." It strikes me that there is a lot of sense in this view of drama in general.

Is that suggestion too much? Perhaps readers out there who have experienced strong emotions via death of a loved one, etc., might be offended. To say that the movies we create can even come close to approximating the feelings of longing, loss, bereavement, suffering that we go through in our lives might be pretentious in the extreme. And certainly the older people that I know turn away from fiction as being useful or worthwhile for them.

Still, I think about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, still writing magical realism at 80, and Michaelangelo Antonioni soldiering away at "The Delicate Thread of Things." 82-year-old Seijun Suzuki at work on the musical "Princess Raccoon"--his best-loved film? Shuji Terayama at death's door, refusing to be hospitalized until finishing "Farewell to the Ark." Tatsumi Kumashiro, directing his final film in an iron lung. These are people who keep exploring, even as they advance on old age and infirmity. How relevant is fiction? Depends on what you use it for.

I use film to explore. I don't work in the film industry, precisely because the thing I want most out of film is to explore the depths of my imagination. I want authorship, because it gives me a control of process and ideas that allows me to explore that very way. Because I won't concede authorship (though I always share it with a co-director--probably more on that later), I look to my other interests and talents to find a way to make a living, and I make films that are meaningful and often relevatory to me. That, and I watch a huge volume of movies.

When I was about 20 my rental account at Blockbuster was transferred to a different video store. I wanted to rent a couple of movies--mostly Kinji Fukasaku's "Black Lizard"--which were only present at the San Marino location, and this made the transfer of my account necessary. The girl at the register did a double-take when the account came over the wire.

"Ohmigod," she said. "You've rented over 1200 movies with us!" I recall she had a very valley-girl, declamatory way of speaking.

A few months later, that figure still alive in my head, I began adding up the movie tickets I had saved in a coffee can in my room from all the movies I had seen in theaters since 1991's "The Rocketeer." That was another 350 films, give-or-take. I added to that the 500 or so Hong Kong films I had rented from a video store in Alhambra and I realized I'd spent a serious amount of my life sitting there watching movies. Since then I've thrown away the coffee can and information like the accounts they kept at Blockbuster appear to have become sort of moot in the information age. But the count rises above 6000. At this point I've watched a lot of movies, read a lot about movies, and I've made a number of short films. At the moment I'm working on my first feature-length movie. I've worked with organizations that screened movies, I've programmed a festival, and chaired a panel discussion on cinema. Who cares that it was not successful. I'm at the point that I can share, with confidence, some opinions about the movies. And I think I bring an interesting angle to these discussions.

The 2000 or so films I saw by the time I made it to Blockbuster were for the most part American movies. Discount the 500 from Hong Kong and say that at the beginning there were about 1500 American films. Primarily from Hollywood, although I started watching films seriously around the time when the American Independent film movement happened. I saw a lot of that, too. But at the end of the day I could say that I'd seen what there was to see. And then I saw a movie from Hong Kong where a baby falls two stories in an abandoned house. A sort of a costumed superwoman dives to rescue the infant, but the child perishes from a protruding rusty nail.

In one particularly ugly moment, my world changed. I could have sworn that there was no way that baby would die. In Hollywood, at that time, it never would have happened. I was well-versed in genre, and there just wasn't a genre, horror or otherwise, where they would kill a baby like that. Still, it happened, and not even at the climax of the film, either. Just somewhere in the middle. It wasn't even the most grotesque thing to happen in "The Heroic Trio"--all in all a very strange film. The curiosity that was picqued in me gave steam to a full-fledged investigation of film from all corners of the globe. I watched the gamut of Hong Kong cinema available at the time, and from there went to Japanese film, and then on to Korean cinema. From there I branched out to Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Africa, Thailand, all I could see from Vietnam and Laos, and so on. I began to read subtitles with a fluency that few other people possess.

That is why this blog is about "reading" movies. It denotes the unique perspective I bring to cinema exploration. Many with language facility far in excess of my own will tell you that much is lost in the translation of a film into another language. Fine. But film is predominantly a visual medium. And what is gained by reading and seeing a movie made in another place, another time, with another radically different perspective is what Fatty's grandfather is talking about in "Yi Yi." We're adding to our knowledge and experience, taking in something far from our own ken. And just as the French New Wave critics of Cahiers Du Cinema read cultural and filmic resonance into the works of American B-movie cinema like that of Val Lewton and Edgar Ulmer, reading a movie in translation gives us a penetrating view--a discovery of our own, and one which I wonder if we might have made had we been processing the original language precisely?

So this is a blog about reading into movies, and exploring other cultures and reflections. I like to converse and argue. I'd love people to offer comments of their own, however abstract they might turn out (this is the world wide web, after all). Criticize! I'm Scottish. Criticism is in our bloodstream. Let swing! I'll be back with more posts and hopefully we can get some discussions going.

Ciao,

Alan