The Things We Love The Most
Why is it that sometimes we deny ourselves the things we love the most? In my case, it's a matter of living the Starving Writer life--of never having the money for luxuries. Tonight, though, I got a serious case of the FuckIts and had a $50 dollar dinner at an Argentine restaurant (yes, with coffee and dessert)--then rented a Louise Brooks movie.
Which meant that I also had to get a membership at the videostore that rents stuff like Louise Brooks movies...
As in most sort-of suburban geographic areas, the majority of movie rentals are out of places like Blockbuster or Movie Gallery or Hollywood Video. People are doing it on line, too, with Netflix or buying directly from Amazon (better selection than the average mall music store.) But down in Northampton there's Pleasant St. Video, which is a single-owner store that reminds me a heck of a lot of the video stores I worked in back in the 1980's.
There was something fun about working in those stores--no uniforms, so we could dress our artsy best. And when we were sold out of new releases, customers wanted recommendations. A pre-requisite for working in most of these stores was a knowledge of film (as they often had obscure titles stocking the shelves that needed a good recommendation to get them rented.) It was fun talking with customers and co-workers about what was good/bad/amazingly bad about movies.
It wasn't like when I walked into Blockbuster and someone working there recommended The League of Extraoridinary Gentleman--possibly the worst movie Sean Connery's ever made. Even Zardoz and Never Say Never Again were better....
Pleasant St. has a good number of strange, obscure stuff--some of it, like the film I rented, only on VHS. Amazing that these things are still playable, but if the rental rate is low, they'll last a bit longer than perhaps Ghostbusters did on its initial release. Pleasant St. has films By Fassbinder and Reifensthal and old Peter Sellers stuff and every Marx Brothers film (try going into Blockbuster and asking for a Marx Brothers film. It's not just that they don't have them--it's that a lot of the folks working there don't know who the Marx Brothers were. Oh, and never mention the Ritz Brothers. They'll think they invented the crackers.)
It's wonderful, too, to be able to say to the guy behind the counter "well, I'm off for a Verhoeven and Pabst double feature!" and he looks at me with a sly, sardonic smile...and knows that I know something about the art of film...
The first loves of my life are my books--the second are movies. Together they are the things I love the most. Movies imprint themselves on me in strange ways. I carry their images and stories in my mind like totems. They inspire me. I remember elements like the mystery box in Kiss Me Deadly or the odd commercial that ran at 1 a.m. for a Russ Meyer film. I remember the mention of films like Jubilee and The Filth and the Fury, which were never released here, and the laughing contest in Kamakazie 89. The intense yet sickening beauty of The Cook, The Theif, His Wife and Her Lover and Marlene Deitrich camping it up in Blonde Venus...
Good movies--even bad movies with beautiful cinematography--often inspire my writing. I write fiction from visual imagery unspooling in my head...as if I were writing out a movie. It's always been that way.
And I've always preferred old or obscure films. Silent movies have haunted me since childhood, and films of the 60's and 70's have story lines and a particular look that can never be duplicated. It's not just that styles change or filmmaking techniques change. It's that culture changes. And filmmaking changes with the culture. Movies, in a sense, stop time and culture. They freeze its images and we can then access them whenever we want.
I want to take those images and toss them in my head, ferment them in my dreams and unconscious, and see what gets produced...
because I know when I feed my writing process, beautiful wonderful things emerge...
Which meant that I also had to get a membership at the videostore that rents stuff like Louise Brooks movies...
As in most sort-of suburban geographic areas, the majority of movie rentals are out of places like Blockbuster or Movie Gallery or Hollywood Video. People are doing it on line, too, with Netflix or buying directly from Amazon (better selection than the average mall music store.) But down in Northampton there's Pleasant St. Video, which is a single-owner store that reminds me a heck of a lot of the video stores I worked in back in the 1980's.
There was something fun about working in those stores--no uniforms, so we could dress our artsy best. And when we were sold out of new releases, customers wanted recommendations. A pre-requisite for working in most of these stores was a knowledge of film (as they often had obscure titles stocking the shelves that needed a good recommendation to get them rented.) It was fun talking with customers and co-workers about what was good/bad/amazingly bad about movies.
It wasn't like when I walked into Blockbuster and someone working there recommended The League of Extraoridinary Gentleman--possibly the worst movie Sean Connery's ever made. Even Zardoz and Never Say Never Again were better....
Pleasant St. has a good number of strange, obscure stuff--some of it, like the film I rented, only on VHS. Amazing that these things are still playable, but if the rental rate is low, they'll last a bit longer than perhaps Ghostbusters did on its initial release. Pleasant St. has films By Fassbinder and Reifensthal and old Peter Sellers stuff and every Marx Brothers film (try going into Blockbuster and asking for a Marx Brothers film. It's not just that they don't have them--it's that a lot of the folks working there don't know who the Marx Brothers were. Oh, and never mention the Ritz Brothers. They'll think they invented the crackers.)
