(no subject)
Happy (Belated) Birthday, connielane!
In honor of yesterday, a little anecdote from my Italian Cinema class that connielane might enjoy:
Several weeks ago, in Italy, my film professor Ermelinda Campani was explaining to us the difference between the story (concatenation of events) and the discourse (style) of a film. We had just watched Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up the previous day, a highly stylistic film without much coherent plot -- it seems like a mystery, but the mystery is never solved. At any rate, Professor Campani asked us if we knew of any contemporary directors with certain trademarks of style that identified everything in their body or work as their own, and of course someone brought up Quentin Tarantino.
This is when film major Mark (roommate of both ex-gay-best-friend and last-minute-love-interest) starts to get all in a huff. When our teacher says she loved Kill Bill, he can't contain himself anymore and starts to let the accusations fly. He liked Tarantino's earlier works, but Kill Bill is just a masturbatory obsession with his own style! Tarantino is too in love with himself and he's finally crossed the line! The film has no content and no meaning! Kill Bill is a postmodern collapse! (Mark actually used the word "masturbatory" at least four times over the course of this debate, but our teacher blithely ignored it). Professor Campani, on the other hand, said that Tarantino was merely testing the limits of the genre (not necessarily crossing them as Mark suggested), and that it didn't matter if there was no moral to the story, because some movies are just not about the story. (Personally I thought Kill Bill did have a very compelling story, and it's one of the things I liked about the movie, along with the style). Essentially what it came down to was our professor arguing that a film can be great art without having any deeper meaning, and Mark arguing that without meaning a film is worthless.
This debate went on for quite a while, until class time was up. At the end our professor mentioned, casually, that she would e-mail Tarantino (whom she had met many times and corresponded with every once in a while) and tell him about our discussion, and if he wrote back she would let us know what he thought. Neither Mark nor any of the rest of us expected him to actually write back, but sure enough, the next class Prof. Campani came in with Tarantino's reply. It was, as it turned out, quite wishy-washy -- he was glad to hear that his films were provoking such controversy, because that told him that they were worthwhile; he didn't state his opinion on the style vs. story question, but I guess it's faily obvious that he loves him some good discourse. Above all, he was flattered to hear that we were discussing Kill Bill in such a beautiful place as Florence.
And that's my little film class anecdote. Our teacher was such a character, and I'm very glad I picked the cinema class in the end.
In honor of yesterday, a little anecdote from my Italian Cinema class that connielane might enjoy:
Several weeks ago, in Italy, my film professor Ermelinda Campani was explaining to us the difference between the story (concatenation of events) and the discourse (style) of a film. We had just watched Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up the previous day, a highly stylistic film without much coherent plot -- it seems like a mystery, but the mystery is never solved. At any rate, Professor Campani asked us if we knew of any contemporary directors with certain trademarks of style that identified everything in their body or work as their own, and of course someone brought up Quentin Tarantino.
This is when film major Mark (roommate of both ex-gay-best-friend and last-minute-love-interest) starts to get all in a huff. When our teacher says she loved Kill Bill, he can't contain himself anymore and starts to let the accusations fly. He liked Tarantino's earlier works, but Kill Bill is just a masturbatory obsession with his own style! Tarantino is too in love with himself and he's finally crossed the line! The film has no content and no meaning! Kill Bill is a postmodern collapse! (Mark actually used the word "masturbatory" at least four times over the course of this debate, but our teacher blithely ignored it). Professor Campani, on the other hand, said that Tarantino was merely testing the limits of the genre (not necessarily crossing them as Mark suggested), and that it didn't matter if there was no moral to the story, because some movies are just not about the story. (Personally I thought Kill Bill did have a very compelling story, and it's one of the things I liked about the movie, along with the style). Essentially what it came down to was our professor arguing that a film can be great art without having any deeper meaning, and Mark arguing that without meaning a film is worthless.
This debate went on for quite a while, until class time was up. At the end our professor mentioned, casually, that she would e-mail Tarantino (whom she had met many times and corresponded with every once in a while) and tell him about our discussion, and if he wrote back she would let us know what he thought. Neither Mark nor any of the rest of us expected him to actually write back, but sure enough, the next class Prof. Campani came in with Tarantino's reply. It was, as it turned out, quite wishy-washy -- he was glad to hear that his films were provoking such controversy, because that told him that they were worthwhile; he didn't state his opinion on the style vs. story question, but I guess it's faily obvious that he loves him some good discourse. Above all, he was flattered to hear that we were discussing Kill Bill in such a beautiful place as Florence.
And that's my little film class anecdote. Our teacher was such a character, and I'm very glad I picked the cinema class in the end.