Vague Film Thoughts

I’ve been thinking a lot, about images, situations, what I want to say with my film–if I decide to make one, that is. Emily says that because that’s all I want to do is see movies all day that I’m headed in the right direction. Several themes have popped up, that I’ve investigated over the years already, but statically–like obsession, love, longing, the male body. I finally saw Polanski’s amazing debut feature, Knife in the Water, and was intrigued by the beauty and simplicity of the premise–3 people on a boat. The whole film seethes with the tension and inevitability of human nature. An image that keeps popping up is Maria Falconetti’s anguished face in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, one of the most moving cinematic gestures, conveyed through an almost claustrophobic 120 minute closeup of a face. I’ve only seen one convincing eroticization of the big hairy (and much older) male, and that was Mark d’Auria’s Smoke, which was booed at the screening that I, all teary and excited, attended. I’m also thinking of films with knockout performances like Günter Lamprecht’s Franz Biberkopf in Berlin Alexanderplatz, or Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress, Thelma Ritter in Pickup on South Street. Would I make love to my subject the way Hitchcock did with Grace Kelley in Rear Window, or just follow my Mastroianni and Moreau around like Antonioni? My heroes are as diverse as Wong Kar Wai and Rouben Mamoulian. Whenever I think of looking at a body in film, I see Brigitte Bardot in that fantastic first scene in Contempt, and collapse under the weight of these glorious visionaries. I’m swimming in the dense vision of others right now, waiting to see if there’s anything original that I might like to add to the mix. I know that I don’t want to make gay film festival tripe, or jump on the indie narrative bandwagon. Scott King’s delicious Treasure Island is a sort of model, for its gratuitous male nudity, density, and queasy sexuality, what an IMDB reviewer called “A treasure of bad film making.” I would so love to have that be my epitaph.