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Left field advice here, but I'd recommend helping out on a movie, or even making your own short. If you want to understand film literally nothing comes close. T
by dbspin 4y ago
Left field advice here, but I'd recommend helping out on a movie, or even making your own short. If you want to understand film literally nothing comes close. This sounds intimidating, but it's no more of a bar than attending a local Kino Cabaret Event [1] or similar. If you work on a film through production - even a simple two day shoot and edit, you'll start to build an intuition for how the medium works. The more you participate in creating it, the more you'll understand film in its native language. There's a strong analogy to learning to programme / basic hacking projects -> understanding software and hardware.
In as much as film appreciation courses and youtube critical videos can be interesting, or draw your attention to things you've missed, they're usually from an external interpretive lens. An example of where they can miss the point is Noam Baumbach's latest film 'White Noise' which is has been critically misunderstood [2]. Meanwhile all the filmmakers I know are in awe of it technically and structurally.
1 - http://kinokabaret.org/ http://kinokabaret.org/
2 - https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/white_noise_2022 https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/white_noise_2022
- 1980phipsi 4y agoI pay pretty close attention to what movies are coming out and I hadn't even heard of White Noise. Wikipedia says they spent 100mn on it. Geez...
- sammalloy 4y agoJust FYI, the original book by Don DeLillo was huge when it came out and everyone was passing it around in the early 1990s. If you were a fan of books in the 1990s, you had either read a copy or you owned it.
- yamtaddle 4y agoYikes, I'm film-nerd-adjacent—I'm semi-serious about it, and am close friends with others who are way more into it than I am—and I like Noah Baumbach (probably more than he deserves—he's the sort I recommend to others only with some hedging, but I like him a lot) yet this one hadn't shown up on my radar, either. And, on top of that, I have Netflix!
- dbspin 4y agoMe too, and I'm a fan of Baumbach and mumblecore / highly verbal in general (although this film doesn't meet the definition). Netflix seem to have just launched it into cinemas without much of a campaign. Stumbled across it in an art house here in Germany. It was streaming two weeks later.
- matwood 4y ago> An example of where they can miss the point is Noam Baumbach's latest film 'White Noise' which is has been critically misunderstood [2] Not to go too far off track, but I blame a huge amount of that misunderstanding with how Netflix has marketed the movie. Expectations play a big part in appreciation and understanding - at least initially.