Film Matters Magazine

This is the illusion of cinema: just as things appear, as we are about grasp them, they disappear.

— Lesley Stern, DEAD AND ALIVE

This piece is inspired by Peter Wollen’s “An Alphabet of Cinema.” The alphabet is a form that connects the fragments like letters, words, images, and the lines in reading with the flow of sound, consequence, personal history, and various emotions. It provides a space that allows things to freely merge and creatively spread.  

Is it possible people come to us—I do not here aspire exactly to a metaphysical argument, and certainly not one about faith or god, but rather just a simple, spiritual question—and then go away from us?

— Ross Gay, THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS

Not laid side to side nor end to end but like a series of covered archways and domes over a corridor,^[i] in a way similar to how letters combine together to make up words we use to make phrases, our intentions build our moments. Our minds propel and pull, project from our bodies our behaviors. Our corpus draws the creation of our experience with our attention and builds upon many things put together, upon the layers of our prioritizations. C stands for our life’s constitution—for the configuration in the ABCs of our life’s composition.  

I am fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen, that movement which is something like the leaving and swelling of the sea (though I have not yet been to the sea): and which is also something like the light which moves on, and especially beneath, the water.

— James Baldwin, “Congo Square”

Splish, splash

Marie hangs on to the pool steps as blue surrounds her: blue pool bricks, blue water, blue sky reflection, blue lights. She directs her eyes toward them—the water swallows their bodies leaving only their floating little heads, rippling through their motions and turning the sharp black lines at the bottom into floating ants. The sound of a distant conversation retreats into the background: they stir the water, and the water proudly announces its intermittent splish-splash. They are ballerinas in the water, each hand gracefully slicing through the air, into the water, up the air again. Trying to keep up with their movements, the water makes a wing out of their hands: they are now angels on the surface. Every traveler, and every cinephile as well, knows moments where, like a purloined letter, he is in the middle of a picture, both nothing and superimposed, a willing hostage to the movement which ignores him.^[i] The water-bound ballerinas allure and mesmerize Marie—she is invited to indulge in her fantasy and desire of belonging and intimacy. After all, the nature of navigating relationships among young women confines her to awkward looking, but never touching. Marie hesitates, about to dive down.

[T]he sacrificial victim must send up long-drawn-out, mournful, pathetic cries, making the hearer feel the unutterable loneliness of existence. Thereupon my joy of life, blazing up from some secret place deep within me, would finally give its own shout of exultation, answering the victim cry for cry. Was this not exactly similar to the joy ancient man found in the hunt?

— Yukio Mishima, CONFESSIONS OF A MASK

Invigorated by the adrenaline of a new semester, this past February I plunged into a deep dive of the bibliography of writer, playwright, model, and nationalist Yukio Mishima and, by happenstance, discovered a new favorite book of mine: Confessions of a Mask. The novel is narrated by a deeply closeted and sexually repressed adolescent who finds himself fascinated with images and drawings of the mortally wounded and bloodied bodies of strong young men. Particularly fond of depictions of Saint Sebastian, the narrator finds that these scenes of dying young men speak to something burrowed deep within him. I include this passage here because it conveys the nature of the relationship between the performer and the spectator, the one who does and the one to whom it is done. Sometimes while watching a film, I hear a cry inside of me but it is base and small and too humiliating to give credence to; I smother the cry until it becomes unbearable or until I hear it mimicked in some way in the world around me as Mishima’s narrator does, a loneliness that reverberates and is responded to until it becomes something more. When the cry becomes unbearable, when the struggle of life grates too harshly against the soul, there becomes a need that is like an itch; a need to create and mirror and reflect the unreflectable. Anxious turnings of the stomach, deep hollows in the chest that strike harder than sadness, the tinges of fire along the strip of the neck, become dramatic soliloquies, dance moves, splashes in a pool, words even.

I am fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen, that movement which is something like the heaving and swelling of the sea…

— James Baldwin, “Congo Square”

Toni gets close, pressing her face against the window in the door. She watches intently, in awe. The dancers battle amongst each other, and the camera switches back to Toni’s body pressed against this door. The dancers now move in slow-mo, the sounds of the music and the room muffled. We focus on one dancer, and her expressive face as she moves. And now, back to Toni, with a look of desire, or longing, on her face. Her focus is broken by her brother, who asks: “You coming?”

C is for Cinema, but that is admittedly too broad of a subject, so I will narrow it down to the time in which, for most, cinephilia begins: childhood. I am around five years old. I am with my sister, or my mother. The movie is High School Musical. I don’t remember the plot, as the hour-and-thirty-eight-minute film was too long for me to control my attention span. However, this movie is my first experience escaping from my living room and joining the world on the screen in my living room. I am a part of every dance routine, and I am even on the court dribbling the basketball with Troy Bolton and the Wildcats. Every longing gaze Troy aimed at Gabriella is not for her, but for me, a five-year-old who has now discovered the feeling of a celebrity crush. I am fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen.^[i] This movement of dance and music affects me. I am forced to care deeply about a cast of characters for the first time in my life. Maybe C should be for connection. Connection is the catalyst of cinephilia.

E is for encounter, and exchange, which are one and the same. E is also for “eyes,” those objects through which our encounters and exchanges take place: eyes through screens, eyes glancing toward cameras, eyes deliberately not glancing toward cameras, eyes closing. The acknowledgement of a screen, the slow eyelid droop of an afternoon nap. Encounter is, first and foremost, about what we see.

Collectively Composed by Victor Bowman-Rivera, Linh Ngoc Bui, Andrenae Jones, Annie Martin, Quillan Qian, Anniyah Rawlins, and Kailyn Shepherd 

With thanks to Professor Amelie Hastie for organizing our contributions to this Preface

Let us assume, to begin with, that films themselves engage in the art of description. Just as poets describe the world, so do film makers – with all the technological possibilities available to them.

— Lesley Stern

We hope you will read the following essays, produced for our fall 2021 Amherst College course “The Film Essay,” and see only a sliver of the full breadth of what can be achieved when writing about film. Of course, film criticism isn’t just the rushed scribbles that only barely answer the all-too-prompted question of “Well, how did you like it?” Film criticism, or well-written film criticism, is concise, patient, and curious. But that doesn’t have to mean that film criticism must be constricted in its form, in how it is communicated from one mind to another. We write “criticism” not just to break apart but to accompany, to add harmonies melodically, and to continue traveling with the films we’ve seen. We do it for the love of the feelings we felt in the work of art, for the love of words and the spaces they can transport us into, the emotions they can at times capture and transmit.