This could be the last time I write about film.
After four years of film studies, I’m left feeling a bit lost. Looking out into the real world, I see a wide range of careers that are exciting and bright and possible — I see many less that match up with the knowledge base I’ve spent my college career building. So I’m left wondering, where is the value in what I’ve spent my time in Ann Arbor learning? When will I find the purpose in watching every single movie with a (maybe too) Freudian lens? Is it worth four years of tuition to be able to detect the Truffaut reference in a Childish Gambino lyric? Do I sound pretentious when I refer to movies as “films?”
Boiling down all of the test-cramming, paper-writing, big-book-reading and class-discussion-navigating, I can really only come up with two main ideas. One: Film is everything around us, all-encompassing and reflective. Two: Our opinions are the most and least important part.
It’s an upside-down and inside-out and very non-deductively valid argument. But I’m going to try. Premise one: Everything we are is reflected in film. Give people a camera, a projector and time, and they have the tools to explain to anyone watching what makes up the important stuff of their lives. We tend to think of the world from our classic, Hollywood-centric bubble, but there is a national cinema to represent nearly every country and an identifiable importance in doing so. In the 1960s, the French government initiated a program that paid screenwriters big money just to write a script and potentially shoot it. Documenting their young people’s voices and exporting them to the world as an image of what it was to be French was a national priority. In Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and early Communist China, propaganda film schools sprung up with government funding. The power of moving images was recognized as an invincibly strong force in regimes known most for their extreme violence. Writing with your camera, referred to in some theory as the caméra-stylo, gives a somewhat invisible strength to those filming, wielded both positively and negatively.
Premise two: Our opinions towards a given film are the most and least important part. No type of movie is objectively better than another, and no matter what you think, it’s impossible to distill what we see on screen in terms of what’s “good” or “bad.” I’m one of the worst offenders of this. As a film critic, I spend my movie-watching time judging what works and what doesn’t, what you should like or disown, what letter grade to give a work that people have spent years of effort and millions of dollars on.
But in the end, everyone’s a critic. The reasons you like or dislike a movie are entirely personal, and it’s futile to judge those that have won awards or had successful runs at the box office as inherently better or smarter. I once watched acclaimed writer Nick Delbanco be unable to control his loud laugh through an entire screening of “Clueless.” I’ve learned my most valuable lessons from professors who spend years analyzing big ideas, like the impact of nations’ underground cinema movements on colonialism, and then easily turn around and geek out over the latest “Transformers” blockbuster. Films hold the value we impart on them. They give us a lens into ourselves, and yes, maybe some are uncomfortable and scary and weird. But there’s a reason you feel this way, so let’s explore it. Filmmaking is such an exciting mix of the most basic, traditional storytelling and the wildest, most advanced technology, so let’s do whatever we want with it. There is no such thing as a guilty pleasure movie, so let’s watch everything.
Looking at these ideas, I think I’ve come to the conclusion that, like many degrees, the value in studying film lies primarily in the ability to learn. The film major at the University of Michigan is not called a film major; it’s deemed “Screen Arts and Cultures.” It took me a while to figure out why this was. Film teaches us that there is no sense of normal in the world, and that our personal backgrounds each represent only one of a world of experiences. By watching and digesting the images on screen, we learn how to learn from other cultures, people, lives. We revise our idea of what it is to see, we dip through different time periods and nations on screen, we spin into trails of thought and connection we never before thought to try and understand. And hopefully, all this watching equips us to handle an equally unexpected world. I’m pretty sure I’m ready for that.