Film School

At some point in the 2010s, I stopped watching films. I didn’t have the bandwidth to invest in their complications and entanglements. As a “professional empathizer” in an emotionally-demanding sector, they weren’t an escape, but a burden piled on. We can only absorb so much.

Surprisingly, I didn’t miss them because it wasn’t only me that changed. Film and television did, too. It was the era of franchises and action flicks, which don’t hold my attention. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime, HBO, and Netflix began pouring billions into streaming, and it was well-made TV. I could watch a show an episode at a time, or even binge a season, but the emotional register was held in suspense, sometimes for years. In contrast, the compression of film means you swallow the entire arc at once. A good film asks for a commitment of the self. It asks that you arrive empty, to be filled up. It’s the difference between a standing reservation and a seven-course meal.

Now I’m evolving again. When the Times published its list of the top 100 films of the century, I decided to watch them all. I like projects.

I’m in film school. I’m focused on how each film is put together, paying less attention to plot, more attention to structure; less attention to characters, more attention to actors; less attention to how I feel, and more attention to what I think. While the Times ranked their list, I’m not watching in any order. My viewing is intuitive and practical: what I feel like watching, what happens to be streaming. Sometimes one film will lead to another, pulled by an actor (Mark Ruffalo, Sandra Hüller, Cate Blanchett) or a director (Christopher Nolan, David Fincher).

This wasn’t always accessible to me. I took a playwriting class in college, but I couldn’t see how to compress or pace a story, or even where one scene ended and another began. When we wrote original scripts, mine vacillated between too much interiority and no action, or all drama.

I suppose I needed more time, more lived experience, and I needed this kind of project to fully appreciate film. In school, I was taught the genre’s constraints, but now I’m able to translate the formula into something like precision, which I understand. Constraint originates from the outside. It’s a framework, an arc, a structure. But precision is alchemical. For example, I saw Greta Gerwig’s talent in Lady Bird (39)—the way she held the tone without slipping into melodrama made me feel like I was breathing into every line. Arrival (29) had me on the edge of my seat the first viewing, and required a second and third to study how director Denis Villeneuve embedded circular logic in a linear art form without disrupting its flow.

I’m only a third of the way through the list, and have picked off a lot of the easy selections in films I’ve seen and loved already. (I’ve previously seen nearly half.) There have only been a handful that I could not finish—too violent, too crude, too frenetic. I’ll try again so my project is complete, but no guarantees. And I’m working my way up to some of the more complex films, including many in the top 10. I find myself browsing the list and still saying no, no, no.

I’d already seen Spotlight (66) and Oceans 11 (71) at least a dozen times; I like to put on a film in the background to set a mood when I do chores. But I’d never listened to them to hear the concise poetry of a script, and the way essential information is conveyed in each line. Now I’m hearing the gaps, what’s unsaid, which our minds easily fill in. I’m listening like a writer. I like ensemble projects too, whether it’s journalists breaking a story or criminals robbing a casino. Something about collaboration and teamwork, and success.

There’s freedom within a container; it gives you walls to lean against. This is the constraint of my project. I didn’t surrender to the genre of film and its emotional overwhelm; I surrendered to an intellectual pilgrimage, and a discrete set. If our capacity to engage with various art forms shifts with life demands, anchoring in craft is what I needed to show up more receptive and available to this one. It also seems like studying an art form might flatten the magic, and yet, somehow, it illuminates it.