My 5-Movie Introduction to Cinema
Filmstack Challenge #3
This is a response to FilmStack challenge #3, started by Ted Hope, this month presented by Sophie of That Final Scene. You can read her challenge here and publish your response.
What 5 movies would you use to turn someone into a film lover?
People don’t fall in love with movies alone; they also fall for them because of the people they see them with. Just like a restaurant meal alone will not be as memorable as one with close friends or family, it’s impossible to separate a great experience from those you share it with.
My love of cinema goes back to my father, who took me to movies around California’s East Bay Area throughout my childhood, which had a lot of great rep houses. We saw new movies and old, always at the theater, the way movies are meant to be seen.
Plus, my parents refused to own a TV, so movie theaters were the only option.
Sullivan’s Travels
Even before I was old enough to see it, my parents told me the glory of Sullivan’s Travels, a 1941 movie about a successful Hollywood comedy director who wants to make a serious and important movie, “something that would realize the potentialities of film as the socialogical and artistic medium that it is.”
This film he wants to make, about the Great Depression, with people eating out of garbage cans and “death staring you in the face,” is titled O Brother, Where Art Thou?
To quote his butler, “People are always interested in things they know nothing about.”
The only problem is that this director has lived a posh and frictionless life, which is what has made his comedies so delightful. The plot follows John Sullivan as he sets out to cosplay as a hobo to find out what trouble is, only to learn the lesson of “write what you know,” and to respect your own experience as valid - you don’t need to chase the headlines.
What I love about this film is that every filmmaker (and artist) needs to overcome the delusion of self-importance in their work. It’s also the perfect encapsulation of the eternal emptiness of success. No matter how many popular films the director Sullivan has made, he can’t be happy because he hasn’t made an “important” film.
Nobody wants to see your important film. Just make us laugh or cry. And put a little sex in it!
Amadeus
My dad took me to see Amadeus in the theater five times. This was at my request. I fell in love with this movie because I connected to the young Mozart character (I was learning to play the harpsichord at the time), trapped in a life of brilliant creative impulses and brought down by jealousy. It’s also a film that I watch fundamentally differently as an adult, feeling like one of those great novels that change with you as you age.
Milos Forman’s use of score to convey the brilliance of the artist’s mind is the perfect combination of film and music, just as the MTV revolution was getting on it’s feet.
When I think about films I imagine shots, but when I experience films I am sucked in by the soundtrack. In the scene below, Antonio Salieri looks at Mozart’s uncorrected first drafts of score and is overwhelmed by their brilliance. He grows more and more jealous as he turns from one page to the next, the sound of each piece mixing together in his head, until he can’t take it anymore and the manuscripts fall to the floor. Salieri narrates: “I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes, at an absolute beauty.”
I don’t care that most of the story is made up, the film is the perfect encapsulation of the creative process, and the havoc that can wreak. It’s also a great example of how important and powerful a soundtrack can be for the cinematic experience.
Superman (Christopher Reeve)
My Aunt Tasia always took my siblings and I to Superman movies as we were growing up. I think she liked the wholesomeness of the character, how he was always standing up for good, and the little guy.
A good man is hard to find.
A couple of key moments still stand out in my memory - one scene follows a burglar as he ascends a skyscraper’s facade using suction cups. He climbs and climbs until he reaches a red boot. They cut wide and we see Superman standing on the building, perpendicular to the ground. My little film mind was blown away! How could he do that?
My aunt explained that they built a set on the ground and turned the cameras sideways to create the illusion.
That shot stuck with me, and I’ve made a few of the same tricks work over the years myself. First, as gaffer on The Hebrew Hammer, Adam Goldberg and Mario Van Peebles climb up a wall to infiltrate the evil son of Santa’s workshop.
Secondly, as DP and producer on The Adventures of Paul and Marian, Jay Stern’s green-screen musical extravaganza, we had several scenes of rock and mountain climbing as Paul searches for the meaning of life.
In both cases, as we shot my brain flooded with warm memories of those childhood trips to the theater with my aunt.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
My Uncle George always took us to Star Trek movies. He was the local science fiction buff and enjoyed giving my parents a break from the kids. The epic quality of the space ship footage (especially compared to the limited budget of the TV series) stood out to me, but what really caught my attention was the plot device of the crew discovering the Voyager probe, which Earth had launched hundreds of years before.
We had studied the recent 1977 Voyager probe launches in school, so it was exciting to see real world science in the movie. Powered by plutonium-238, these craft are still out in interstellar space, transmitting a weak signal and carrying a “golden record” which contains sounds and images of Earth.
Maybe they will outlast us…
My younger brother was more fixated on actor Persis Khambatta’s bald head - living in Berkeley, we had never seen a woman without long hair. He kept asking my uncle “did she go grocery shopping looking like that?”
The first Star Trek movie was finding it’s footing from the TV show, and was probably a little too-inspired by Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Wrath of Khan was a whole new world for inspiring my future filmmaker. The layers of backstory that folded perfectly into the present tense were so well told that I didn’t even need to have seen the original episode that inspired it. Walking out of the space shots of the final frontier it was always a shock to hit daylight.
As the series continued, there were good and bad movies, but overall I feel like Star Trek is one of the best ways to get kids interested in science and moives.
R.I.P., Gene Roddenberry.
School of Rock
I can’t end this list without passing on to the next generation, and one of my own kids favorite family films is Richard Linklater’s School of Rock.
We’ve enjoyed so many movies together, but this one weaves such a great fantasy for school-age children and Jack Black’s antics are infectious and hilarious. My daughters can sing along to every song, even the one that’s on the Broadway-only soundtrack. They both play piano and totally connect to the young boy who goes from playing Mozart to playing The Who in under 90 minutes. Pure cinematic joy.
Every time we watch the film, it inspires hours of rock education via youtube clips of classic rock and metal acts, live shows and music videos. Important cultural lessons must be passed down through the generations.
Now, you might say, “Gee Alan, this sure is a paint by numbers movie for an auteur like Linklater,” but I don’t care.
I love epic slow art films, but that’s not what got me into cinema. Fun movies that anyone can enjoy are the most important “gateway drugs” if you ask me.
So, since you’re asking.
The 5 films that my dad took me to as a child which had the biggest impact on my mindset and career: Aguire, the Wrath of God, My Life as a Dog, Au Revoir Les Enfants, Coming to America, and The Last Emperor.
The 5 films that my college film teacher Jill Godmilow inspired me with: Ali, Fear Eats the Soul, Germany in Autumn, The Inextinguishable Fire, Babe, and The Marriage of Maria Braun.
The 5 inspiring films that I found on my own, reading Village Voice reviews and stumbling into various New York City arthouse theaters: Happy Together, Princess Mononoke, Andrei Rublev, Boogie Nights, and anything by Yasujirō Ozu, but especially An Autumn Afternoon.
It’s hard for me to believe, but there was a major portion of my life when I had not heard of Ozu. Then one month, the Film Forum was doing a retrospective of all his films and I said, who’s that? Then I found out. Wouldn’t have started with him, but he’s one natural minimalist end-point for narrative filmmaking. My favorite quote of his is “other directors make fancy dishes like pork or steak. I make tofu.”
Keep it simple. Here’s to the tofu makers.
Inspiring!!!
This is an EXCELLENT list!!!