Bumping it up

I'm starting a new thread about an old subject, to add some comments to the "Inspiration" thread, which is starting to slip off the page.

First, I need to say that everything Eric said regarding 2001 was true -- he did like the monkey parts, and I did tell him it was going to be like Star Wars.

Zac's comments and Paul's response to them have touched something in me as well. I don't know that I think of cinema as providing me a deeper understanding of myself, but when I see a film that I consider a masterpiece, it seems an expression of something I knew I felt or believed, but either didn't know I knew/felt it, or didn't know how to express it. An example of this would be Pasolini's Notes for an African Orestes, which is a documentary about his abandoned attempt to make a film of the Greek cycle, transplanted to post-colonial Africa. Some of Pasolini's ideas of how to visualize the spiritual or abstract -- for example, a dying lioness to represent the defeated Fury, for example -- moved me so much that I hugged a friend who happened to come by as the film was ending; I was that caught up in a moment of vicarious artistic joy. As Maurizio Viano has written in A Certain Realism, Pasolini was ahead of his time in this project, addressing themes that would become important to post-colonialist studies, feminism and even environmentalism in the 1970s.

Lest this become too academic, let me also emphasize that giddy moment of needing to embrace somebody. Great films (masterpieces and near misses) inspire some emotional response in me, even bringing me close to tears. Few shots are more beautiful than the Star Child turning its gaze upon the viewer at the end of 2001; few are as perfectly sad as the door closing at the end of The Searchers; few as quietly hopeful as the crane shot at the end of Simple Men. I just finished watching a movie that has its faults but is, methinks, unfairly maligned -- Peter Jackson's King Kong. Some of the moments at the end -- Kong tapping his chest to communicate "beautiful" to Ann, his recognition that he is about to die, the last of his kind, Ann's anguish as she watches him slip away from her -- hit this movie geek where it hurts/counts.

I don't know what any of this means, but there it is.