Watching movies

For my movie watching, I settled on ten Black directors and twenty-two films. I am about halfway through.

I have had many thoughts already, but I am saving them up. For now, the main thing has been remembering how beautiful movies can be.

One of the early films was Daughters of the Dust (directed by Julie Dash, with cinematography by Arthur Jafa). That one makes it kind of obvious; I mean, it is gratuitously beautiful. I could worry about that taking away from the story, but that's not how it works. You are carried along by the images, but then the significance of things keeps stealing in on you later.

Where I started thinking about it more was after watching Eve's Bayou (directed by Kasi Lemmons, cinematography by Amy Vincent). There is a lot of beautiful imagery, but that closing shot... it's like if there is a museum of cinematography, and a hall with blown up images (preferably on glass) of  the most beautiful shots in film history, that should be there. (And probably one image from each section of Hero, but that's another story.)

I remember once looking at a patch of sunlight on a brick wall that was so beautiful that it didn't seem real. It sent me looking up the origins of "pretty as a picture", because why should we look at something real and compare it to a reproduction?

Apparently the phrase came from a common art practice of not reproducing flaws when they were painting. The end result looked mostly like the subject, but a little bit better too.

I simultaneously understand and don't quite approve of that, but there is something else that can be done with setting things to the best advantage. Framing and contrast and lighting and all of those factors can be used, not so much for changing the subject but for changing how we see it. They can enhance how we see it.

It goes that way with the plots too. You can make true stories more exciting by adding in things that didn't happen. At least, you can try that, but will sometimes only succeed in making it obviously fake and stupid.

However, if you take something that took three conversations - because humans take a while to get on the same wavelength, and we realize things we missed and have to get back to them later - and then distill that into one conversation, that gets to the point without all the false starts and superfluity. That's something else. It's still fiction, but it's more truthful and it can be helpful. We see parts of ourselves in it. Maybe we understand not just that story better, but many other stories.

It's just a reminder for me of what art can be at its best.

And it's been too long since I've been writing.