Film, Vicarious Creation, and Personal Direction by Hillary

Film, Vicarious Creation, and Personal Direction by Hillary - October 2016 Scholarship Essay

In high school, I received good grades but rarely felt passionate about the subjects I aced. The one class which I simultaneously enjoyed and in which I was challenged both academically and emotionally was the film class I took in my senior year. This is why film is the subject I would teach.
I had a low opinion of movies and therefore a low expectation for the class. Then the professor put on 2001: A Space Odyssey. Many of the students sitting near me lamented the film for its content, which they found self-indulgent and confusing; however, I recall not so much their bored faces bathed in the blue of the projector as the film’s visual and auditory effects: the crescendoing hum at the appearance of the monolith, the neoclassical room in which the astronaut sees himself decades older. I went home in a post-film daze and spent hours looking at theories on 2001’s meaning. I became aware of film’s ability to be a vehicle for thought and creativity as well as entertainment.
The films we watched in class that resonated most were the ones that connected to other things I was learning about. For example, after the funeral for Henry Lime at the beginning of The Third Man, Lime’s girlfriend Anna walks away along the side of the street alone, which instantly made me think about a required book from that year, Albert Camus’ “The Stranger”. Its protagonist Meursault also walks alongside the road for a funeral. I thought about the meaning of that book, or rather its lack of meaning, and what these visual parallels meant within that context. Did this funeral matter? Later in The Third Man, we discover that the funeral was a sham because Henry Lime is still alive. The protagonist Holly meets with Henry Lime on a ferris wheel, where Henry delivers a speech about how insignificant the deaths of the victims of his diluted penicillin scheme are. This moral nihilism reflects that of The Stranger’s Meursault. I realized then that film had the power to expand our understanding of things we otherwise might only understand superficially.
Film allowed me to understand more than just literature though; it also provided me with a cinematic filter through which to bathe my relatively ordinary life. The vast landscapes of suburban and rural southern United States in Paris, Texas gave me the power to romanticize the small town I grew up in. It became a cultural capital within a suburbia; I saw the kitsch of diners and the flash of headlights around my house with the eyes of a director like Wim Wenders.
Teaching a creative subject like film has the ability to change a student’s life in the way teaching math or anatomy just can’t. When I was at the lowest point of my depression, my teacher put on Dead Poets Society. I was so moved that I then went out and got a tattoo with a phrase from the movie. Now whenever I spy the ink in my reflection, I am transported back to that dimly lit classroom and sometimes even the Dead Poets classroom where I can see the characters reciting poetry and looking at things from different angles for the first time.
Of course, the study of film isn’t just watching movies. There’s much to learn about camera angles, lighting, and other production aspects. Film terminology took on new meaning as I applied it to my own life. There’s the Kuleshov effect, where the same shot of an actor is interposed between shots of what he is looking at. The audience interprets his unchanged facial expression as whatever emotion we feel toward the object or person he is looking at. When the blank face of a love interest or friend becomes either approving or disgusted depending on how I feel about myself/my situation/my clothes/my personality, I remember this trick; nothing about their expression has actually revealed anything, and I’m projecting my own feelings about myself onto them. I also discovered the importance of non-diegetic sound, or noise that exists outside of the film’s universe in order to advance the mood. I turned on the Twin Peaks score as I walked down the school hallways, adding intrigue and mystery to my upcoming history lesson.
I would become a film teacher for all of these reasons. I have a need to indulge in conversation about what I watch, and I want to instill within my students that same desire. Film is often seen as a way to escape from our lives but rarely as a way to enrich it. I want a film class that encourages its students to find the depth and meaning of film in relation to themselves so that they may be inspired to, for example, create their own experimental short film or ace that difficult essay for their lit class. Maybe they’ll notice all the yellow buildings in their otherwise dingy town and pretend to be on the set of a Wes Anderson flick. Maybe they just need to know that other characters--other people--feel the same unexplainable alienation or simple joys that they do. I want to allow my students to live several exciting lives vicariously through the movies I show so that they can be the directors of their own personal and layered narratives.