Thursday, October 29, 2009

Too Legit to Fit

By James Pynn

From the refuge of the few to the new equivalent of the English major, film schools have become very popular. When I went to college it wasn't a particularly popular major. In fact, it was something of a non-major. Now, of course, it's particularly fashionable and there is a certain panache that come with telling people you are a film major. As the culture is more and more inundated with entertainment, the more prominent film majors become. Does this cheapen the degree? A mute point, perhaps.

To my surprise, as my time in film school came to an end, I became more and more interested in method acting and started to write my own scripts. This led me to realize most of my fellow cohorts in the field were not particularly interested in cinema, per se. Rather, they were interested in the glamor, mostly fabricated, of being a film major. What was the big deal about DeMille, Welles, Brando, or Dean? After all, at the end of the day it was about how one looked, not what one did.

Though you would think all film majors would have a film collection, you would be wrong. I was only one of a handful of students who actually had a collection of laser discs. As the year progressed, I began to decipher which students were truly interested in film and which were mere, prancing posers. The most notable tell was the fact the students who truly loved film did not cared much for how well they were dressed or groomed.

Film demands a certain appreciation that doesn't leave much time or inclination to craft a "look." We didn't gather in large groups or waste all of our parent's money on pub- crawls. We used all of our resources to obtain the best quality films, scripts, and biographies we could find. More importantly, we used our money to buy tickets to art-house screenings.

When I troll through the local bookstores or movie shops, I see a generation of film lovers keeping the flame of appreciation alive. The mediums change, from VHS to laser disc to DVDs and now to Blu-Ray, but the sentiment is still the same. The desire is still the same: to watch, to be engrossed, and to learn a little bit more about what it means to not only be a movie fan, but a human being.

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