Hopefully Coming Out of Hibernation
So I haven’t posted anything in over a month. I would feel bad, except I had finals (or rather, a load of papers and projects I had to scramble to finish). Then, I had to take a temp job over winter break, so basically, almost everything has been on hold.
I did, however, manage to watch a few good movies over break. I saw Melancholia last night, and had a movie marathon with friends, which consisted of Hunger, Shadow of A Doubt, and Coraline (although I’d already seen it). I’d have to say, among the group, Hunger and Melancholia left the greatest impression on me. I was blown away by Michael Fassbender’s acting in Hunger and the film’s strange pacing, and Melancholia was surprisingly gripping. But of course, I can’t deny the brilliance of Shadow of A Doubt either because you can almost never go wrong with Hitchcock, and Joseph Cotten is now becoming a personal favorite.
I’ve also been mulling over my knowledge of film history a lot lately. I’m sure I’ve bemoaned this before, but I feel like I’m nowhere near the knowledge base that I’d like to achieve. I think the pressures of school and work and a social life have contributed to that, and that’s fine. Doing well in school and having time for friends will always be high on my priority list because that’s part of what makes me happy. But, I still think I could be more informed. While writing one of my final papers this past semester (in which I had to analyze my journey as a student), I realized that part of succeeding in college (and in the real world, actually) is being responsible for your own learning. I can’t just rely on my professors to tell me everything I need to know on a certain subject or topic. I have to fill in the blanks for myself. I’ve learned so much in my film classes over the past couple years, and that’s given me more confidence in my film writing, but there are still major blanks I have to fill there as well. I can’t even believe the amount of film criticism I haven’t even tapped into, and all of the films I want to see.
As a result, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to read up more on film criticism and film history on my own time this year. It’s a rather overwhelming goal for me since I barely know where to start. My goal right now is simply to read a little bit every day—read film news, re-read my some of my textbooks, search out aspects of film I haven’t learned much about yet. That’s all I can really do at the moment since I’ve become so busy this school year, and I would still like to maintain a balance.
I would love to lounge about all day and learn about film, and take my time with it, but alas, that will not pay the bills.