It's wonderful, too, to be able to say to the guy behind the counter "well, I'm off for a Verhoeven and Pabst double feature!" and he looks at me with a sly, sardonic smile...and knows that I know something about the art of film...
The first loves of my life are my books--the second are movies. Together they are the things I love the most. Movies imprint themselves on me in strange ways. I carry their images and stories in my mind like totems. They inspire me. I remember elements like the mystery box in Kiss Me Deadly or the odd commercial that ran at 1 a.m. for a Russ Meyer film. I remember the mention of films like Jubilee and The Filth and the Fury, which were never released here, and the laughing contest in Kamakazie 89. The intense yet sickening beauty of The Cook, The Theif, His Wife and Her Lover and Marlene Deitrich camping it up in Blonde Venus...
Good movies--even bad movies with beautiful cinematography--often inspire my writing. I write fiction from visual imagery unspooling in my head...as if I were writing out a movie. It's always been that way.
And I've always preferred old or obscure films. Silent movies have haunted me since childhood, and films of the 60's and 70's have story lines and a particular look that can never be duplicated. It's not just that styles change or filmmaking techniques change. It's that culture changes. And filmmaking changes with the culture. Movies, in a sense, stop time and culture. They freeze its images and we can then access them whenever we want.
I want to take those images and toss them in my head, ferment them in my dreams and unconscious, and see what gets produced...
because I know when I feed my writing process, beautiful wonderful things emerge...
posted by Tish Grier at 8:57 PM
5 Comments:
What a treat to know that other writers are, like me, inspired by film.
The combination of sound, visual imagery, and movement is why, on a Friday night, I tend to reach for a film rather than a book.
Films that move me to write?
"The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
"Bleu" (Three Colors)
"Breaking the Waves"
"Silvia"
"Dreams"
"Frida"
As I started reading this, I was thinking "did she hit up Pleasant St.?" And lo, you did. There's a place like that down here, and I hang my head in shame that I am not over there much anymore, with the advent of netflix. I will say, on their behalf, they DO have a huge selection, and it's nice to be able to put things in the queue as I hear about them. (OF course my queue is a lot of indie and foreign with a smattering of classics.)
Somehow, I imagine you'll enjoy Firecracker: http://www.dikenga.com/films/firecracker/index.htm
And got any good recommendations in addition to the material in your post?
Tish - I didn't know you were a Derek Jarman fan! I love the late 70's & 80's fringe-y Brit directors - Greenaway, Julien Temple, Alex Cox! Throw Wim Wenders (ever see Wings of Desire?)onto the list & I'm in film heaven.
So great to hear from all of you--and to find other female film buffs! We are, I think, few and far between, ladies...
About film, there's a dreamlike quality to films that hasn't really been explored by psychologists (I can think of only one book that's been written on it)...and many of them effet us in such a profound way...
I really love silents, so movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, anything by F.W. Murnau, or von Stroheim (his stuff is kind of hard to find) or starring Louise Brooks are great.
Other faves are those weird 40's and 50's Film Noir--anything with Dan Duryea for instance. Stuff like Double Cross or Kiss me Deadly...and the great thing about so many of them is that you can go back to the source material--the Earle Stanley Gardner or Dash Hammett books that give details that the movies *couldn't* convey.
Between watching the films and reading the books, I figured out what they meant when they say a character is a "boy" and what a guy's really doing when he's drinking champaign from a lady's slipper...
and Wings of Desire is one of my favorite films! That's one of those special films I got to see in a theater in NYC when it first came out. The scene when the angels are on top of the statue was amazing. And Greenaway's eye for color and visual symbolism sometimes makes me tune out the dialogue just to take in the visuals.
And Sid and Nancy my god! seeing that when I did--when I *was* still a punk and in my 20's...it had such an impact. Frighteningly, that's the way *some* of us were at certain points in our lives.
I'm going to have to do a post soon on films that really *get* me...
oh, and put a plug in for May at Pleasant St. Theater--they're doing 30 films in 30 days for their 30th anniversary and have some of *the* best stuff lined up! I can't wait!
hey Ed! wow, it's really sad to hear that NJ doesn't have a good "vintage" rental store. I imagine alot of them were run out with the Blockbustering of video rental/retailing. But I wonder if it's that NJ is such a media-saturated environment (as compared to W. Mass--you should see the derth here.) I sometimes think all the media saturation that I see going on w/the net and all may be working towards a recycling of the last 30 years of culture and a loss of anything prior to that. I'm not even sure how many of the old silents, distributed by oddball video companies, are available on dvd now. strange how things change...
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