Montage

I've written here about the movies I've made in the past. My distant past. Those afternoons spent chasing my friends around our neighborhood in the service of various plot machinations driven, for the most part, by whatever make-believe games we were playing the day before. These came after the films of my older brother, who was, to be fair, much more expansive in his narrative scope. In his movies, there were costumes and distinguishable characters. This took me years to figure out.
Years later, when I was in college, I had washed out of my studio art major, primarily because I failed a basic drawing course. Not that I couldn't draw, but because I stopped going. Apparently certain universities believe that you should officially drop a course when you want to stop taking it. How is an artist supposed to function under these oppressive conditions? For me, the answer was to flee to the Film Studies department. Here I studied both the history of celluloid, and how to make them. I flourished here, in part, due to the kindness and financial patience of my parents who bought me a new camera as well as my very own Super-8 moviola and editing equipment. It wouldn't be fair to say that I found my muse, but it was during my sophomore year that I began to find my cleverness.I made movies in black and white.
At the time, I was watching movies made at the beginning of the twentieth century, and I found myself drawn to this primitive art. I watched documentaries and French New Wave. I watched Italian Neorealist film. I watched the Marx Brothers. I read Sergei Eisenstein's book and worshiped at the altar of "Battleship Potemkin." I sat through an entire semester listening to some very intelligent professor wax on about the films of Alfred Hitchcock just so I could watch the movies.
And then there was the horror film class. All those late nights and early mornings watching Frankenstein, the Wolf Man and all his Universal pals finally paid off. I got my easiest A of my college career by wading through the headwaters of all my inspiration. Somewhere during all of this excitement, I made a visit to a counselor to try and figure out what kind of major I might be able to splice together out of all these credits. As it turns out, I had worked myself right out of the fun. I had taken so many film history classes and not nearly enough film making classes that I no longer qualified to graduate as a film maker. I was also top-heavy on film study credits, and was told that if I wanted to graduate in the next decade that I should bundle up what I had and paint it over with an English veneer along with my Creative Writing Workshops and call it a Bachelor of Arts, Creative Writing.
After I left the university setting, I put away my film camera in favor of the flashy new video machine I coerced my parents into buying for me. The moviola was lost in a move somewhere back in the eighties. All those little reels of film disappeared as well. But sometimes I still dream in black and white.