Not satisfied with taking one genre at a time, in this post I will go wild, and will not respect a rule I have had for some time. I will just simply pick two films, shake them together, prove my point and show you all. I have recently watched two films I liked enough to immortalize in this connected space of mine.
Boyhood (2001-2014), is being celebrated as unique. Not quite, on top of my head I can think of The Story of the Children of Golzow (GDR 1960 - DE 2008); a documentary with similar intention and quite bizarre a resolution post-fall of the Berlin Wall. Attempts of this magnitude you can count with two or three fingers. Boyhood is so far the best achievement. For the sake of comparing it with the 45-hour GDR-series: the perspicacious summary of twelve years. So much so, that the less-than-three-hour film succeeds in leaving the spectator not only once, but at least twelve times a feeling of déjà-vu with his/her own life. I got to see this in a sneak preview a day before the German premiere recently. A film I have been expecting since I could not get a ticket in the Berlinale this February. Three months biting my nails have I been. And I will not tell you anything else. If by now you have not seen it, go see it and then come back… one) because you are already as late as the white rabbit, and two) because you may not be able to identify all the ingredients of my perfume. Strike two if your sense of smell is not very sharp and go see the movie.
Yesterday I watched James Dean (2001), a title I had repeatedly seen laying around streaming catalogues but had ignored. Basically, because I thought it was a nostalgic TV-documentary and not the reason everyone is talking about James Fanco so much that I already hate the man. This film has gone quite under the commercial radar, maybe due to an ambiguous poster? The more I look at it the less I am sure if it is the Dean James or the Franco James. This one belongs to one of my favorite genres, the biopic. And within the biopic, here is adding to my top 5 right there with gems such as Walk the line, W.E. and Bright Star. This film is already over 10 years old, but in my opinion quite pioneer in a time when biopics such as Ali (same year) were on. Aka: biopics that tell you the whole story including the tiny details making them unbearable epic-like attempts to turn real life into legend. Many would say: yes, James Dean was a legend, a shooting star that went by as fast as he arrived. Well this is exactly the strength of this small TV-film; in tiny moments it captures the whole essence of this strange-behaving and fascinating creature. I am afraid that magic is greatly achieved by the man I hate so much.
Putting one and one together, the point of my short and, as always, seemingly inconclusive analysis is not other than the observation that film —here defined as my favorite way to consume stories— has finally been affected by the storytelling reduced to a tweet or a status update. I don't mean this necessarily in a apocalyptic way or with a bit of criticism! Those five hours I spent with Mason and his family and both James's will remain in my memory for a long time; because I do not need the whole story including the details, but some bit.lys. Some ten minutes each year in Mason's life or five minutes in each of the three movie sets James Dean stepped into, were more than enough to reveal the whole story behind their characters. In other words, to tell a story too large to perceive by the naked eye or to reconstruct an undocumented instant in History; the key is, focus on that which most fascinates (you, by the way) and reduce it to its essence. That takes a good storyteller (in this case Richard Linklater and Mark Rydell) and time… sometimes twelve years.
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