Favorite Favorites

To cap off the Practice of Theory series, I’d like to put my money where my mouth is and talk about a few of my favorite films and why they’re my favorite.  The last thing you ever want to do is ask a film student what his or her favorite film is.  I heard a joke once, that the answer will either be ‘it depends on the genre’ or ‘Citizen Kane’.  So rather than mention a few films and tell you why I like each of them, I’ll lay out a few things that I like to see in films, and then list a few that exemplify them. 

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As a filmmaker, I really love movies about movies, perhaps in the same way that a doctor might love Patch Adams or Awakening...or Robin Williams.  Films about film are self-reflexive, which means that they comment on their own creation and reflect on their own existence - they are meta-cinematic.  Film history and film production is a fascinating subject for a film, because it is often peopled with artful, if not artistic, characters and infamous events.  Some of my favorites are Fellini’s 8 ½, Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, and Altman’s The Player.  These films take a self-deprecating, even cynical look at artistic creation, and at the less than idealistic motives that drive the film industry. 

Also, I like films that make you think, or that even confuse you.  And I also like highly stylized films -films that use technical elements (lighting, camera, color, sound, location, etc) to achieve an effect or create a certain look.  The directors I’m thinking of here are Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Sorrentino.  A film like 2001 or Stalker or Il Divo (which are by these three directors, respectively) has a distinctive style.  Style is crafted through precise choices, to project a certain feel, or to express something about the theme, story, characters, or ethics.  These films are both stunning to watch and fascinating to think about. 

I like films that simply tell a good story, regardless of how much the camera moves, or whether the colors are stylized.  Films that I could watch over and over for the story as well as the aesthetics are October Sky, Gran Torino, Cold Mountain, Ocean’s 11, Imitation of Life, Blade Runner, Say Anything, Meet the Parents, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Raising Arizona, Shawshank Redemption, High Fidelity, and Benny and Joon.  They’re special to me for their ability to tell a damn good story, to make me laugh, or make me feel something deeply.  These are all fairly mainstream films that probably won’t show up in too many film theory text books or be taught in many Film Aesthetics classrooms, unfortunately.  But when someone asks me my favorite film, it is often one of these that first comes to mind.       

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Epilogue

[written in June...]

I write this all on the night before my Film Aesthetics final exam [with heavy revisions two months after the fact, now that I am finally posting this].  Tomorrow I will have three hours to write an essay answering one question.  I’ll have to show that I understand something about Film Aesthetics and can articulate my own opinions amid those of the theorists and critics.  Feeling pretty nervous tonight, I can say with absolute certainty that both film theory and film practice will be intertwined in my own future projects, and I know that what I’ve begun this year will be the start of a lifetime effort to the answer that eternal question, What is Film?