SOMEBODY Sure Likes the Word, "Film"

I find myself, once again, returning to the humanities.

In my Introduction to the Humanities class, we recently closed our film unit, and have since moved on to paintings. While studying film as a medium, as well as its history, we spent a significant amount of class time picking apart scenes from “the greats.” We studies camera angles, elements of photography, lighting as a storytelling tool, the importance of music, and even the different cuts and transitions from scene to scene, and their effect on the audience.

Film is regarded as “total art,” because it has the potential to encompass elements from all of the other arts, from drama to poetry. Films that strike a nerve, that open an emotional vein, are the ones that achieve the appropriate balance of these elements. They are elusive, sound-and-light concoctions that pass relatively quickly and leave only memories and impressions for the viewers; they are reminiscent of nighttime dreams. That element has changed with the introduction and refinement of playback devices, such as DVD and Blue-Ray players, but for all of the money and effort poured into them, films are, ultimately, deucedly fleeting things.

In that class, we became amateur film critics. Our professor endeavored to teach us how to describe our mantic reactions to the movies in logical ways, with a humble but effective knowledge of the tools at a filmmaker’s disposal. Now, with a second Great Works response on the horizon, lessons learned from that class take on new significance.

I did not have very many experiences like this in high school, where each class only seemed to apply to itself, and concepts that transcended all of the various disciplines were rarely acknowledged as such.

--Posted by S. Benjamin Puente