My Story

As a kid I encountered the IMDb Top 250 and found it pretty cool. My sisters and I looked through it and counted how many of the films we had seen. It was probably about 10 or 15, things like Star Wars, Toy Story, and Indiana Jones. I didn’t think much of it for a few years.

When I was 14, I re-discovered it and again counted how many films on the list I had seen. It was something like 20 or 30. I had seen just enough movies near the top of the list to give me a sense of pride, and had just enough pride to feel a sense of embarrassment at the number of films on the list I hadn’t seen. So I started obsessively hunting down everything on the IMDb Top 250. I searched online for classic movies, rented them 3-at-a-time from Superclub Videotron, regularly scanned the TV Guide so that I could plan my day around the interesting films. I crossed highly acclaimed movies like Casablanca, Citizen Kane, The Godfather, It’s A Wonderful Life, The Seventh Seal, and Raging Bull off the list and began to think of myself as a film buff. I didn’t necessarily like the classic movies I watched but I still went through as many as I possibly could so that I could say I saw them. At the very least, I became accustomed to watching movies in black-and-white and in different genres, time periods, and styles.

My old favourite movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of The Black Pearl was replaced with The Usual Suspects. I became a fan of all those dark, stylish movies of the 90s and early 00s: Fight Club, American Beauty, Magnolia, Boogie Nights, Se7en, Memento, American History X, Requiem For A Dream, Reservoir Dogs, … These filmmakers were smart, flashy, witty, ironic, gritty. Their films were like puzzles that needed to be solved, decoded.

My favourite director was Stanley Kubrick. I loved how his fans treated his films as the highly religious treat their biblical texts. As a young Jew, I was taught that every letter in the Torah was there for a reason. If a word was found to be redundant or a sentence seemed to be contradictory, it became our job to uncover the explanation for why the biblical passage is written in such a way. There was always some ingenious answer as to why the contradiction was not a contradiction at all. Similarly, when one thinks he’s spotted a mistake in a Stanley Kubrick film, he gives Kubrick the benefit of the doubt, thinking of some artistic significance for this supposed mistake. Although there’s no doubt some people go too far with their interpretations of Kubrick’s work, I think he earned that respect he gets from his viewers by proving himself as a careful technician, a perfectionist that crafts every detail of his films. I wanted to be like that, someone that planned every detail and whose movies had to be seen several times in order to be fully appreciated.

Later on, I discovered the French New Wave and became a huge fan of how Truffaut and especially Godard so playfully broke the laws of cinema. I liked them because they were pranksters, deconstructing narrative and genre conventions, upsetting audience expectations, breaking the fourth wall. They did everything I wished I could have done and they did it with style.

When I was 16, 17, 18, 19 I watched hundreds of movies a year, often several in a day. I remember having the goal of completing the entire IMDb Top 250 before I turned 18, but I eventually gave up, frustrated by all the crappy new movies that attained high spots on the list, bumping down stuff I had already seen. In addition to this, there was a lot of fluctuation at the bottom of the list and it seemed impossible to nail a target that never stayed put. I had seen something like 225 when I stopped caring.

In addition to watching movies I amassed an impressive pile of movie trivia. I could tell you what year almost every movie I knew of was released in. I knew which actors had done which films, I knew every major director’s filmography, I memorized Oscar winners and nominees. In short, I knew all sorts of trivialities and very little that mattered.

I went into Communications Studies in university with the intention of becoming a writer-director. I chose Film Studies as a minor because I figured I would be able to get good grades without any effort (I was right about that). When I got to school I realized that “Film Studies” was absolutely nothing like the subject I had mastered. There was no essay for which my collection of nerdy trivia could be applied. We weren’t learning how specific film techniques achieved certain effects, or how great artists worked. But neither were we learning about anything that was actually useful. Rather, we learned about the ontology of the photographic image, sociological readings of Mickey Mouse, poststructuralist theories of gender roles, the impact of digital media on our traditional understanding of cinema. Nothing, in short, that the vast majority of cinephiles could care less about. Certainly, nothing that would ever affect the real world, outside the bubble of a handful of interested academics.

I write now from the perspective of someone who has seen only a handful of movies in the past few months, almost none of them interesting. I don’t watch movies anymore. I’m not sure I like them. I tend to lose my attention in middle of them and often don’t even pick up on basic details of the plot.

Nevertheless I continue to aspire to be a filmmaker.

This blog is an attempt of mine to organize my ideas and receive feedback on them, to offer my ideas to others even while correcting them based on the responses I get.