It’s Still a Beautiful Day
If it weren’t for cinema . . .
I might not have felt seen as a lonely kid wanting to do something meaningful with my life (E.T., The Goonies, and The Red Balloon).
I might not have thought about how the distance between people grows when we fear telling the truth or asking for help (Crimes and Misdemeanors, Jean de Florette, Fanny and Alexander, Make Way for Tomorrow).
I might not know that impudence can also telegraph creativity (Lawrence of Arabia).
I would not have memories of spectacular, delicate, often exquisite imagery of the natural and built landscape and how we steward or disregard it (Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka, Wall-E, The Abyss).
My internal conversation would not be funded by cautionary tales of egotistical ambition or humility before being (Citizen Kane, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Andrei Rublev, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Ikiru), challenging invocations to follow an inner compass no matter the cost (On the Waterfront, The Assassin, Malcolm X, 8½), revelatory dreams about the meaning of death (After Life), and explorations of power and justice (Do the Right Thing, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Cabaret). Or a motley crew or couple of stumblers looking for answers and finding community (The Muppet Movie, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Apartment), or broken people staying broken because the social contract is broken too (Midnight Cowboy) or overcoming their brokenness by making a new social contract (Lone Star). I would not have in the back of my mind the illustration of spending a life on love with which The Exorcist culminates; or the empathy induced by One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Wings of Desire, and Where Is the Friend’s House?; or the confrontation with desperation revealed in Thelma & Louise, Revanche, The Piano, and The Dam Keeper.
I might not have the comfort of imaginary friends reminding me that my questions, confusions, and griefs are welcome (The Apartment, The Fisher King, The Accidental Tourist, All About My Mother).
I would not have gone to India, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, China, Argentina, Romania, Egypt, and Italy, all without leaving my living room.
I wouldn’t have been awakened by off-the-beaten-track movies, my love for which makes me feel like I’m part of a small but noble band: Endless Poetry, Wonderstruck, Patti Cakes, The Painter and the Thief, Le Havre, Ratcatcher, The Barbarian Invasions, Ten Canoes, Russian Ark, Kundun, The Hudsucker Proxy, Basquiat, Smoke, The Addiction, Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud, Grace of My Heart, To Sleep with Anger, Mississippi Masala, and a hundred more besides.
And I might not have experienced the elevation that helps convince me that there’s more to life than what we can describe or see, as in Fearless, The New World, Embrace of the Serpent, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Yi-Yi, In the Mood for Love, The Fountain, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, and Moonlight.
My doubts and loves would not have a cinematic soundtrack or backdrop. My life is unthinkable without the movies, and for years now they’ve been the ongoing conversation that I share with my coauthor and friend. The next time I see a movie, I’ll open my mind and heart, and with gratitude let my own dreams mingle with those projected in front of me. That gratitude mingles today with what I feel for you, the readers of this book. May your experience of cinema help you experience more of the wholeness of your life. Thank you.
I have been reading since I was four years old, but movies were not a part of my life until I was about eight. In the 1950s, parents often included a theater outing in birthday parties, which meant that I saw my first films, Old Yeller and The Shaggy Dog, distracted by kids who were more interested in throwing popcorn at each other than watching the movie.
I began to take films seriously when I was in my teens and was blessed, when I was in my early twenties, to be living in New York City at a time when so many theaters were showing classics and foreign films. It was then that I embarked on my haphazard education in cinema.
The late Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, a fisherman’s son, beat the odds in a highly stratified society, taught himself to read and write in French, and published several novels in the 1950s. At the time, well over 80 percent of Senegalese were illiterate, and Sembène realized that if he wanted to reach most of his countrymen, he had to turn to film. He called movies “the night school of the people.”1
Even though literacy rates around the world have improved in the last hundred years, Sembène’s phrase has stayed with me, reminding me of one reason films matter. They can reach people in a way that books cannot. In these concluding remarks I hope to reflect on some of the recommended films in the list Gareth and I have provided, films that have illuminated and informed my life.
The Quiet Girl, An Education, and The Souvenir hit uncomfortably close to home. I was the kind of “quiet girl” who kept emotions bottled up inside, and these films helped me understand that this made me vulnerable as a young woman to seduction by older men and slow to recognize that the romance they offered was a trap.
Endless Poetry, the autobiographical masterpiece by Alejandro Jodorowsky, has a particular relevance for me. When Jodorowsky’s El Topo, a surrealistic and acidly comic spoof of Westerns, began the first-ever midnight showings at a Manhattan “art house” theater, I was one of the young people who was drawn to it. Many scenes made me laugh, but I also found the film self-indulgent. I later met Jodorowsky at a party—he was twenty years my senior and struck me as vain and egotistical. But years later when I encountered his Endless Poetry, a film he made at the age of eighty-eight, it reminded me that people change in remarkable ways. I am no longer a young woman harboring a false sense of my own sophistication, and while Jodorowsky will always be a wild man, confrontational, zany, and self-absorbed, he is also capable of making an engaging, thoughtful, and moving film about the life of an artist.
The little movie theater on Main Street in Lemmon, South Dakota, still has wall sconces that date from the 1920s when my mother watched Flash Gordon serials there as a child. The community treasures the theater so much that it raised funds so that it could switch to a digital format instead of closing. First-run Hollywood films now show there on weekends. As rural people are generally ignored in the American media, I’m grateful that two films—The Last Picture Show and Nebraska—do an excellent job of depicting people I know. The Last Picture Show explores the currents that run deep beneath the surface in any small town. Many young people are desperate to leave; others cannot imagine moving away. There are personal tragedies that a facade of social niceties doesn’t quite conceal. Nebraska makes me feel as if I’m visiting relatives in Iowa and the Dakotas. I have been on that forlorn-looking Main Street and staggered through conversations about the weather with folks who are champion slow-talkers. The film made me wish my parents were still alive because they would love it.
Cries and Whispers is the first film that caused me to confront the subject of grave illness and death, and how different family members respond to it, and the many ways they grieve. I return to it often because now that I have tended to members of my family as they were dying, the film continues to provide new revelations and new meaning.
Like Gareth, I have been invigorated by the way films open the world for me. Lee Isaac Chung, in his autobiographical film Minari, explores the interior world of a family whose circumstances are far different from my own.
The film depicts a boy whose father, a Korean immigrant, is determined to be a farmer and, despite his wife’s wariness, purchases land in Arkansas on which he plans to grow vegetables to sell to a growing Korean population. The heart of the film is not on large themes like immigration but on the dynamics of family life, the couple’s squabbles and concerns over making enough to live on, and the upheaval caused when the wife’s newly widowed mother comes from Korea and must share a room with her grandson. Minari caused me to reflect on the conflicts in my own family but also on the love that continues to hold us together, despite our many differences.
Circumstances led Chung to live in Rwanda for a time, and he made his first film, Munyurangabo, there, employing local people, all nonprofessional actors. It’s the first movie ever made in the Rwandan dialect of Kinyarwanda. But those details matter less than the substance that concerns Chung, the horrific Rwandan genocide of 1994. The film’s two main characters are teenage boys who are too young to have experienced it. One is a Hutu and one a Tutsi, and they are attempting to resist the warnings of their elders that their differing tribal heritage means that they should not associate with each other. Their friendship is complicated by the desire of one boy to take revenge on the man who killed his father.
Chung demonstrates that it is possible to tell a complex story in a simple way and to produce a parable about the aftermath of brutal violence and the forgiveness that is possible for ordinary people to attain. That to me is the essence of what I most admire in the art of cinema. Chung takes me to an unfamiliar place, and I meet people there who share my concerns about how to live honorably in a cruel and unjust world.
I hope that you will enjoy watching and discussing the films we’ve featured in this book, and I thank you for taking this journey with us.